Twelve-score and five years ago, our Founders brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great cultural war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met, for the second time in the last 12 months, at the highest governing body of that nation.
We have come to determine whether or not that nation’s former chief executive is above the law. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot rightly determine such innocence or guilt, as we cannot compel those responsible to make such a determination — to do their sworn duty — if they are moved more greatly to follow along ideological lines of extreme partisanship.
The world will little note, nor long remember what they say here, but it can never forget what it is they will do here.
