apparition! This stern and unique figure, carved from the ocean and the wilderness, its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winters and of wars, until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base, while startled kings and emperors gazed and marveled that from the rude touch of this handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied genius of human government and the perfected model of human liberty! God bless the memory of those immortal workers and prosper the fortunes of their living sons and perpetuate the inspirations of their handiwork!

Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done everywhere, every word I then uttered, — to declare that the sentiments I then avowed were universally approved in the South, I realize that the confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that confidence by uttering one insincere word or by withholding one essential element of the truth.

Far to the south, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line, once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There is centered all that can please or prosper humankind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There by night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests, vast and primeval, and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries- cotton, iron, and wood that region has easy control; in cotton, a fixed monopoly; in iron, proven supremacy; in timber, the reserve supply of the republic. From this assured and

- not

permanent advantage, against which artificial conditions cannot much longer prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries. Not maintained by human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in divine assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest, set amid costly farms from which competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a limit, this system of industries is mounting to a splendor that shall dazzle and illumine the world.

That, sir, is the picture and the promise of my home a land better and fairer than I have told you, and yet but fit setting, in its material excellence, for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizenship. Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting the republic from its sturdy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers, and touching this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet, while in the El Dorado of which I have told you but 15 per cent of its lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched, and its population so scant that, were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could not be heard from Virginia to Texas; while on the threshold of nearly every house in New England stands a son, seeking with troubled eyes some new land to which to carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains that in 1880 the South had fewer Northern-born citizens than she had in 1870, fewer in '70 than in '60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the sectional line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North have crossed it over to the South than when it was crimson with the best blood of the republic, or even when the slaveholder stood guard every inch of the way?

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 fairer half of this republic and free the halted feet of thousands whose eyes are already kindled 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 at 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 upon 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 hereby 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 the American soil.

But the freed man 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 an inferior. The red man was owner of the land, the yellow man 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 privilege and prosperity. It matters not that wherever the whites and blacks have touched, in any era or any clime, there has been irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however similar, have lived anywhere at any time on the same soil with equal rights in peace. In spite of these things we are commanded to make good this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American prejudice, to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible between whites and blacks, and to reverse, under the very worst conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay, a rigor that accepts no excuse, and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity, we do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would-so bound up in our honorable obligation to the world that we would not if we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, he alone can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy, with less than the knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood, and that when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving hearts.

The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South, the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history, whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war, whose energy has made bricks without straw and spread splendor amid the ashes of their warwasted homes these men wear this problem in their hearts and

their brains by day and by night. They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means what they owe to this kindly and dependent race, the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth and their march encumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!

II. THE ISSUE

Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr. President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible, and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place, rightly to solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly disregard, guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and irresponsible of either race, compensating error with frankness and retrieving in patience what they lose in passion, and conscious all the time that wrong means ruin — admit this, and we may reach an understanding to-night.

I bespeak your patience, while with vigorous plainness of speech, seeking your judgment rather than your applause, I proceed step by step. We give to the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth $450,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses, and fruit. This enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and discontented labor. It comes from peaceful