is man; natural right is sacred forever; and of politics the sole basis is universal justice.”  Joyfully it sang for a while, but soon there began to come up the clank of chains mingling with its chant, and the groans of oppressed men and violated women, and prayers to Heaven for another justice than this; and then the words of its chant grew bitter in the mouth of our nation, and a sickness came in its heart, and an evil blush mounted and stood on its brow; and at length a devil spoke in its bosom and said, “The negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect”; and ere the words were fairly uttered, their meaning, as was indeed inevitable, changed to this,—­“A Northern ‘mudsill’ has no rights that a Southern gentleman is bound to respect”; and soon guns were heard booming about Sumter, and a new chapter in our history and in the world’s history began.

Our nation refused allegiance to its own principles, refused to pay the lawful costs of its virtue and nobility; therefore it is sued in the courts of destiny, and the case is this day on trial.

The case is plain, the logic clear.  Natural right is sacred, or it is not.  If it is, the negro is lawfully free; if it is not, you may be lawfully a slave.  Just how all this stands in the Constitution of the United States I do not presume to say.  Other heads, whose business it is, must attend to that.  Every man to his vocation.  I speak from the stand-point of philosophy, not of politics; I attend to the logic of history, the logic of destiny, according to which, of course, final judgment will be rendered.  It is not exactly to be supposed that the statute of any nation makes grass green, or establishes the relationship between cause and effect.  The laws of the world are considerably older than our calendar, and therefore date yet more considerably beyond the year 1789.  And by the laws of the world, by the eternal relationship between cause and effect, it stands enacted beyond repeal, and graven upon somewhat more durable than marble or brass, that the destiny of this nation for more than one century to come hinges upon its justice to that outcast race,—­outcast, but not henceforth to be cast out by us, save to the utter casting down of ourselves.  Once it might have been otherwise; now we have made it so.  Justice to the African is salvation to the white man upon this continent.  Oh, my America, you must not, cannot, shall not be blind to this fact!  America, deeper in my love and higher in my esteem than ever before, newly illustrated in worth, newly proven to be capable still, in some directions, of exceeding magnanimity, open your eyes that your feet may have guidance, now when there is such need!  Open your eyes to see, that, if you deliberately deny justice and human recognition to one innocent soul in all your borders, you stab at your own existence; for, in violating the unity of humanity, you break the principle that makes you a nation and alive.  Give justice to black and white, recognize man as man; or the constituting idea, the vital faith, the crystallizing principle of the nation perishes, and the whole disintegrates, falls into dust.