Today is a day - the day - which we dedicate to the honoring and celebration of the birth of the United States of America, a nation which - according to popular history but not, technically, to scholastically-established fact - was born 229 years ago. And while the date is somewhat arbitrarily selected from among several reasonable times (the bulk of the signatures on the Declaration date from August, not from July 4), it serves its purpose well. Today, we honor our country. Today, we remember those who rebelled not because they were by their natures bellicose or recalcitrant but because they felt that it was the last option open to them in the redressing of their grievances. And while one can argue endlessly over whether or not their complaints were a valid basis for rebellion, in the end rebellion is the course which this nation pursued. It is for this that we honor them and commemorate our nation's birth.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we do this. For in this rebellion, those men and women who fought and died for this cause brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. And if that nation has strayed from these goals, if its people have grown perhaps beyond the scope of effective true democracy, if it seems now to have lost its way, if, above all, it never truly embraced those tenets of its fabrication - still it can be said that our roots lie in this most basic concept: that not by class nor race nor creed shall our worth be determined, but by our souls, by the very essence of ourselves. By the fact of our humanity. Those men centuries ago fell far short of the ideals to which they largely aspired. Yet in the acceptance of this failure they acknowledged not only that they, too, were human, and thus given to flaw and failure; but also that by the creation, through the great and hallowing sacrifice of blood, of a nation dedicated to the equality of all men, even the oppressed, even the downtrodden, even the tired, the poor, the huddled masses can realize their dreams of freedom.

Yet, in a larger sense, we cannot hallow - we cannot consecrate - this nation. Our very history is the story not only of those with power, but of those without. This nation has since before even its birth been a beacon of hope for the hopeless and a home for the homeless. These poor people, these hopeless and homeless folk, did not find always here a place with arms open, but still they found a place which would take them in. The oppressed did not always find a place willing to grant to them that cherished equality, but still they found a place where they could have hope of one day finding that. The brave men, the brave women, living and dead, who have struggled here, have consecrated this nation 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 have done here.

It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored ancestors we take increased devotion to that that cause for which they gave their full measure of devotion - that we here resolve that they shall not have struggled and fought and died in vain - that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. We must never lose sight of our dedication to that freedom, to that liberty, to that equality. We must remain vigilant and wise, guarding these things with our voices when we might be heard; with our actions when we might be seen; and with our lives when we might by our deaths grant yet better lives to those for whom we have died.

Today we honor those who have fought, over these centuries, for a noble goal. We honor those brave soldiers who have fought, whether they have died or lived, in wars to defend this goal. We honor those men and women, immigrants of convenience or desperation, admiration or hope, who have spent their lives in the pursuit of this nation's highest ideal. We honor those men and women, born in this country with the birthright of liberty, possessed of skin of all shades and circumstances of all sorts, slave or freeman, pauper or plutocrat, who labored for this goal. We honor these people who have struggled in the name of freedom, in the name of equality - in the name of government of the people, by the people, for the people, that it might not perish from the earth.