ucture of this Government. In those
days no limitation was placed upon the enjoyment of the defensive
rights of the citizen, including the right of suffrage, on account of
the color of the skin, except in the State of South Carolina. All of
the other States participating in the formation of the Government of
the United States had some limitation, based on sex, or age, or
property placed upon the right of suffrage; but none of them so far
forgot the spirit of our Constitution, the great words of the
Declaration of Independence, or the genius of our institutions, as to
inquire into the color of a citizen before allowing him the great
defensive right of the ballot. It is true, that as the republic moved
off in its grand course among the nations a change occurred in the
minds and practices of the people of a majority of the States. The
love of liberty, because of its own great self, and not because of its
application to men of a particular color, lost its sensitive character
and active vitality. The moral sense of the people became dormant
through the malign influence of that tolerated enemy to all social and
governmental virtue, human slavery. The public conscience slumbered,
its eyes closed with dollars and its ears stuffed with cotton. When
these things succeeded the active justice, abounding mercy, and love
of human rights of the earlier days, State after State fell into the
dark line of South Carolinian oppression, and adopted her
anti-republican limitation of the right of suffrage. A few States
stood firm and kept their faith, and to-day, when compared with the
bruised and peeled and oppression-cursed State of South Carolina,
stand forth as shining examples of the great rewards that are poured
upon the heads of the just. Massachusetts and South Carolina, the one
true, the other false to the faith and ideas of the early life of the
nation, should teach us how safe it is to do right, and how dangerous
it is to do wrong; how much safer it is to do justice than it is to
practice oppression.

"But, sir, not the States alone fell into this grievous error. The
General Government took its stand upon the side of injustice, and
apostatized from the true faith of the nation, by depriving a portion
of its citizens of the political right of self-defense, the use of the
ballot. What good has come to us from this apostasy? Take the history
of the municipal government of this city, and what is there in its
pages to make an American