But there is, or should be, such a claim; it rests upon the strongest possible grounds of equity; while the conference of freedom and citizenship was simply the rendering back in the first instance that which no man has any right to appropriate, law or no law; and, in the second, bestowing a boon which had been honestly earned in every conflict waged by the Union from Yorktown to Appomatox Court House—a boon, I am forced to exclaim, which has, in many respects, proved to be more of a curse than a blessing, more a dead weight to carry than a help to conserve his freedom; and to aid in the fixing of his proper status as a co-equal citizen. I deny the right of any man to enslave his fellow; I deny the right of any government, sovereign as the Union or dependent as are the States in many respects, to pass any regulation which robs one man or class to enrich another. Individuals may invest their capital in human flesh, and governments may legalize the infamous compact; yet it carries upon its face the rankest injustice to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country—men too of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the masterly irony of Junius, speak of the black man as the "ward of the nation"—a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization which I pronounce to be reared upon quicksand, a civilization more fruitful of poverty, misery and crime than of competence, happiness and virtue. Those who regard the black man in the light of a "ward of the nation," are too narrow-minded, ignorant or ungenerous to deserve my contempt. The people of this country have been made fabulously affluent by legalized robbery of the black man; the coffers of the National Government have overflowed into the channels of subsidy and peculation, enriching sharpers and thieves, with the earnings of slave labor; while nineteen out of every twenty landowners in the South obtained their unjust hold upon the soil by robbing the black man. When the rebellion at last closed, the white people of the South were poor in gold but rich indeed in lands, while the black man was poor in everything, even in manhood, not because of any neglect or improvidence on his part, but because, though he labored from the rising to the setting of the sun, he received absolutely nothing for his labor, often being denied adequate food to sustain his physical man and clothing to protect him from the rude inclemency of the weather. He was a bankrupt in purse because the government had robbed him; he was a bankrupt in character, in all the elements of a successful manhood, because the government had placed a premium upon illiteracy and immorality. It was not the individual slave-owner who held the black man in chains; it was the government; for, the government having permitted slavery to exist, the institution vanished the instant the government declared that it should no longer exist!
I therefore maintain that the people of this Nation who enslaved the black man, who robbed him of more than a hundred years of toil, who perverted his moral nature, and all but extinguished in him the Divine spark of intelligence, are morally bound to do all that is in their power to build up his shattered manhood, to put him on his feet, as it were, to fit him to enjoy the freedom thrust upon him so unceremoniously, and to exercise with loyalty and patriotism the ballot placed in his hands—the ballot, in which is wrapped up the destiny of republican government, the perpetuity of democratic institutions. It is the proper function of government to see to it that its citizens are properly prepared to exercise wisely the liberties placed in their keeping. Self-preservation would dictate as much; for, if it be considered the better part of valor to discretely build and maintain arsenals and forts to bar out the invader, to prepare against the assaults of the enemy from without, how much more imperative it is to take timely precautions to counteract the mischief of insidious foes from within? Are our liberties placed more in jeopardy by the assaults of an enemy who plans our destruction three thousand miles away than of the enemy within our very bosoms? Was it the puissance of the barbarian arms or the corruption and enervation of the character of her people which worked the downfall of Rome? Was it influences from without or influences from within which corrupted the integrity of the people of Sparta and led to their subjugation by a more sturdy people? Let us learn by the striking examples of history. A people's greatness should be measured, not by its magnificent palaces, decked out in all the gaudy splendors of art and needless luxuries, the price of piracy or direct thievery; not in the number of colossal fortunes accumulated out of the stipend of the orphan and widow and the son of toil; not in the extent and richness of its public buildings and palaces of idle amusement; not in vast aggregations of capital in the coffers of the common treasury—capital unnecessarily diverted from the channels of trade, extorted from the people by the ignorance of their "wise men," who seek in vain for a remedy for the evil, because they do not want to find one.[11] A people's greatness should not be measured by these standards, for they are the parasites which eat away the foundations of greatness and stability. On the contrary, such greatness is to be found in the general diffusion of wealth, the comparative contentment and competency of the masses, and the general virtue and patriotism of the whole people. It should, therefore, manifestly be the end and aim of legislators to so shape the machinery placed in their hands as to operate with the least possible restraint upon the energies of the people. It should not be the studied purpose to enrich the few at the expense of the many, to restrain this man and give that one the largest possible immunity. No law should be made or enforced which would abridge my right while enlarging the right of my neighbor. That such is the case at this time—that legislatures are manipulated in the interest of a few, and that the great mass of the people feel only the burdens placed upon them by their servants, who are more properly speaking become their masters—that to such perversion of popular sovereignty we have come, is admitted by candid men.
Therefore, that the people may more clearly know their rights and how best to preserve them and reap their fullest benefits, they should be instructed in the language which is the medium through which to interpret their grand Magna Charta.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Since all sensible men know that the evil lies in a protective tariff and the bulky catalogue of monopoly.