n and
contumely of their fellows. In season and out of season they
preached their glorious gospel of immediate and unconditional
emancipation. Wild visionaries they, incendiaries whose very
writings, like the heresies of old, must be consigned to the
flames; impracticable enthusiasts, seditious citizens. But lo!
the flame of war passed over us and their dream is true; and in
the clearer light which shines upon us to-day, we can hardly
realize that this great blot upon our civilization could have
existed, the time seems so far away.

And we of America, we who have reached the summit of the
prophecies of centuries past, we dream of new and loftier
mountains in the distance. We who have realized in our political
institutions a universal equality of men before the law, find
that we have only reached the foothills of the greater range
beyond. There are men in our midst who are dreaming to-day of a
time when mere political equality shall be based upon that
broader social and economic equality which is so necessary to
maintain it. They dream of a time when each man's reward shall be
proportioned to his own exertions and his own desert, and nothing
at all shall be due to the accident of birth; dream of a time
when bitter, grinding poverty, save as a punishment for idleness,
shall no longer exist in a world so full of the bounty of heaven.
Is it wilder than the dream of him who, under the despotism of
the Bourbons, could dream of a great people whose birth should be
heralded by the cry that all men are created equal? Is it wilder
than the dream of him who, oppressed by the tyranny of Alva,
could dream of a day of perfect religious toleration? Men talk
with contemptuous pity of the dreamer. But he rather is the
object of pity who bars the windows and draws the curtains of his
soul to shut out the light of heaven that would smile in upon
him. Let us rather pity the man who fears to utter the divine
thought which fills him. Let us pity rather that man or that
nation which lives in the complacent consciousness of its own
virtue and blessedness, and dreams of no higher good than it
possesses. He that has a dream of something better than he sees
around him, let him tell it though the world smile. He that has a
prophecy to utter, let him speak, though m