The Art of Public Speaking - Section 42 | by Dale Carnegie & J. Berg Esenwein

Section 42 Appendix D. Speeches for Study and Practice. Henry W. Grady. The Race Problem. Delivered at the Annual Banquet of the Boston Merchants' Association at Boston, Massachusetts, December 12, 1889. Mr. President, Bidden by your invitation to a discussion of the race problem, forbidden by occasion to make a political speech, I appreciate, in trying to reconcile orders with propriety, the perplexity of the little maid, who, bidden to learn to swim, was yet adjured. Now go, my darling, hang your clothes on a hickory limb, and don't go near the water. The stoutest apostle of the Church, they say, is the missionary, and the missionary, wherever he unfurls his flag, will never find himself in deeper need of unction and address than I. Bidden to-night to plant the standard of a Southern Democrat in Boston's banquet hall, and to discuss the problem of the races in the home of Phillips and of Sumner. But, Mr. President, if a purpose to speak in perfect frankness and sincerity, if earnest understanding of the vast interests involved, if a consecrating sense of what disaster may follow, further misunderstanding and estrangement, if these may be counted upon to steady undisciplined speech and to strengthen an untried arm, then, sir, I shall find the courage to proceed. Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New England's historic soil, and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and her thrift. Here, within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill, where Webster Thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought, and Channing preached, here, in the cradle of American letters, and almost of American liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New England, when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange apparition, this stern and unique figure, carved from the ocean and the wilderness, its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winter and of wars, until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base, while startled kings and emperors gazed and marvelled that from the rude touch of this handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied genius of human government, and the perfected model of human liberty. God bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of their living sons, and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork. Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done everywhere, every word I then uttered, to declare that the sentiments I then avowed were universally approved in the South, I realise that the confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my presence here to-night. I should dishonour myself, if I betrayed that confidence, by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess, Mr. President, before the praise of New England has died on my lips, that I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of seventeen thousand Vermont Democrats, that for twenty-two years, undiminished by death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched over their rugged hills, cast their democratic ballots, and gone back home to pray for their unregenerate neighbours, and awake to read the record of twenty-six thousand Republican majority. May the God of the helpless and the heroic help them, and may their sturdy tribe increase. Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line, once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There is centred all that can please or prosper humankind. A perfect climate, above a fertile soil, yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night, the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheath. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures, forests vast and primeval, and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries, cotton, iron, and wood, that region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly. In iron, proven supremacy. In timber, the reserved supply of the Republic. From this assured and permanent advantage, against which artificial conditions cannot much longer prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries. Not maintained by human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in divine assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest. Not set amid costly farms from which competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a limit, this system of industries is mounting to a splendour that shall dazzle and illumine the world. That, sir, is the picture and the promise of my home, a land better and fairer than I have told you, and yet but fit setting in its material excellence for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizenship. Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its sturdy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers, and touching this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet, what in the Eldorado of which I have told you, but fifteen per cent of its lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched, and its population so scant that, were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could not be heard from Virginia to Texas, while on the threshold of nearly every house in New England stands a son, seeking, with troubled eyes, some new land in which to carry his modest patrimony. The strange fact remains that in 1880 the South had fewer northern-born citizens than she had in 1870, fewer in 1770 than in 1660. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the sectioned line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North have crossed it over to the South than when it was crimson with the best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholders stood guard every inch of its way? There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing, sir, but this problem and the suspicions it breeds hinders a clear understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices of Manassas and Gettysburg, and illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was ever wrought with the sword or sword at the cannon's mouth. If this does not invite your patient hearing tonight, 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 has 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 honour 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 civilised 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 airship 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, however similar, have lived anywhere, at any time, on the same soil, with equal rights, in peace. In spite of these things, we are commanded to make good this change of American policy, which has not, perhaps, changed American prejudice, to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible between whites and blacks, and to reverse, under the very worst conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to this superhuman task, with an impatience that brooks no delay, a rigour that accepts no excuse, and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity, we do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would, so bound up in our honourable obligation to the world that we would not if we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know. We cannot solve it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy, with less than the knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood, and that, when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall feel your strong arms about us, and hear the beating of your approving hearts. The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South, the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history, whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war, whose energy has made bricks without straw, and spread splendour amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes, these men wear this problem in their hearts and brains by day and by night. They realise, as you cannot, what this problem means, what they owe to this kindly and dependent race, the measure of their debt to the world, in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march cumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration. Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr. President, we need not go one step further, unless you concede right here that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible, and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly disregard, guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and irresponsible of either race, compensating error with frankness, and retrieving in patience what they lost in passion, and conscious all the time that wrong means ruin. Admit this, and we may reach an understanding tonight. The President of the United States, in his late message to Congress discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem, asks, are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights that are his? I shall not here protest against a partisanry that, for the first time in our history, in time of peace, has stamped with the great seal of our government a stigma upon the people of a great and loyal section, though I gratefully remember that the great dead soldier who held the helm of state for the eight stormiest years of Reconstruction never found need for such a step, and though there is no personal sacrifice I would not make to remove this cruel and unjust imputation on my people from the archives of my country, but, sir, backed by a record on every page of which is progress, I venture to make earnest and respectful answer to the questions that are asked. We give to the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth $450,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses, and fruit. This enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and discontented labour. It comes from peaceful fields, in which laughter and gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with a singing plough. It is claimed that this ignorant labour is defrauded of its just hire. I present the tax books of Georgia, which show that the black 25 years ago a slave has in Georgia alone $10,000,000 of assessed property, worth twice that much. Does not that record honour him and vindicate his neighbours? What people penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every Afro-American agitator stirring the strife in which alone he prospers, I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their children the helpful message their state sends them from the schoolhouse door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than $1,000,000, and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered, of the fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for $10,000,000, and yet 49% of the beneficiaries are black children, and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps or can help our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston, although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of little. The South, with one-seventh of the taxable property of the country, with relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth as much of public lands, and having back of its tax books none of the $500,000,000 of bonds that enrich the North, and though it pays annually $26,000,000 to your section of pensions, yet gives nearly one-sixth to the public school fund. The South, since 1865, has spent $122,000,000 in education, and this year is pledged to spend $32,000,000 more for state and city schools, although the blacks, paying one-thirtieth of the taxes, get nearly one-half of the fund. Go into our fields and see whites and blacks working side by side, on our buildings in the same squad, in our shops at the same forge. Often the blacks crowd the whites from work, or lower wages by their greater need and simpler habits, and yet are permitted, because we want to bar them from no avenue in which their feet are fitted to tread. They could not there be elected orators of white universities, as they have been here, but they do enter there a hundred useful trades that are closed against them here. We hold it better and wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the exotic in the window. In the South there are black lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists, doctors, preachers, multiplying with the increased ability of their race to support them. In villages and towns they have their military companies equipped from the armouries of the state, their churches and societies built and supported largely by their neighbours. What is the testimony of the courts? In penal legislation we have steadily reduced felonies to misdemeanours, and have led the world in mitigating punishment for crime, that we might save, as far as possible, this dependent race from its own weakness. In our penitentiary record, sixty per cent of the prosecutions are negroes, and in every court the black criminal strikes the coloured juror that white men may judge his case. In the North one black in every 185 is in jail, in the South only one in 446. In the North the percentage of black prisoners is six times as great as that of native whites, in the South only four times as great. If prejudice wrongs him in Southern courts, the record shows it to be deeper in Northern courts. I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and upright as the Bar of Massachusetts will solemnly endorse my assertion, that in the Southern courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life, liberty or property, the black has distinct advantage because he is a black, apt to be over-reached, oppressed, and that this advantage reaches from the juror in making his verdict to the judge in measuring his sentence. Now, Mr President, can it be seriously maintained that we are terrorising the people from whose willing hands comes every year one thousand million dollars of farm crops, or have robbed the people who, twenty-five years from unrewarded slavery, have amassed in one state twenty million dollars of property, or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every day, or deceive them when we are educating them to the utmost limit of our ability, or outlaw them when we work side by side with them, or re-enslave them under legal forms, when for their benefit we have even imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of law? My fellow countrymen, as you yourselves may sometimes have to appeal at the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to my people tonight the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these incontestable facts. But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and violence. This I admit, and there will be until there is one ideal community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely is it misjudged? It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the Negro, his helplessness, his isolation, his sensory of servitude. These dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition, inflamed by prejudice and partisanry, has led to injustice 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 door 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 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 labourer 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 ballots of the Negro be free. The white people of the South abandoned, Mr. President, not in prejudice against the blacks, not in sectional estrangement, not in the hope of political dominion, but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is this vast, ignorant and purchasable vote, clannish, credulous, impulsive, impassionate, tempting every heart of the demagogue, but insensible to the appeal of the statesman. Wrongly started in that it was led into alienation from its neighbour and taught to rely on the protection of an outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction, and even that information on which conviction must be based. It must remain a faction, strong enough in every community to control on the slightest division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed upon, its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses misdirected, and even its superstition made to play its part in a campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardised and every approach to the ballot box debauched. It is against such campaigns as this, the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every southern community has drugged deeply, that the white people of the South are banded together, just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if three hundred thousand men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot, banded in race instinct, holding against you the memory of a century of slavery, taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already travested legislation from your State House, and in every species of folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit. But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long been flippantly charged to be evidence, and has now been solemnly and efficiently declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on our part. Let us see. Virginia, a State now under fierce assault for this alleged crime, cast in 1888 seventy-five percent of her vote. Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty percent of her vote. Was it suppression in Virginia, and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last month Virginia cast sixty-nine percent of her vote, and Massachusetts, fighting in every district, cast only forty-nine percent of hers. If Virginia is condemned because thirty-one percent of her vote was silent, how shall this State escape, in which fifty-one percent was dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen Southern States in 1888 cast sixty-seven percent of their total vote, the six New England States but sixty-three percent of theirs. By what fair rule shall the stigma be put upon one section while the other escapes? A Congressional election in New York last week, with the polling place in touch of every voter, brought out only six thousand votes of twenty-eight thousand, and the lack of opposition is assigned as the natural cause. In a district in my State, in which an opposition speech has not been heard in ten years, and the polling places are miles apart, under the unfair reasoning of which my section has been a constant victim, the small vote is charged to be proof of forcible suppression. In Virginia, an average majority of twelve thousand, a less hopeless division of the minority, was raised to forty-two thousand. In Iowa, in the same election, a majority of thirty-two thousand was wiped out, and an opposition majority of eight thousand was established. The change of forty thousand votes in Iowa is accepted as political revolution. In Virginia, an increase of thirty thousand on a safe majority is declared to be proof of political fraud. It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the vote is not regularly cast, but more inexplicable that this should be so in New England than in the South. What invites the Negro to the ballot box? He knows that of all men it has promised him most, and yield in him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of forty acres and a mule. His second, the threat that democratic success meant his re-enslavement. Both have been proved false in his experience. He looked for a home, and he got the Freedman's Bank. He fought under promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his neighbours, with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up in his, and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss of their confidence and sympathy. That is at last his best and enduring hope. And so, without leaders or organization, and lacking the resolute heroism of my party friends in Vermont that make their hopeless march over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage, he shrewdly measures the occasional agitator, balances his little account with politics, touches up his mule, and jogs down the furrow, letting the mad world wag as it will. The Negro voter can never control in the South, and it would be well if partisans at the North would understand this. I have seen the white people of a state set about by black hosts until their fate seemed sealed. But, sir, some brave men, banding them together, would rise as Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and, touching their eyes with faith, bid them look abroad to see the very air filled with the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. If there is any human force that cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law, or divorced in force. It is the inalienable right of every free community, the just and righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on this, sir, that we rely in the South, not the cowardly menace of mask or shotgun, but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility, masked and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it all the powers of earth shall not prevail. It is just as certain that Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of a white race that before the moral and material power of her people once more unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was left alone, vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts, as that night should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass forced bills, but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liberties to federal election law. You may submit, in fear of a necessity that does not exist, that the very form of this government may be changed. You may invite federal interference with the New England town meeting that has been for a hundred years the guarantee of local government in America. This old state, which holds in its charter the boast that it is a free and independent commonwealth, may deliver its election machinery into the hands of the government it helped to create. But never, sir, will a single state of this union, north or south, be delivered again to the control of an ignorant and inferior race. We wrested our state governments from black supremacy when the federal drumbeat rolled closer to the ballot box and federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free government. But, sir, though the canon of this republic thundered in every voting district in the south, we still should find in the mercy of God the means and the courage to prevent its re-establishment. I regret, sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in seeming estrangement to the north, if, sir, any man will point out to me a path down which the white people of the south, divided, may walk in peace and honour. I will take that path, though I take it alone, for at its end, and nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section and the full restoration of this union. But, sir, if the black had not been enfranchised, the south would have been divided and the republic united. His enfranchisement, against which I enter no protest, holds the south united and compact. What solution, then, can we offer for the problem? Time alone can disclose it to us. We simply report progress and ask your patience. If the problem be solved at all, and I firmly believe it will, though nowhere else has it been, it will be solved by the people most deeply bound in interest, most deeply pledged in honour to its solution. I had rather see my people render back this question rightly solved, than to see them gather all the spoils over which faction has contended since Catiline conspired and Caesar fought. Meantime, we treat the black fairly, measuring to him justice in the fullness the strong should give to the weak, and leading him in the steadfast ways of citizenship, that he may no longer be the prey of the unscrupulous and the sport of the thoughtless. We open to him every pursuit in which he can prosper, and seek to broaden his training and capacity. We seek to hold his confidence and friendship, and to pin him to the soil with ownership, that he may catch in the fire of his own hearthstone that sense of responsibility the shiftless can never know. And we gather him into that alliance of intelligence and responsibility that, though it now runs close to racial lines, welcomes the responsible and intelligent of any race. By this course, confirmed in our judgment and justified in the progress already made, we hope to progress slowly, but surely, to the end. The love we feel for that race you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy from her home up there looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals the sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her black arms and led me smiling to sleep. This scene vanishes as I speak, and I catch a vision of an old southern home with its lofty pillars and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I see women with strained and anxious faces, and children alert yet helpless. I see night come down with its dangers and its apprehensions, and in a big homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving hands, now worn and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal woman, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man, as they lay a mother's blessing there. While at her knees, the truest daughter I yet have found, I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary, because her slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin, or guard at her chamber door, put a black man's loyalty between her and danger. I catch another vision, the crisis of battle, a soldier, struck, staggering, fallen. I see a slave scuffing through the smoke, winding his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of hurtling death, bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down his life in his master's stead. I see him by the weary bedside, ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble heart that God will lift his master up until death comes in mercy and in honour to still the soldier's agony and seal the soldier's life. I see him by the open grave, mute, motionless, uncovered, suffering for the death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him, when the mould is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave comes a voice saying, follow him, put your arms about him in his need, even as he put his about me, be his friend as he was mine. And out into this new world, strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering growth, I follow, and may God forget my people when they forget these. Whatever the future may hold for them, whether they plod along in the servitude from which they have never been lifted since the Cyrenian was laid hold upon by the Roman soldiers and made to bear the cross of the fainting Christ, whether they find homes again in Africa and thus hasten the prophecy of the psalmist who said, and suddenly Ethiopia shall hold out her hands unto God, whether forever dislocated and separate, they remain a weak people beset by stronger, and exist as the Turk who lives in the jealousy rather than in the conscience of Europe, or whether in this miraculous republic they break through the cast of twenty centuries and, belying universal history, reach the full stature of citizenship, and in peace maintain it, we shall give them uttermost justice and abiding friendship. And whatever we do, unto whatever seeming estrangement we may be driven, nothing shall disturb the love we bear this republic or mitigate our consecration to its service. I stand here, Mr. President, to profess no new loyalty. When General Lee, whose heart was the temple of our hopes and whose arm was clothed with our strength, renewed his allegiance to this government of the Pommatooks, he spoke from a heart too great to be false, and he spoke for every honest man from Maryland to Texas. From that day to this, Hamilcar has nowhere in the South sworn young Hannibal to hatred and vengeance, but everywhere to loyalty and to love. Witness the veteran standing at the base of a Confederate monument, above the graves of his comrades, his empty sleeve tossing in the April wind, adjuring the young men about him to serve as earnest and loyal citizens the government against which their fathers fought. This message, delivered from that sacred presence, has gone home to the hearts of my fellows. And, sir, I declare here, if physical courage be always equal to human aspiration, that they would die, sir, if need be, to restore this republic their fathers fought to dissolve. Such, Mr. President, is this problem as we see it. Such is the temper in which we approach it. Such the progress made. What do we ask of you? First, patience. Out of this alone can come perfect work. Second, confidence. In this alone can you judge fairly. Third, sympathy. In this you can help us best. Fourth, give us your sons as hostages. When you plant your capital in millions, send your sons that they may know how true are our hearts, and may help to swell the Caucasian current until it can carry without danger this black infusion. Fifth, loyalty to the republic, for there is sectionalism in loyalty as in estrangement. This hour little needs the loyalty that is loyal to one section, and yet holds the other in enduring suspicion and estrangement. Give us the broad and perfect loyalty that loves and trusts Georgia alike with Massachusetts, that knows no south, no north, no east, no west, but endures with equal and patriotic love every foot of our soil, every state of our union. A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us tonight to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever divides. We, sir, are Americans, and we stand for human liberty. The uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth. France, Brazil, these are our victories. To redeem the earth from kingcraft and oppression, this is our mission, and we shall not fail. God has sown in our soil the seed of his millennial harvest, and he will not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until his full and perfect day has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle, from Plymouth, Rock and Jamestown all the way, aye, even from the hour when from the voiceless and traceless ocean a new world rose to the sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that stupendous day, when the old world will come to marvel and to learn amid our gathered treasures, let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past with the spectacle of a republic, compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love, loving from the lakes to the gulf, the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill, serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory, blazing out the path and making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in God's appointed time.