A Senator of the United States from the South, whose hands have been dyed in the blood of his fellow citizens, and who holds his high office by fraud and usurpation, not long since declared that his State could very well dispense with her black population.  That population outnumbers the white three to one; and by the toil by which that State has been enriched, by the blood and the sweat of two hundred years which the soil of that State has absorbed, by the present production and consumption of wealth by that black population, we are amazed at the ignorance of the great man who has been placed in a “little brief authority.”  The black population cannot and will not be dispensed with; because it is so deeply rooted in the soil that it is a part of it—­the most valuable part.  And the time will come when it will hold its title to the land, by right of purchase, for a laborer is worthy of his hire, and is now free to invest that hire as it pleases him best.  Already some of the very best soil of that State is held by the people this great magnus in the Nation’s councils would supersede in their divine rights.

When the war closed, as I said, the great black population of the South was distinctively a laboring class.  It owned no lands, houses, banks, stores, or live stock, or other wealth.  Not only was it the distinctively laboring class but the distinctively pauper class.  It had neither money, intelligence nor morals with which to begin the hard struggle of life.  It was absolutely at the bottom of the social ladder.  It possessed nothing but health and muscle.

I have frequently contemplated with profound amazement the momentous mass of subjected human force, a force which had been educated by the lash and the bloodhound to despise labor, which was thrown upon itself by the wording of the Emancipation Proclamation and the surrender of Robert E. Lee.  Nothing in the history of mankind is at all comparable, an exact counterpart, in all particulars, to that great event.  A slavery of two hundred years had dwarfed the intelligence and morality of this people, and made them to look upon labor as the most baneful of all the curses a just God can inflict upon humankind; and they were turned loose upon the land, without a dollar in their hands, and, like the great Christ and the fowls of the air, without a place to lay their head.

And yet to-day, this people, who, only a few years ago, were bankrupts in morality, in intelligence, and in wealth, have leaped forward in the battle of progress like veterans; have built magnificent churches, with a membership of over two million souls; have preachers, learned and eloquent; have professors in colleges by the hundreds and schoolmasters by the thousands; have accumulated large landed interests in country, town and city; have established banking houses and railroads; manage large coal, grocery and merchant tailoring businesses; conduct with ability and success large and influential newspaper enterprises;