Now, Mr. President, can it be seriously maintained that we are terrorizing the people from whose willing hands comes every year $1,000,000,000 of farm crops?  Or have robbed a people who, twenty-five years from unrewarded slavery, have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of property?  Or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every day?  Or deceive them, when we are educating them to the utmost limit of our ability?  Or outlaw them, when we work side by side with them?  Or re-enslave them under legal forms, when for their benefit we have even imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of law?  My fellow-countrymen, as you yourselves may sometimes have to appeal at the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these incontestable facts.

But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and violence.  This I admit.  And there will be until there is one ideal community on earth after which we may pattern.  But how widely is it misjudged!  It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the negro.  His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude,—­these dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs.  This disposition, inflamed by prejudice and partisanry, has led to injustice and delusion.  Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an incident—­in the South, a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit of the community.  Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons and it scarcely arrests attention—­a chance collision in the South among relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one race is destroying the other.  We might as well claim that the Union was ungrateful to the colored soldier who followed its flag because a Grand Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran as for you to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or to accept exceptional grounds as the rule of our society.  I am not one of those who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either section, and belie American character by declaring them to be significant and representative.  I prefer to maintain that they are neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and sin of our poor fallen humanity.  If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its weakest part, I should despair of both sections.  But, knowing that society, sentient and responsible in every fiber, can mend and repair until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither.  These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia’s busy life as they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro!  And if they did, no one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish.  It is through them, and the men and women who think with them—­making nine-tenths of every Southern community—­that these two races have been carried thus far with less of violence than would have been possible anywhere else on earth.  And in their fairness and courage and steadfastness—­more than in all the laws that can be passed, or all the bayonets that can be mustered—­is the hope of our future.