Being raised from boyhood to maturity in Chicago, I was ever conscious of the historic figure of Abraham Lincoln. This was brought about by my inordinate interest in animals. My father, Dyonizy, used to take me to the zoo in Lincoln Park from our Polish neighborhood, instead of going to church as most of the peasant immigrants did. It was there that I became acquainted with the splendid monument to Lincoln by the very fine Irish sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Apropos monuments erected to Lincoln, I regard this one as the most supreme of any in the United States. The one carved in marble by Daniel Chester French, sitting in the shrine in Washington, is academically correct, but without the spirit which ought to animate it. One should feel as if in the presence of a living hero set in a particular gesture, not before a stuffed skin. When looking at Gauden's sculpture, I feel humble, but not when dwarfed by the one in Washington.

Having known very many people, including every variety of radical, I developed a deep scorn for the latter, whose chief motivation for thinking is a hidden grudge, not provoked personally, but preordained. I was acquainted with, among other Chicago literati, Carl Sandburg, and we took a few walks together through Washington Park. Despite his later writing of the biography of Lincoln, I have always looked down on him, even in my youth, because although already in his thirties, he still was a Socialist. A man adhering to Socialism in his maturity, which he should have abandoned at the time of coming to late puberty, must have stuck like a scratched Victrola record, intellectually, if without embarrassment he could still claim he was anti-Capitalism. Without great wealth and the generosity of some millionaires there can be no scientific, nor cultural, progress. Only non-motivated simpletons could crave the equal division of prosperity, the well-deserved rewards of those who work hard using their intelligence. Only misfits would murder a class of people with initiative and set themselves in their place to form the Dictatorship of the Slow-wit Proletariat.

I have always admired Lincoln most of all for his high degree of Common Sense, which by the way is so uncommon, that to those few who possess it, mankind eventually erects monuments.

The name of the Lincoln family, hailing from Britain, is ancient. It can be broken up into the idiom of the ancient Polish language - Protong (my own discovery), from which all other languages evolved, thus revealing its meaning Flooded Else(where) Loved, Flooded No (more existing). Thus, the Lincoln name, obviously compounded by a diluvial refugee, like thousands of seemingly meaningless names all over the globe, also describes the beloved Easter Island where all our forefathers lived before the Great Deluge.

I made this lithograph of him from one of the authentic photographs taken during his life, but I drew him as if in sculpture. I would rather have carved his likeness, but my American circumstance did not permit me to have a studio with a skylight which is so utterly indispensable in making precise sculpture. The lithographic plate of this portrait, along with a few others, was stolen by its German printer who claimed he did not know what happened to them when he moved to La Jolla from Pasadena. I have made another plate of the portrait of Lincoln and have some prints available on request.