njoy 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
m