Where the African race is enslaved or degraded, where it is exposed to any indignity or shut out from that equality which is a primal right to humanity, there civilization is still feeble.

It is sure to come; and one sign of its arrival will be that prevailing sentiment which recognizes the perpetual obligations of equal justice to all, and the duty to repair past wrongs by compensations in the future.

In the great debt of the whites to the blacks there is a bank from which, for generations to come, the latter can draw.

What fame so great as his, if he would devote the just influence of his lofty position to securing for nations the inappreciable benefits of a tribunal for the settlement of their differences!

There is no question so supremely practical; for it concerns not merely one nation, but every nation; and even its discussion promises to diminish the terrible chances of war.

Its triumph would be the greatest reform of history.

Health itself is valuable only as it enables us to perform the duties of life, and I know no present duty more commanding than that to which you refer.

I confess a true pleasure in learning that the colored people are at last rising to take the good cause into their own hands, because through them its triumph is certain.

Only in this way can indifference, which is worse even than the stubbornness of opposition, be overcome.

It is hard to deal with that dulness which feels no throb at the thought of opening to all complete equality in the pursuit of happiness.

In the warfare for Equal Rights you are the advance guard, sometimes the forlorn hope.

You are animated to move forward, not only for your own immediate good, but because through you the whole colored population of the country will be benefited.

What is secured for you will be secured for all,--while, if you fail, there is small hope elsewhere.

Do not forget--and let this thought arouse to increased exertion--that your triumph will redound to the good of all.

Emancipation, colored suffrage, the right of colored persons to testify, and the right to ride in the street-cars,--all these began here, and I remember well how they were all encountered.

Emancipation took place, and not a voice or sound was heard except of peace and gladness.

I was soberly assured by eminent politicians, that if colored persons were allowed to vote there would be massacre at the polls.

But all these changes, demanded by simple justice, have been in every way beneficent.

Who would drive the colored citizen from the polls?

And now the old objections are revived, and made to do service again, in order to defeat the effort for common schools,--being schools founded on the very principle of Equal Rights recognized in the elective franchise, in the court-room…

If this principle is just for all the latter,--and nobody says the contrary now,--why hesitate to apply it in education?

Why, then, compel him in those tender years to bear the ban of exclusion?

Why, at that early period, when impressions are received for life, impose upon him the badge of inferiority?

He is to be a man; therefore he must be trained to that self-respect without which there can be no true manhood.

But this can be only by removing all ban of exclusion, and every badge of inferiority from color.