As an up-and-coming young lawyer and aspiring politician, Lincoln was often invited to speak on topics assigned by the organization that invited him. Here he addresses the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” The most precious of these institutions, says Lincoln, is the rule of law and not of the mob. The topic was not an abstract one for Lincoln and his audience, for ten weeks before Lincoln delivered this address a pro-slavery mob had lynched the abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy in nearby Alton, Illinois.

As a subject for the remarks of the evening, the perpetuation of our political institutions, is selected.

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them – they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time, and untorn by usurpation – to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.