31. Theodore Roosevelt, Address of President Roosevelt at the Lincoln Dinner of the Republican Club of the City of New York: Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, February 13, 1905 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905). (38 p.)
Tribute to Abraham Lincoln interrupted repeatedly by applause. The President exhorts the audience to follow Lincoln’s example with these words. “We of to-day, in dealing with all our fellow-citizens, white or colored, North or South, should strive to show just the qualities that Lincoln showed: His steadfastness in striving after the right, and his infinite patience and forbearance with those who saw that right less clearly than he did; his earnest endeavor to do what was best, and yet his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable; his unceasing effort to cure what was evil, coupled with his refusal to make a bad situation worse by any ill-judged or ill-timed effort to make it better.”