and delusion.
Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an
incident--in the South, a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit
of the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons
and it scarcely arrests attention--a chance collision in the South among
relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one
race is destroying the other. We might as well claim that the Union was
ungrateful to the colored soldier who followed its flag because a Grand
Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran as for you
to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or to accept
exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one of those
who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either
section, and belie American character by declaring them to be
significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are
neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and sin of our poor
fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its
weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that
society, sentient and responsible in every fiber, can mend and repair
until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither.
These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia's busy life as
they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And
if they did, no one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is
through them, and the men and women who think with them--making
nine-tenths of every Southern community--that these two races have been
carried thus far with less of violence than would have been possible
anywhere else on earth. And in their fairness and courage and
steadfastness--more than in all the laws that can be passed, or all the
bayonets that can be mustered--is the hope of our future.

When will the blacks cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not
dominated by the will of the intelligent; when the laborer anywhere
casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor anywhere
is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the
steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and
shiftless--then, and not till then, will the ballot of the negro be
free. The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in
prejudice against the blacks--not in sectional estrangement--not in the
hope of political dominion--b