“You can’t seem to see the immediate result of your blows. And so it hain’t no wonder to me that lots of weak ones, and skairt ones, and so-called prudent ones, cry out and hang onto the axe and try to stop the noble chopper’s hands. They don’t want a change. The old Torys in the Revolution didn’t want a change. It wuz strikin’ out in the darkness and bringin’ dangers and war onto their heads. They didn’t want to go away from English rule.
“But the noble band of choppers kep’ on a hackin’ the tree of tyranny till it crashed down and they walked over its prostrate trunk into freedom; and the weak ones wuz glad enough when the dangers wuz all past, and they sot down under the joy bells of 1776 and leaned their backs up aginst Bunker Hill, and enjoyed themselves first rate.
“The Israelites didn’t want a change. They didn’t want to go out of the land of bondage. Lots of livin’ ties united ’em to the land of their birth, and lots of onseen ones too. The graves of their ancestors, and memories, and loves, and joys, and sorrows all hung onto their heart-strings, and they didn’t want to go.
“But Moses wuz in the right on’t. And they come out at last into a land flowin’ with milk and honey.
“And they wuz glad they went.
“The Unbelievers didn’t want Jesus for a King and a Ruler—they didn’t want a change. They fit aginst God’s plan for ’em, and conquered, so they thought. But they didn’t, and now the world is glad on’t, as it stands under the glow a fallin’ from the glorious twentieth century.
“Ask the United Christian Nations of the World if it hain’t a blessed change. Ask ’em if they hain’t glad they went out of the superstitions and bondage of the old dispensation, out into the glorious liberty of the Gospel, out under the blessed rule of the Prince of Peace.
“No, Col. Seybert, I don’t think it is much of a reason, even if it is true, to say that the negroes don’t want to go. In all these cases I have brung up—and I might go on a bringin’ ’em up and a layin’ ’em down in front of you for hours and hours if it would do any good—but in all on ’em, as in these supreme cases I have mentioned, what difference did it make in the end whether the majority wuz willin’ or not to be saved, only in the discouragement and trouble it made the noble few who see clear from the beginnin’ to the end?
“HE HASTENED OFF.”