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Lincoln, however, accurately presaged the despoiling power of civic decay. One of his earliest and perhaps most underappreciated speeches, given when he was merely 28 years old, was his 1838 Lyceum Address in which he asks and answers his own question, “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! . . . At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad.”
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Lincoln, however, accurately presaged the despoiling power of civic decay. One of his earliest and perhaps most underappreciated speeches, given when he was merely 28 years old, was his 1838 Lyceum Address in which he asks and answers his own question, “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! . . . At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad.”
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