at the same time that these blankets are being sold the Interior Department is asking for bids to supply 10,000 blankets for the Indians?  The reason for buying more when there is an embarrassing over-supply is that the specifications call for the words “Interior Department” to be woven into the blankets.  To an outsider it would seem that the words might be indelibly stamped on the old blankets of similar description, and that the departure from custom would be better than the loss on the old blankets and the increased expenditure for the new blankets.

The reason for mentioning such incidents is that there are so many more of which the public never hears.  Their combined educative effect would be great, but it is wasted without publicity.  Since the public is not unanimous against public ownership and operation, there must be a considerable number of persons who are proof against anything but a catastrophe greater than the prostration of the railway and utility industries.  That is an expansive way of education, but perhaps Dr. Cooley, Dean of the University of Michigan, is right in his view that the method is necessary to prevent a greater calamity by persistence in the error.

    New York Times, July 21, 1919

2.  Fourscore and seven years ago our Fathers brought forth on
    this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and
    dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived or so dedicated, can long endure.  We are met on a great battlefield of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—­we cannot consecrate—­we cannot hallow this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us, the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—­that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

    ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  Gettysburg Address, 1865