The truth of all this has been brought under suspicion by the flatulent oratory of our Fourth-of-Julys; but truth it remains.  Our nation did enunciate a grand idea never equally felt by any other.  Our nation has said, and said with the sword in its right hand, “Every man born into this world has the right from God to make the most and best of his existence, and society is established only to further and guard this sacred right.”  We thus established a new scale of justice; we raised a demand for the individual which had not been so made before.  Freedom and order were made one; both were identified with justice, simple, broad, equal, universal justice.  The American idea, then, what is it? The identification of politics with justice, this it is.  With justice, and this, too, not on a scale of conventional usage, but on the scale of natural right.  That, as I read, is the American idea,—­making politics moral by their unity with natural justice, justice world-old and world-wide.

This conception—­obscurely seen and felt, and mixed with the inevitable amount of folly and self-seeking, yet, after, all, this conception—­our nation dared to stand up and announce, and to consecrate it by the shedding of blood, calling God and all good men to witness.  The deed was grand; the hearts of men everywhere were more or less its accomplices; all the tides of history ran in its favor; kings, forgetting themselves into virtue and generosity, lent it good wishes or even good arms; it was successful; and on its primary success waited such prosperities as the world has seldom seen.

But, because the deed was noble, great costs must needs attend it, attend it long.  And first of all the cost of applying our principle within our own borders.  For, when a place had been obtained for us among nations, we looked down, and, lo! at our feet the African—­in chains.  A benighted and submissive race, down-trodden and despised from of old, a race of outcasts, of Pariahs, covered with the shame of servitude, and held by the claim of that terrible talisman, the word property,—­here it crouched at our feet, lifting its hands, imploring.  Yes, America, here is your task now; never flinch nor hesitate, never begin to question now; thrust your right hand deep into your heart’s treasury, bring forth its costliest, purest justice, and lay its immeasurable bounty into this sable palm, bind its blessing on this degraded brow.  Ah, but America did falter and question.  “How can I?” it said.  “This is a Negro, a Negro!  Besides, he is PROPERTY!” And so America looked up, determined to ignore the kneeling form.  With pious blasphemy it said, “He is here providentially; God in His own good time will dispose of him”; as if God’s hour for a good effect were not the earliest hour at which courage and labor can bring it about, not the latest to which indolence and infidelity can postpone it.  Then it looked away across oceans to other continents, and began again the chant, “Man