fe'-JSRfV V # ™\^ ^oW/ V'™V ^ • ,o- ^••£V.g** v^*> %-^.V.g^ V^^> & ° A* A *b♦ *> ■ . '.• .«> &°* ^ * A& *>. \^ 0^ c • " • ♦ ^b a> 1 • * ABRAHAM LINCOLN AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE SHAWMUT CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH IN BOSTON ON FEBRUARY 14, 1909 By MOORFIELD STOREY ABRAHAM LINCOLN AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE SHAWMUT CONGRE- GATIONAL CHURCH IN BOSTON ON FEBRUARY 14, 1909 MOORFIELD STOREY BOSTON Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers, 272 Congress Street 1909 c^n> £. • E1457 ,8 ' ABRAHAM LINCOLN. We are met to commemorate the birth of him whom Lowell called "the first American." The phrase was well chosen, for Abraham Lincoln was the first great leader of this people who sprang as it were straight from American soil and grew to manhood under purely American influences. He stands pre- eminent in our history because he was true to the cardinal prin- ciple of American freedom upon which our existence as a nation is founded, the great truth that "all men are created equal," and lived to make his countrymen adopt and apply it in dealing with slavery, the greatest evil that ever afflicted this country. I am not here to sketch his biography, but I should like to make you realize the conditions of his childhood and youth, for they emphasize the lesson of his life. He knew little of his ancestors, and apparently owed nothing to inheritance. In his first recorded address, made at the age of twenty-three, he said truly: "I was born, and have ever remained, in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations or friends to recommend me." His father was an ignorant and shift- less carpenter, while of his mother's family he only knew that they belonged to the class known as "poor whites"; and he was not tempted to inquire further. He was born in Kentucky, but his father was a wanderer, and by successive moves carried his family to Indiana and finally to Illinois. His poverty may be gathered from the fact that, when Lincoln was seven years old, the family lived for a year in a shelter fourteen feet square and open on one side to the weather. Lincoln's youth was passed in the most squalid surroundings among the rough pioneers who laid the foundations of the great West. His biographer tells us "that the sum of all the schooling which he had in his whole life was hardly one year." Teachers were rare and books were few, and little trace of Eastern civilization could be detected in the daily lives of the men and women about him. His days were spent in the hard work of a new settlement, —in felling trees and splitting rails, — among the rude, ignorant, kindlv, hard-working, hard-drinking, strangely assorted peo- ple pushed from the older States by ill-luck or worse, by a crav- ing for adventure or by mere restlessness, — the skirmish line of civilization which has always preceded the main army of settlers as our population has moved westward. For a few years before and after he reached the age of twenty-one he had some experience in business, first as clerk and again as partner in a small country store, but neither venture was successful. His leisure time was devoted to read- ing and studying law as opportunity offered. He was appointed postmaster of a small village when he was twenty-four, he found employment as a land surveyor at a time when speculation in real estate was active, and in various ways he earned his living, but his ambitions were political. At twenty-three he was a candidate for the legislature, at twenty-five he was elected, and was re-elected three times in succession, being twice the candidate of the Whig party for Speaker of the House. In 1837 he was admitted to the bar and settled in Springfield. His first service as representative in the State legislature ended in 1842, but in 1844 he was a candidate on the Whig ticket for presidential elector, and stumped the State for Henry Clay. In 1846 he was nominated for the office of representa- tive in the National Congress, and was the only Whig elected from Illinois. Add to this that he served as a captain in the Black Hawk War, though he saw no lighting, and we get some idea of the training which prepared him for the great part which he was to take in his country's history. As a poor boy among poor settlers, as shop keeper, posl master, surveyor, stum]) speaker, legislator, and young lawyer whose practice was in small matters, lie had been from birth at every moment in touch with the plain people. Their feel ings were his feelings, he knew their habits, their ways of thought, their tastes, their instincts, as a man knows his own family. Born in the most wretched circumstances, but with abilities and ambitions that carried him to the highest place in his country, he could not help believing in the people, and in the great principles of free government laid down as everlasting truths in the Declaration of Independence. It was from the Declaration that he drew the faith which made him, in the fulness of time, "the great emancipator." "Nothing of Europe here." He was, and he could not help being, American in every fibre of his being; and his life must ever be the strongest argu- ment in favor of the political system which makes possible such a career as his, and can produce such a ruler. Barren and poor as was the soil from which he sprung, that soil was in no small measure the source of his rare power. Had Lincoln died at the end of his term in Congress, he would have been forgotten. He had done and said nothing in any way memorable. His life had been like that of many another young politician. In 1837 during his second term in the legislature of Illinois he had written a protest, signed bv himself and another member, against certain pro-slavery reso- lutions which had passed the legislature, and this protest had been spread upon the journal of the House. In this the signers declared their belief "that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils." In 1840 his heart was touched by the sight of twelve negroes whom he saw chained together on a steamboat going south, and of this he afterwards wrote, "That sight was a con- tinued torment to me." While in Congress, he introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia "with the consent of the voters of the District and with compensation to owners," but there are few references to slavery in his speeches or correspondence, and evidently it had not stirred him deeply. In a eulogy of Henry Clay delivered in 1852 he stated Clay's position on this question in these words: "He ever was on principle and in feeling opposed to slavery. . . . He did not perceive that on a question of human right the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. . . . Cast into life when slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself. His feeling and his judgment therefore ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject. . . . The name and opinions and influence of Mr. Clay are fully and as I trust effectually and enduringly arrayed against" the extreme abolitionists. "But I would also, if I could, array his name, opinions and influence against the opposite extreme- — against a few but an increasing number of men who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white man's charter of freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.' " The views which he attributed to Clay were at that time doubtless his own, and it is interesting to observe in this early statement that devotion to the Declaration of Inde- pendence which he always felt and constantly expressed. Such was the equipment and such the faith of Lincoln when the final battle against slavery began in 1854, and from that time until his death in April, 1865, little more than a decade, occurred all that gives Lincoln his enduring claim to the grati- tude of his countrymen. When Stephen A. Douglas, then senator from Illinois, proposed and carried the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and thus opened to slavery territory of the United States which had been secured to freedom, Lincoln's hour had come and the man was ready. Men had foolishly thought that the compromise of 1850 had ended the irrepres- sible conflict between freedom and slavery, — as if any com- promise between right and wrong could endure in a moral world! — but now the contest broke forth again, not to end until under Lincoln's leadership and mainly by his act slavery was forever abolished. In this contest he won his way from obscurity to immortality. Douglas was then the most aggressive Northern Democrat, and was a prominent candidate for the nomination of the Demo- 5 cratic party at the next presidential election. The indigna- tion excited by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the struggle between freedom and slavery in Kansas inevitably centred upon him as the author of the repealing statute, and this indignation could find effective expression best in his own State. He held the centre of the pro-slavery line, and Lincoln as the Whig leader in Illinois was pitted against him. More- over, when Congress met in December, 1853, the country was overwhelmingly Democratic. The Whigs at the election of 1852 had carried only Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The anti-slavery sentiment was naturally strongest in New England, New York, and parts of Ohio, but Illinois and Indiana had never been enlisted on that side. To convert them meant victory for freedom in the whole coun- try. For those reasons the struggle in Illinois interested the whole nation. The debate continued at intervals from 1854 to i860, and during these six years by his masterly discussion of the slavery question Lincoln made himself the leader of the Republican party. In this memorable contest Lincoln displayed clear thinking, remarkable power of statement, great moral force, and a simple direct style which was wonderfully effective. Douglas, a native of Vermont, the son of a physician and educated in the schools of Vermont and New York, showed himself a demagogue, constantly appealing to the prejudices and passions of his audiences. Lincoln, the son of the soil, brought up among the people, proved his faith in them by addressing himself to their reason and their conscience. He spoke to the best that was in his hearers, he never descended to personality or abuse or tried to carry his audience by any trick of rhetoric. The absence of heat in his speech made it the more convincing. As we read the great debate, we feel that Lincoln's argument was like fate, passionless, impersonal, inexorable. He treated his opponents courteously, he met their arguments fairly, and he triumphed by the strength of his case and the sheer force of his reasoning. He felt as he said that "the human heart is with us. God is with us," and with such allies it was sacri- lege to degrade and obscure the great issue by attacks on men. He honored the people by giving them his best, and, respond- ing to his appeal, they justified his faith. He rested his case against slavery upon foundations which could not be shaken. He insisted that it was morally wrong, and that its existence was inconsistent with the principles upon which our government rests. His biographers have published among his works certain fragments, probably notes for speeches, written about this time while he was thinking out the way to present the question. In the first of these on slavery, written about July i, 1854, we find "Most governments have been based practically on the denial of the equal rights of men. . . . Ours began by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant and vicious to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and by your system you would always keep them ignorant and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant wiser, and all better and happier together." Our political faith could not be stated better. Again he said: — "The doctrine of self-government is right — absolutely and eternally right. ... If the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he, too, shall not govern himself! When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism. . . . No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. I say that is the leading principle, the sheet-anchor of American republicanism. . . . Allow all the governed an equal voice in the government, and that and that only is self-government." In another speech he said : — "I suggest that the difference of opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong, and those who do not think it wrong. The Republican party think it wrong — we think it is a moral, a social and a political wrong. We think it a wrong not confining itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it is a wrong which in its tendency affects the existence of the whole nation." Throughout the long discussion between the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and his election to the Presidency, in one form or another these two ideas were steadily pressed, — slavery is wrong, and it is inconsistent with the Declaration of In- dependence, — until in Independence Hall at Philadelphia, on his way to be inaugurated, he made his memorable statement: — "I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in- the Declaration of Independence. ... I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due" time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. . . . Now, my friends, can this country be saved on that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. . . . But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassi- nated on this spot than surrender it." With no experience in executive office, with but slight knowl- edge of Washington and even of the Republican leaders who were to be his associates in carrying on the government, but strong in this faith, he took the helm of state at the greatest crisis in his country's history, and in this faith he conquered. His wonderful career as President is familiar to you all, 8 and, if it were not, I could not tell it in the few moments at my command. When he was inaugurated, men could only conject- ure what he was. They doubted his capacity and lamented the chance which had placed him in power over the heads of leaders like Seward, Chase, Sumner, and others whose ability was known. His personal appearance, exaggerated by caricature of pen and pencil, repelled some who could not look below the surface. Tom Taylor in his eulogy after the assassination paints it in few words: — "His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face, His gaunt gnarled hands, his unkempt bristling hair, His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease, His lack of all we prize as debonair, Of power or will to shine, of art to please." We were not wont to associate such peculiarities with our president, and we wondered. He came from a small Western town to the most conspicuous and the most difficult place then held by man. The eyes of the civilized world were fixed upon him, and he stood "in the fierce light that beats upon a throne." "God's plan And measure of a stalwart man, Limbed like the old heroic breeds, Who stands self-poised on manhood's solid earth, Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, Fed from within with all the strength he needs." He stood there for four years, as if to show that the man of humblest origin could with equal opportunity make himself the equal of the highest, and in his own person to prove that the principles of free government are everlasting truths. His courage, his wisdom, his honesty, his unfailing patience, his faith, his simplicity, his absolute unselfishness, his single- hearted devotion to his task, his freedom from personal feeling or jealous}', his tolerance of others, and, when occasion required. his masterful power over men were gradually recognized until the people trusted him as they never trusted man before or 9 since ; until the severest of his critics, whether at home or abroad, could say with Taylor: — "He had lived to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil and confute my pen, To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men,"— in a word, until this son of an ignorant pioneer was recognized as the greatest ruler of his time, — among the greatest rulers of all times, and we could say of him as Motley said of William the Silent, "As long as he lived he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets." For my purpose to-night I may state his course as President in a few words. He knew that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and that no lasting reunion was possible unless it was destroyed. He knew that the people of the North were divided upon the question, that the border States where slavery existed were enlisted in its behalf, and that, if slavery was at- tacked, they might secede and enormously increase our diffi- culties. He knew that slavery in the States where it existed was protected by the Constitution which he had taken an oath to maintain; and this oath he was determined to keep. When, however, it became apparent to all thinking men that the slaves were the support of the Southern armies, and that it was at least doubtful whether we could save the Union without destroying slavery, when public opinion was ripe and the country was behind him, he did not hesitate. It seemed to many that he was very slow to strike, but in less than eighteen months after Sumter was attacked he issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation. As we look back, how swiftly he moved! On January i, 1863, his final proclamation freed the slaves then held in the seceded States, and the Thirteenth Amendment for which he labored crowned the work. Slavery had drawn the sword, and in accordance with the stern law of retribution it perished by the sword. For the first time in the history of the country the "self-evident" truths announced in the Decla- ration of Independence were recognized and sanctioned by the IO Constitution of the United States. For the first time all men under our flag were free; and by Lincoln more than by any other man this great triumph was won. Many had labored long and faithfully for the cause, many had suffered obloquy, loss, wounds, and even death at the hands of the mob; thousands of our bravest and best had laid down their lives on the battle- field before the end came, and high honor is due them all. I would not take from any one his share of praise; but Lincoln stands apart, and, to describe him, let me borrow the words of Lowell : — "For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any cheat of birth, But by his clear-grained human worth And brave old wisdom of sincerity! They knew that outward grace is dust; They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill And supple-tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. Great captains, with their guns and drums, Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American." I will add the words of his biographer, Mr. Morse, in regard to one great quality, which was in no small part the secret of his success: — "By his position he had more at stake, both in his life- 1 1 time and before the tribunal of the future, than any other person in the country. But there was only one idea in his mind, and that was — not that he should save the coun- try, but that the country should be saved. Not the faint- est shadow of self ever fell for an instant across this simple purpose. He was intent to play his part out faithfully with all the ability he could bring to it; but any one else, who could, might win and wear the title of savior. . . . Never once did he manipulate any covert magnet to draw toward himself the credit or the glory of a measure or a move." "Let his great example stand Colossal, seen of every land, Till in all lands and thro' all human story The path of duty be the way to glory." And now, a century after his birth, men are met all over this country to do him honor. Why? Why are we here? Not for his sake, nor because any word or thought of ours can affect his fame. That is established "far above our poor power to add or detract." His place on the page of history is secure. We meet here for ourselves. Such ceremonies are the merest waste of speech and time unless they make our own lives better. Why do we honor Lincoln ? Not because he was a President of the United States. Men have held that office whom we have forgotten or would gladly forget. Not because he signed the proclamation of emancipation. A far inferior man in his place might have been driven to do that by military necessity. We reverence Lincoln because through his rough exterior, through his simple and eloquent speech, through his historic acts, through the whole record of his life, we recognize a great moral power, because he had the faith and courage to save this nation by upholding and applying the principles of free government upon which it was founded, because he is the embodiment and exponent of the fundamental political truth that all men have equal rights and are entitled to equal oppor- 12 tunities under the law, because he is the best representative of the ideals for which this country stands and which every citizen should cherish. How genuine is our reverence! Do we honor Lincoln only with our lips? "If you love me, keep my commandments." If we really honor him, must we not show it by earning on the work which he began, by holding aloft the standard which dropped from his dying hand? "He, being dead, yet speak- eth." How often do we quote his words! You have just heard them, but they cannot be repeated too often. "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." "The great task remaining before us" then, is not yet done. When Lincoln began his battle against slavery, it was in- trenched in the Constitution. Slaves were chattels, and the United States had no power to make them men. When the battle ended, slavery had ceased to exist, and instead of being protected it was prohibited by the Constitution. That was Lincoln's work. He found four millions of negro slaves. We have to deal with ten millions of colored freemen. They are living in their own country, the land where they and their fathers before them were born. Thcv are as much Americans 13 as we. They have every legal and political right which any American citizen has. They are in every respect our equals before the law, and the United States is bound to see that their rights are respected. We owe them much. Their fathers were brought here against their will by ours, and held in bond- age for two hundred and fifty years. If they are poor and ignorant, it was their white masters who left them so. For any evils or difficulties which spring from the presence of the colored race in this country the white race is responsible, and upon the white race, therefore, rests the duty of repairing the wrong which it has done. These propositions cannot be denied. But men now speak of a race problem. Let me state this problem as it was stated a few weeks ago by Senator Frazier, of Tennessee: — "The exigencies of civil war freed the slave, but the black man remained, and with him a problem unparalleled in its difficulties. Mark those difficulties: Two races, nearly equal in numbers, but utterly and wholly dissimilar. The one educated, proud, and aggressive; the other igno- rant, idle, and superstitious. The one with a thousand years of civilization stretching out behind it; the other but a few centuries removed from barbarism. The one but a generation ago in bondage to the other, yet each made, by law, equal in civil and political rights. Thus situated, they are asked to dwell together, on the same soil and under the same skies, in peace and harmony, without the one race dominating the other. "Mr. President, the people whom I have the honor in part to represent here have dealt fairly, kindly, even generously, by the negro. . . . But, Mr. President, I would not be entirely frank if I did not say that upon certain phases of the race question they, in common with the rest of the South, have stood, and I believe will ever stand, firm and unalterable. First, never again will the negro race be allowed to politically dominate and control a sov- ereign State of this Union. To do so would be to enthrone 14 ignorance and give it dominion over intelligence, and to bring back the rapine and utter and reckless debauchery of the reconstruction era. Second, the social barrier which separates the races will never be allowed to be lowered. To do so would destroy the purity and integrity of the white race, and shock the sensibilities and outrage the moral sense of the Caucasian race the world over. "Mr. President, for forty years and more, in patience and kindness, the people of the South have wrestled with this problem, which is racial, not political. It is still un- solved. What the end will be only God, in His infinite wisdom, can see. Shall it be that the black race will be deported ? If feasible, it would remove the last remaining barrier to the complete unity of the American people. Shall it be a race war,— bloody, fierce, exterminating,— a war for the survival of the fittest? God forbid! Shall it be amalgamation and the unspeakable horror of a cor- rupted and inferior race? To allow it would be to destroy that civilization which is at once our strength and our pride. Shall it be that the two races will dwell together, and yet apart, in peace and harmony? To do so without the one race dominating and ruling the other would be to belie the universal verdict of racial history. I do not know. But one thing I do know, Mr. President, that the solution of this problem rests primarily in the hands of the Southern white man and the Southern black man, and calls for the wisest counsel and broadest conservatism of both." Let us reduce this statement to its essential propositions and examine them. The claim is that the colored men are inferior to white men; that they cannot be allowed to become the politi- cal or social equals of the whites lest civilization suffer, the purity of the white race be destroyed, and resulting inter- marriage produce "a corrupted and inferior race"; and that they can only dwell together peacefully if the whites are allowed to dominate. The other possibilities suggested are sending 15 these fellow-citizens as exiles to Africa or a bloody war of extermination, both impossible, or the amalgamation of the two races. The race problem arises from the determination of the white race to deny the equal rights of their colored fellow-citizens. It is the white man, not the colored man, who creates it. The whites, because they are white, claim the right to hold their fellow-men down because they are dark. When that determi- nation is abandoned, the problem is settled. In the North and South alike, men talk of a "race problem" and foster "race prejudice" because they are afraid that their dark neighbors may become their equals. Employment for which the colored man and woman are entirely fit is denied them because they are colored. Labor unions exclude them. They are denied the protection of the law in Northern as well as Southern States, and when, in the very city which is proud that it was Lincoln's home, an orgy of riot and bloodshed occurs, stimulated by race prejudice and resulting in the robbery and murder of excellent citizens because they are colored, the perpetrators of these crimes go unpunished because the juries will not convict. Springfield pretends to honor Abraham Lincoln, while it tells the country that no law protects the homes and the lives of its colored citizens, and they may be plundered and killed with impunity. The spirit which made slavery possible is stronger than it was when Lincoln died. It is the cruel, selfish, unchristian determination of the whites that colored men shall not have an equal chance in life with them that creates our race problem, and it is the white race that must be taught to do justice. There is no natural prejudice of color. Too many white babies of delicate birth have nestled contentedly in the arms of colored nurses and have learned to call them "Mammy," too many white and colored children have grown up as play- mates in close daily association, too many mulattoes in whose veins flowed the best blood of the white race have been born, to leave any ground for believing that a native repulsion keeps the races apart. The prejudice comes with years, and is cul- i6 tivated and cherished. It becomes fashionable, and the un- thinking adopt it to prove their superiority. It spreads from community to community, like a contagious disease. The prejudice which in some countries has long existed against the Jews, the feeling between the English and the Irish, the hos- tility between men of different nations which inevitably follows war, the religious antipathies which lighted the fires of Smith- field and led to the internecine struggles between Catholics and Protestants in both the Old and the New World, were quite as strong and quite as easy to cherish, and our color prejudice can be banished as these have been banished by all reasonable men. The argument which I have quoted defeats itself. If the negroes are by nature inferior to the whites, and the invincible barrier of race prejudice keeps them apart, how can the ques- tion of social equality arise? Where is the danger of inter- marriage, with the resulting corrupted race ? Is it really prob- able that the whites will deliberately select as their friends and associates, as their husbands or wives, persons who are in all respects their inferiors, and against whom they have an uncon- querable prejudice? Admit that a few cases of marriage be- tween exceptional individuals may occur, can the association become common? Is a race capable of such action really superior? The alternative is clear. Either the colored race is not hopelessly inferior, or social equality is impossible. If no education can make the colored race equal to the white, there is no reason why we should not give colored chil- dren all the education which they are capable of receiving. Senator Frazier says that they are "ignorant, idle, and super- stitious," and that because they are so their presence in the community creates a problem. Is it wise statesmanship to aggravate this problem by keeping them ignorant and super- stitious? The remedy for these conditions is education, and the great enemies of the Southern States to-day are the men who speak and work against educating the colored race. Lincoln's words in 1854 answer them as he answered Douglas then : — "They said, some men are too ignorant and vicious to *7 share in government.- Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious." These men would make the problem permanent and give us no hope of better things. There is no answer to the question -which the late Carl Schurz put to his Southern friends: "How do you expect to succeed in competition with neighboring communities, if your policy is to keep your laborers ignorant and degraded, while their policy is to educate and elevate theirs ? " If, as Senator Frazier thinks, the negro can never by any education be made the equal of the white, the danger of a min- gling between the two races on terms of social equality is the merest bugbear. The negro will be better than he is, but still inferior. If, on the other hand, education will make him the equal of the white, we are bound to help him to such education. It is his right. If colored men thus become our equals, there is no reason why we should not meet them as equals. If we do not, prejudice only will keep us apart. Booker Washington, Pro- fessor Dubois, and many others are welcome guests, and are well entitled to welcome, at the tables of the most highly educated and refined people in this country. Why should they not be? How many white men can look back on a life of such achieve- ment, of such triumph over obstacles seemingly unsurmount- able, as Mr. Washington ? He shames us all. I firmly believe that in the years to come our children will be as much ashamed of our color prejudice as we are of the mob that burned the Ursuline convent. The danger of "amalgamation and the unspeakable horror of a corrupted and inferior race" is not increased, but diminished, by elevating the colored race. When the negroes were slaves, was there no corruption of blood? When the offspring of a mixed relation, no matter how slight the percentage of colored blood, could be bought and sold, the relations between master and slave were notorious, and many a white father has sold his own son into slavery. There was no fear then of a corrupted race. Elevate the colored man and the colored woman, and you will increase their respect for themselves and for their race. 18 Then color will create a barrier far stronger than ever existed when the colored race were slaves. The more you lift a man above the level of the brute, the less likely is he to commit the crimes of a brute. Lead these people up. Do not crush them down. A few weeks ago in Virginia a man and woman were sen- tenced to eighteen years in prison for the crime of marrying each other. The man thought he was colored, and before slavery was abolished he was colored, since he had negro blood in his veins. If there had been no ceremony of marriage, there would have been no such imprisonment, but the effect on the race would have been the same. What must we say of a community where marriage is a crime and illicit intercourse a venial off ence ? A civilization such as this is hardly "a strength" or "a pride." There is only one remedy for the negro problem, and that is justice. The negro has the moral and the legal right to equal opportunities with ourselves. To deny these rights is flagrant injustice, and any injustice injures both the man who suffers and the man who does it, but the latter suffers most. Slavery cost the white man more than it ever cost the colored man in America. We can estimate the number of men who died in the Civil War, but we cannot estimate the loss to the country of the brains and character which perished with them, nor can we imagine even how much stronger and better their posterity might have made the nation, had they lived to rear families. We can count approximately the dollars that we spent and are still spending for war and its consequences, but no man can guess how much our civilization has lost through the legacy of hatred, bitterness, prejudice, and brutality which the war left behind it. "The bloody shirt" and the Ku-Klux Klan of the years that are gone, the lynchings, the burnings, the night- riders, the race problem of to-day, — these are the penalties which we have paid and are paying for two hundred and fifty years of cruel injustice. Do we want another such terrible lesson? For our own profit we made slaves of our fellow-men; but "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Cannot we learn from our bitter 19 experience how much injustice costs! Must we persist in try- ing to keep down the race which it is our duty and our interest to lift up! Does a dread of social equality excuse injustice! Society protects itself. Men of very different characters, tastes, asso- ciations and incomes live together in every community. Those associate together who like each other, whose tastes and ideas are the same. We all live near fellow-citizens who perhaps speak a different language and certainly lead very different lives from our own. We do not think it necessary to deny their legal rights or to keep them ignorant, lest they invade our houses and marry our daughters; and, unless the colored race is peculiarly attractive to the white, there is no reason why they should not live side by side, as all over our land men live side by side, enjoying the same rights and privileges, but never having social relations with each other or even knowing each other's names. White men and black men have so lived for years in almost every State of this Union. This is not a, problem for the Southern people alone. Under the Constitution as it was before the Civil War the slaveholders had absolute power over their slaves. The government of the United States was powerless to interfere, and then, if ever, slavery was a problem for the slave States. They dealt with the black man as they would, but the injustice which was done him brought death into hundreds of thousands of homes in States where slavery was unknown. The blood of Massachu- setts was spent as freely as the blood of South Carolina. The lesson which we learned then will never be forgotten. Shall we go to war with Spain to free Cuba and send a new army to pacify her when revolution threatens? Shall our President protest against injustice to the Jews in Russia, and are we not to care whether our own fellow-citizens are denied their rights and subjected to oppression in our own country, when the Constitution makes it the duty of the government to see that their rights are maintained ? We are too closely bound together, and under every form of government, whether we realize it or not, an injury to the poorest citizen is an injury 20 to the State. Night-riding in Kentucky spreads North and South; unpunished lynching in Mississippi makes every colored man's, nay, every white man's life in the country less secure. Springfield and other Northern cities learn the lesson easily, and the methods which are familiar in dealing with colored men are soon applied to white. The race problem concerns every man, woman, and child in the United States, and it cannot be left to men who announce their purpose to perpetuate injustice. We have only to look at California and Nevada to see how race prejudice in a State threatens our peace as a nation. We insist that American citizens must be admitted by China and Japan and be at liberty to travel or reside there at pleasure, we demand for our commerce "the open door," but two of our States undertake to keep Chinese and Japanese citizens out of their bounds, and to load them with insult and indig- nity. They are willing to involve this whole nation in war, perhaps, rather than receive them on any terms. A large majority of the world's inhabitants are colored, and we in our absurd conceit arrogate to every white man superiority over any colored man. Yet we are afraid to meet them on equal terms even where we are in an enormous majority. The basis of race prejudice is selfishness and fear. There are some seventy-one thousand Japanese in this country, and white Americans are afraid that these men may take the bread out of our mouths. There are some ten millions of negroes, and their white neighbors fear that, unless they are kept as hewers of wood and drawers of water, they will assert a social equality and intermarry to such an extent as to degrade our people. This is not the feeling of a superior race, but the cowardice of men who dare not treat their fellow-men justly lest they beat them in the race of life. It is a confession of in- feriority. Can a race of such superior intelligence as ours fail to see that we cannot with impunity deny their rights to our own colored fellow-citizens and insult the most powerful Asiatic nations at the same time, without sooner or later paying the 21 penalty? We cannot make men buy of us, and the loss of the Chinese and Japanese markets would be a great blow to our prosperity. The time will come to us, as it comes to every mortal, when we shall need friends. Are we wise in turning the friends we have into enemies? We thought the Japanese barbarous fifty years ago, because they did not admit us to their country. What are we now ? Not content with a race problem bequeathed to us by our ancestors at home, we set at naught the principles and counsels of Lincoln, and cross the ocean to make a new race problem for ourselves thousands of miles from our shores. We have conquered the Philippine Islands and are holding their inhabi- tants as our subjects outside the Constitution and against every principle which we have hitherto maintained. If Mr. Taft and Governor Smith are both right, our experiment can- not succeed. Mr. Taft in an address before the Union Reading College, Manila, on December 17, 1903, said: — "Were I assured that the present attitude of the major- ity of American merchants and the American press would be permanent, and if I did not confidently hope that there must be a great change in the future, I should be very much discouraged in respect to the result of the experi- ment which the United States is making in these islands. " A purely racial hatred is one of the most difficult things possible to overcome, and, if it is founded on permanent conditions, it is almost hopeless to look for its ceasing. But I am not discouraged, because I am sure that the next decade will change the conditions in the respects which I have described — changing them most radically." Half that decade is gone, yet Governor Smith in his annual message to the Philippine Assembly, February 1, 1909, deplores "the growing gulf between the Americans and the Filipinos in the Philippines." That it is growing is sure, and that it will continue to grow is equally sure. When men in their own land are treated as inferiors by a race of foreign invaders, 22 they cannot help hating the foreigners with a steadily grow- ing hatred, and, alas, there is no hope that Americans will soon admit that colored men are their equals. Let Lincoln state the argument by which our adventure is defended and the reply: — "Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow — what are these arguments? "They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving [the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were always of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people — not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. . . . Turn it in whatever way you will — whether it come from the mouth of a king, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race — it is all the same old serpent." "The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities.' Another bluntly calls them 'self-evident lies.' And others insidiously argue that they apply to 'superior races.' These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect — the supplanting the principles of free government and restor- ing those of classification, caste and legitimacy. . . . They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation, and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who denv freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it." Lincoln taught human equality and opposed a government 23 of men without their consent always and everywhere. If we really honor him, must we not respect his teachings and follow his example? We revere him for his great utterances. Are they not true? The source of the race problem is in our own race, and it is this which we must educate. If we reallv admire Lincoln, let us dare to adopt his principles. Let us look into our own hearts and cease to cherish any feeling that our neighbor of whatever color is below us. Men and races have various qualities. The captain of industry may have strength, judgment, and skill in making money, but in those qualities which are blessed in the Sermon on the Mount he may be distinctly inferior to many a humble workman in his employ. Let Lincoln speak: — "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'All men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'All men are created equal except negroes.' When the Know Nothings get control, it will read 'All men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catho- lics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy." This was in August, 1855, when the Know Nothing party had carried many States and its members were afraid that Catholics and foreigners threatened our safety. That foolish panic, that lamentable brutality, have passed. We no longer think that men whose religious opinions differ cannot live in peace side by side. The prejudice of color has taken its place, and it is just as childish and unreasonable. Now our version of the Declaration is, "All men are created equal except negroes, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese." We are still degenerate, and our troubles at home and abroad, our race problem, our Philippine difficulties, our difficulties with Japan and China, come because we are not true to our- selves, because we will not admit that all men are equal, but 24 instead deny that the same blood flows in the veins of "all the nations upon earth." Of all civilized peoples we, whose gov- ernment rests on human equality, cultivate the race prejudice most sedulously. Those to whom we deny equality represent the best of the colored races, the great nations of China and Japan, whose civilization is more ancient than our own, the Christian freedom-loving Filipinos, the best of the African race. Are we so blind as not to see what such a denial must cost us? Let every man who honors the memory of Lincoln prove that this honor is not mere lip-service, by resolving with him that the men who died at Gettysburg "shall not have died in vain"; and that the great principle that "all men are created equal" shall become in very truth the faith of all this great nation. Let us say with Charles Sumner: — "Show me a creature with lifted countenance looking to heaven made in the image of God, and I show you a man who, of whatever country or race, whether bronzed by equatorial sun or blanched by polar cold, is with you a child of the Heavenly Father and equal with you in all the rights of human nature." Thus and thus onlv can we fitlv honor Abraham Lincoln. W60 ■; V*CT I • O 5» », 0° * *