the South prevail, and we shall see a new America. The
land of the fathers and of the present will become strange to us. In
place of a thriving population, each member socially independent,
self-respecting, contented, and industrious, contributing, therefore,
to the general welfare, and preserving to posterity and to mankind a
national future of inconceivable power and grandeur, we shall see a
class of unemployed rich and unemployed poor, the former a handful, the
latter a host, in perpetual feud. The asylum of nations, ungratefully
rejecting the principles of equality, to which it has owed a career
of prosperity unexampled in history, will find in arrested commerce,
depressed credit, checked manufactures, an effeminate and selfish,
however brilliant, governing class, and an impoverished and imbruted
industrial population, the consequences of turning back upon its path of
advance. The condition of the most unfortunate aristocracies of the Old
World will become ours.

But the venerated principles partially promulgated in our golden age
forbid such unhappy auspices. Undoubtedly gentlemen make revolutions in
history; but since all may be Christians, may not all men be gentlemen?
At least, have not all men, everywhere, the sacred and comprehensive
right of equal freedom of endeavor to occupy their highest capacities?
_Does not the Creator, who makes nothing in vain, wherever He implants a
power, imply a command to exercise that power according to the highest
aspiration, and is not responsibility eternally exacted, wherever
power and command coexist?_ By that fearful sanction, may not all men,
everywhere, become the best they can become? What that may be, is not
free, equal, and perpetual experiment, judged by conscience in the
individual and by philanthropy in his brother, and not by arrogance
or cupidity in his oppressor, to decide? To secure the wisdom and
perpetuity of this experiment, are not governments instituted? Is not
a monopoly of opportunity by any single class, by all historical and
theoretical proof, not only unjust to the excluded, but crippling
and suicidal to the State? Nay, is not the slightest infringement of
regulated social and political justice, liberty, and humanity, in
the person of black or of white, that makes the greatest potential
development of the highest in human nature impossible or difficult, to
be resisted, as a violation of the peace of the soul, endless treachery
to mankind, an affront to