There can be but one answer.  It is the very problem we are now to consider.  The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty.  Better than this, it will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt.  Nothing, sir, but this problem and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear understanding and a perfect union.  Nothing else stands between us and such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices of Manassas and Gettysburg, and illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon’s mouth.

If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night—­hear one thing more.  My people, your brothers in the South—­brothers in blood, in destiny, in all that is best in our past and future—­are so beset with this problem that their very existence depends on its right solution.  Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence.  The slave-ships of the Republic sailed from your ports, the slaves worked in our fields.  You will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution.  But I do here declare that in its wise and humane administration in lifting the slave to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom, our fathers left their sons a saving and excellent heritage.  In the storm of war this institution was lost.  I thank God as heartily as you do that human slavery is gone forever from American soil.  But the freedman remains.  With him, a problem without precedent or parallel.  Note its appalling conditions.  Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil—­with equal political and civil rights—­almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility—­each pledged against fusion—­one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last by a desolating war, the experiment sought by neither but approached by both with doubt—­these are the conditions.  Under these, adverse at every point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to the end.

Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship.  Never before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an alien race.  The red man was cut down as a weed because he hindered the way of the American citizen.  The yellow man was shut out of this Republic because he is an alien, and inferior.  The red man was owner of the land—­the yellow man was highly civilized and assimilable—­but they hindered both sections and are gone!  But the black man, affecting but one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any cost, his full and equal heirship of American