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“America First” has probably as many varieties of meaning and use as “Safety First.” It means to every individual very much according to what feelings it inspires in him of selfishness or patriotism. We are inspired as we believe, and, to be an American, it is necessary to appreciate the meaning and mission of America.

American history is composed of the struggle to get clear the meaning of American liberty. Through many years of distress and sacrifice, known as the Revolutionary War, the American people freed themselves from un-American methods and masteries imposed on them from across the sea. Out of that turmoil of minds came forth one typical leader and American, George Washington. But we did not yet have clear the meaning of America, and through yet more years of even worse suffering, involving the Civil War, we freed ourselves from the war-making methods and masteries entrenched within our own government. Out of that political turmoil of minds appeared another American, Abraham Lincoln, whose life represents supremely the most important possibilities in the meaning and ideal of America. To know the mind-making process that developed Washington and Lincoln is to know not only the meaning but also the mission of America.

Every American child and every newcomer to our shores is in great need to understand clearly and indisputably their interest in American freedom, as being human freedom and world freedom, if they are to realize and fulfill their part as Americans.

The American vision of moral freedom and social righteousness can in no way be made clearer than in studying the process of development that individually prepared Washington and Lincoln to be the makers and preservers of a developing democracy for America and for the American mind of the world.

Lincoln’s early life has interest and meaning only for those who are seeking to understand the pioneer political principles, fundamental in character and civilization, out of which could develop a mind and manhood equipped for the greatest and noblest of human tasks. To take his “backwoods” experiences and their comparatively uncouth incidents, as interesting merely because they happened to a man who became famous, is to miss every inspiration, value and meaning so important in building his way as man and statesman. To read the early incidents of Lincoln’s life for the isolated interest of their being the queer, peculiar or pathetic biography of a notable character has little that is either inspiring or informing to a boy in the light of present experiences and methods of living. Indeed, many social episodes of pioneer customs are seemingly so trivial or coarse, in comparison, as to detract in respect from a boy’s ideal of the historical Lincoln.

The Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln—Hodgensville, Ky.

The pioneer frontier was the social infancy of a new meaning for civilization. Its lowly needs of humble equality were the first social interests of Lincoln, and the wonderful story of his life in that place and time, if told as merely historical happenings, incidentally noticeable only because they happened to Lincoln, becomes more and more frivolous and disesteeming in interest to boyhood, and to the general reader, as current social customs develop away beyond those times. This is why such strained efforts

have been made to give the incidents of his social infancy a pathetic interest, or some other sympathetic appeal, where everything was so unromantic, industrious, simple, enjoyable and faithful to the earth.

Those lowly years were sacred privacy to him. He knew there was nothing in them for a biographer, and he said so. His experience is valuable only in showing how it developed a man. True enough, the biographically uninteresting trivialities of his early years were not from him but from his environment. This is proven from the fact that two wider contrasting environments are hardly possible than those of Washington and Lincoln, and yet out of them came the same model character and supreme American.