otsteps of release; as though I had stood upon the scaffold and had
seen the glittering axe fall upon me; as though I had been upon the rack
and had seen, bending above me, the white faces of hypocrite priests;
as though I had been taken from my fireside, from my wife and children,
taken to the public square, chained; as though fagots had been piled
about me; as though the flames had climbed around my limbs and scorched
my eyes to blindness, and as though my ashes had been scattered to the
four winds, by all the countless hands of hate. And when I so feel, I
swear that while I live I will do what little I can to preserve and to
augment the liberties of man, woman, and child.

It is a question of justice, of mercy, of honesty, of intellectual
development. If there is a man in the world who is not willing to give
to every human being every right he claims for himself, he is just so
much nearer a barbarian than I am. It is a question of honesty. The man
who is not willing to give to every other the same intellectual rights
he claims for himself, is dishonest, selfish, and brutal.

It is a question of intellectual development. Whoever holds another man
responsible for his honest thought, has a deformed and distorted brain.
It is a question of intellectual development.

A little while ago I saw models of nearly everything that man has made.
I saw models of all the water craft, from the rude dug-out in which
floated a naked savage--one of our ancestors--a naked savage, with
teeth two inches in length, with a spoonful of brains in the back of
his head--I saw models of all the water craft of the world, from that
dug-out up to a man-of-war, that carries a hundred guns and miles of
canvas--from that dug-out to the steamship that turns its brave prow
from the port of New York, with a compass like a conscience, crossing
three thousand miles of billows without missing a throb or beat of its
mighty iron heart.

I saw at the same time the weapons that man has made, from a club, such
as was grasped by that same savage, when he crawled from his den in
the ground and hunted a snake for his dinner; from that club to the
boomerang, to the sword, to the cross-bow, to the blunderbuss, to the
flint-lock, to the cap-lock, to the needle-gun, up to a cannon cast by
Krupp, capable of hurling a ball weighing two thousand pounds through
eighteen inches of solid steel.

I saw, too, the armor from the shell of a turtle, that one of our brave
anc