Four hobbit scores and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon Middle-earth a new fellowship: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great battle...testing whether that fellowship, or any fellowship so conceived and 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 this fellowship 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 hobbits, elves, dwarves, and 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 dedicated here 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 fellowship, under the guidance of the Valar, shall have a new birth of freedom...and that government of the hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men, by the hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men, for the hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men, shall not perish from Middle-earth.
