t at the cannon's mouth.

If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night--hear one thing
more. My people, your brothers in the South--brothers in blood, in
destiny, in all that is best in our past and future--are so beset with
this problem that their very existence depends on its right solution.
Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-ships of the
Republic sailed from your ports, the slaves worked in our fields. You
will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do here
declare that in its wise and humane administration in lifting the slave
to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving
him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom, our fathers left their
sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this
institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human
slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the freedman remains.
With him, a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling
conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil--with equal
political and civil rights--almost equal in numbers, but terribly
unequal in intelligence and responsibility--each pledged against
fusion--one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last
by a desolating war, the experiment sought by neither but approached by
both with doubt--these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at every
point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to
the end.

Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship. Never
before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an
alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed because he hindered the
way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this
Republic because he is an alien, and inferior. The red man was owner of
the land--the yellow man was highly civilized and assimilable--but they
hindered both sections and are gone! But the black man, affecting but
one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to
the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any
cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity.
It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded without
rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and the blacks
have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been an
irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races,