Four score and seven years earlier, the nation's founders brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. During a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure, people gathered on a great battlefield to dedicate part of it as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond any added human power by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The living were called to dedicate themselves instead to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that they had not died in vain, and to ensure a new birth of freedom so that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.