The people of this country have been made fabulously affluent by legalized robbery of the black man; the coffers of the National Government have overflowed into the channels of subsidy and peculation, enriching sharpers and thieves, with the earnings of slave labor; while nineteen out of every twenty landowners in the South obtained their unjust hold upon the soil by robbing the black man.

When the rebellion at last closed, the white people of the South were poor in gold but rich indeed in lands, while the black man was poor in everything, even in manhood, not because of any neglect or improvidence on his part, but because, though he labored from the rising to the setting of the sun, he received absolutely nothing for his labor, often being denied adequate food to sustain his physical man and clothing to protect him from the rude inclemency of the weather.

He was a bankrupt in purse because the _government_ had robbed him; he was a bankrupt in character, in all the elements of a successful manhood, because the _government_ had placed a premium upon illiteracy and immorality.

It was not the individual slave-owner who held the black man in chains; it was the _government_; for, the government having permitted slavery to exist, the institution vanished the instant the government declared that it should no longer exist! I therefore maintain that the people of this Nation who enslaved the black man, who robbed him of more than a hundred years of toil, who perverted his moral nature, and all but extinguished in him the Divine spark of intelligence, are morally bound to do all that is in their power to build up his shattered manhood, to put him on his feet, as it were, to fit him to enjoy the freedom thrust upon him so unceremoniously, and to exercise with loyalty and patriotism the ballot placed in his hands--the ballot, in which is wrapped up the destiny of republican government, the perpetuity of democratic institutions.

It is the proper function of government to see to it that its citizens are properly prepared to exercise wisely the liberties placed in their keeping.