“ Upon this day which commemorates the emancipation of the black and the larger freedom of the white race, the redemption of the state and the birth of a new nation, I would bring to you a message not of blackness and despair but of hope—hope triumphant, hope, that Watts has pictured as blind with one string to her lyre, that sees not the star just ahead, but sits supreme at the top of the world. ”

“ To-day is the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the preserver of the Union, the liberator of a race. [410] "The mystic chords of memory," stretching from heart to heart of millions of Americans at this hour, "swell the chorus of thanksgiving" to the Almighty for the life, character, and service of the great President.
Four brief, crucial years he represented the soul of the Union struggling for immortality—for perpetuity; in him was the spirit of liberty struggling for a new birth among the children of men.
"Slavery must die," he said, "that the Union may live." ”

“ Our greatest danger is, that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. ”

“ It is beautiful to defend those who can not defend themselves, to lift up the weak, to succor those who are ready to perish. It is heroic, divine, when the doing so involves peril and sacrifice of self. It is the essence of the Gospel preached and lived by one who spoke and lived as never man spoke and lived. It is simple and undefiled Christianity. Nothing avails to make Senator or President or people Christian but just this one thing—not race or color or creed, not learning and wealth and civilization—but kindness to God's poor, to Christ's little ones. ”

“ If American citizenship contains a hope and promise, a wealth, a blessing, and a content, aye! and immortality and just renown, it lives to-day in hearts, and not in stones; it lives in feelings and not in lands; it resides in aspirations and not in coffers, it lives in ideals and not in vaunt and splendor.
It is yours to fulfill its duties; to meet well its responsibilities; it is what your fathers builded out of heart and soul, out of love, compassion, and generous fellowship, and not out of blood and brawn; it is humanity's own ”

“ All honor to Abraham Lincoln, the performer, not the preacher; the friend of humanity, the friend of the North, the friend of the South, the friend of the white man, the friend of the black man; the man whose heart, like the Christ's, was large enough to bring within the range of its sensibilities every human being beneath the stars. The man who, when God's clock struck the hour, swung back on its creaking hinges the door of opportunity that the slaves might walk over its portals into the army and into new fields of usefulness in civil life. ”

“ And when we look at all the magnificent fabric we call civilization, its incalculable material, its wealth, its amazing mechanical resources, its wonderful scientific discoveries, its many-sided literature, its sleepless and ubiquitous journalism, its lovely art, its abounding charities, its awful fears and sublime hopes, we get a magnificent conception of the possibilities of life, as this latest of the centuries draws its purple robe about its majestic form and stands up to die as the old Roman Cæsar stood, in all the magnificence of its riches, and the plenitude of its power. ”

“ Yet, almost single-handed and alone, Garrison continued to fight on, declaring that "his reliance for [310] the deliverance of the oppressed universally is upon the nature of man, the inherent wrongfulness of oppression, the power of truth, and the omnipotence of God." After the greatest civil war that ever immersed a nation in a baptism of blood and tears, Garrison, unlike most reformers, lived to see the triumph of the cause for which he fought and every slave not only acknowledged as a free man, but clothed with the dignity and powers of American citizenship. ”

“ Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! ”

“ I see a great country tenanted by untold millions of happy, healthy human beings; men of every race that God has made out of one blood to inherit the earth, a great human family, governed by righteousness and justice, not by greed and fear—in which peace and happiness shall reign supreme.
Men more and more are beginning to realize that the common origin and destiny of the human race give to each species the right to occupy the earth in peace, prosperity, and plenty, and that the duty of each race is to promote the happiness of all. ”

“ In the democracy of death all are equal. Then men, my brothers, our duty is to make life in human society the same great democracy of equality of rights, of privileges, of opportunities, for all the children of men. There is nothing else worth while.
God grant to the American people this larger view of humanity, this greater conception of human duty. In a movement for democracy, for social and industrial justice, for the complete Emancipation of the Negro from the disabilities of color, Massachusetts must now, as in the past, point the way. ”

“ Is our poverty the barrier that divides us from a closer fellowship with our white brethren? Would wealth cure all the evils of our condition, and give us the cordial recognition we ask from them? If so, we can remove even this barrier. Our labor has already created much of the wealth of the South, and it only needs intelligence to turn it into our own coffers and make it the possession of our own people. Among the whites money seems to be the sesame that opens the doors to social recognition, and converts the shoddy into a man of influence and rank. ”

“ The injustice that leans upon the arm of oppression for support must fall; truth perverted or suppressed gains in momentum while it waits; generations may perish, but humanity will survive; out of the present conflict of opinion and the differences of race and color that divide, once the tides of immigration have ceased to flow to our shores, this nation will evolve a people who shall be one in purpose, one in spirit, one in destiny—a composite American by the co-mingling of blood. ”

“ Your education, your observation, your occupation, have brought you into close touch and into personal and vital relations with the fundamental problems of life. We may call it the truth problem, the labor problem, the Indian problem, or perhaps the Negro problem. I like to call it the "Human Race Problem."
The dawn of history breaks upon a world at strife, a universal conflict of man at war with his brother. The very face of the earth has been dyed in blood and its surface whitened with human bones in an endeavor to establish a harmonious and helpful adjustment between man and man. ”

“ Slavery preys upon man, and man only. A brute cannot be made a slave. Why? Because a brute has not reason, faith, nor an undying spirit, nor conscience. It does not look forward to the future with joy or fear, nor reflect upon the past with satisfaction or regret. But who in this vast assembly, who in all this broad land, will say that the poorest and most unhappy brother in chains and servitude has not every one of these high endowments? ”

“ If some man would ask me the one act on the part of my own race that gives to me the greatest hope for the Negro's ultimate elevation to the heights of civilization and culture, I would not revel in ancient lore to prove them the pioneers in civilization, nor would I point to their marvelous progress since Emancipation that has surprised their most sanguine friends, but I would take the single idea of their unquestioned acceptance of the dogmas and tenets of the Christian religion as promulgated by the Anglo-Saxon, as the highest evidence of the future possibilities of the race. ”

“ We claim for ourselves no superior devotion to the character, history, and memory of the illustrious name whose monument we have here dedicated to-day. We fully comprehend the relations of Abraham Lincoln, both to ourselves and to the white people of the United States. Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades—the silent continents of eternity. ”

“ You will then behold the race of men as I have beheld them once when my single soul seemed with sympathy winged and I sat with the lowly outcast and felt his outrage and his shame; I brooded with him over all his wrongs; I felt within my breast the poison shaft of hate, and clinched like him my fist, scowled, and vengeance swore on them who drove my despair and misery to crime by scoff and rancor and unforgiving hate. ”

“ To all such we can only render the tribute which history accords to those who fight as privates in the battles of human progress, with all the more devotion and fidelity because their names will never be known. Whenever a man earns the respect of the community in which he resides, some part of that respect, some breath of that fragrance is reflected upon the race of which he is a member. ”

“ Five centuries of heroic strife against oppression had sanctified the name of Liberty. They were mad with the hatred of tyranny, and centuries of bitter, heart-rending experience had made them wise and valorous for the fray. Liberty is now about to win on Saxon soil, but not there alone, for those of her yeomanry, who were hardiest for the fight and cherished the broadest liberty, transplanted themselves now upon this new soil of America and laid the foundation of a new Empire, which then and forever should be untrammeled by the conservation of princes and unabashed by the sneers of monarchs. ”