Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1883 — Parallel Remarks of Great Men. [ARTICLE]

Parallel Remarks of Great Men.

In Bartlett’s “Dictionary of Familiar Quotations,” says the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Lincoln’s “Government of the people, by the people, for the people,” is paralleled by similar phrases from earlier speeches by Theodore Parker and Daniel Webster. No original is suggested, however, for the equally famous passage from the second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” The following expression, however, bears so close a resemblance as to be worth quoting: “In charity with all mankind, bearing no malice or ill-will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow-men, not knowing what they do.” It occurs at the close of the letter addressed by John Quincy Adams, on July 30, 1838, to A. Bronson, of Fall River, Mass., in response tp an invitation to attend a celebration, on Aug. 1, of the final abolition of slay cry in the British West Indies.