Speech #1030104423

I would like to remind my colleagues of a remarkable part of our early history and of our genius. On the Fourth of July in 1858. while he was in the midst of the campaignultimately unsuccessfulto be elected to the Senate of the United States. Abraham Lincoln spoke to a throng of his constituents about something which troubled those constituents even then: The distinction between Americans who could trace their descent to the generation which signed the Declaration of Independence and fought for our freedom. and those who were immigrants or the sons or daughters of immigrants. This is what Abraham Lincoln said on that day. a century and a half ago: We have. besides these who are descended by blood from our ancestors. those who are not descendants at all of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence or fought to establish it. But when they look through that old Declaration. they find: "We hold these truths to be selfevident. that all men are created equal . . ." and then they feel that that moral sentiment evidences their relation to those men. and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration. and so they are.