of the slave trade.  So general was the conviction, the public determination, to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808.  A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war.  Now if slavery had been a good thing, would the fathers of the republic have taken a step calculated to diminish its beneficent influences among themselves, and snatch the boon wholly from their posterity?  These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe.  This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures.  Yes, gentlemen, to all his creatures, to the whole great family of man.  In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.  They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity.  They erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.  Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back.  Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the revolution.  Think nothing of me—­take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—­but come