mong strangers," to endure, like the
children of Israel, a season of cruel probation, and then to begin
life in earnest; to put their shoulders to the wheel and assist in
making this vast continent, this asylum of the oppressed of the world,
the grandest abode of mingled happiness and woe, and wealth and
pauperization ever reared by the genius and governed by the
selfishness and cupidity of man. And to-day, as in the dark days of
the past, this people are the bone and sinew of the South, the great
producers and partial consumers of her wealth; the despised, yet
indispensable, "mudsills" of her industrial interests.

A Senator of the United States from the South, whose hands have been
dyed in the blood of his fellow citizens, and who holds his high
office by fraud and usurpation, not long since declared that his State
could very well dispense with her black population. That population
outnumbers the white three to one; and by the toil by which that State
has been enriched, by the blood and the sweat of two hundred years
which the soil of that State has absorbed, by the present production
and consumption of wealth by that black population, we are amazed at
the ignorance of the great man who has been placed in a "little brief
authority." The black population cannot and will not be dispensed
with; because it is so deeply rooted in the soil that it is a part of
it--the most valuable part. And the time will come when it will hold
its title to the land, by right of purchase, for a laborer is worthy
of his hire, and is now free to invest that hire as it pleases him
best. Already some of the very best soil of that State is held by the
people this great magnus in the Nation's councils would supersede in
their divine rights.

When the war closed, as I said, the great black population of the
South was distinctively a laboring class. It owned no lands, houses,
banks, stores, or live stock, or other wealth. Not only was it the
distinctively laboring class but the distinctively pauper class. It
had neither money, intelligence nor morals with which to begin the
hard struggle of life. It was absolutely at the bottom of the social
ladder. It possessed nothing but health and muscle.

I have frequently contemplated with profound amazement the momentous
mass of subjected human force, a force which had been educated by the
lash and the bloodhound to despise labor, which was thrown upon itself
by the wording of the Emancipation Proclamatio