The Fourth of July — our nation’s 250th — is a day away.

As we have noted over the past two editorials, we are proud to celebrate our nation’s achievements with a special edition today. We hope you enjoy it.

Within that edition are several noteworthy speeches.

“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live,” President Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1862. “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, 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 did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

“We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans on Dec. 8, 1941. “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces with the unbounding determination of our people we will gain the inevitable triumph so help us God.”

“Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told civil rights marchers on Aug. 28, 1963. “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”

Our country, over its 250 years, has encountered challenges and heartache and pain. Some of the pain came from foreign hostilities and from cultures and ideologies diametrically opposed to our values. Some of the heartache came from our own shortcomings in realizing the American dream.

Our best leaders have recognized that America’s commitment to foundational principles — the God-given rights of men and women, as individuals — could lead us through heartache and pain and lead us to better, brighter futures.