We should have had little difficulty in dealing with the Negro or the Indian, or the Oriental, if the American people had applied to them, as the Golden Rule requires, the principles they expect to apply and to have applied to themselves.

We have never understood that in some essential matters human nature is the same in men of all colors and races.

The difficult problems in our national politics at this hour will nearly all of them be solved if the people will adhere to rules of conduct imposed as restraints in the early constitutions.

The sublimity of the principle of self- government does not consist wholly or chiefly in the idea that self is the person who governs, but quite as much in the doctrine that self is the person who is governed.

How our race troubles would disappear if the dominant Saxon would but obey, in his treatment of the weaker races, the authority of the fundamental laws on which his own institutions rest!

The problem of to-day is not how to convert the heathen from heathenism, it is how to convert the Christian from heathenism; not to teach the physician to heal the patient, but to heal himself.

The Indian problem is not chiefly how to teach the Indian to be less savage in his treatment of the Saxon, but the Saxon to be less savage in his treatment of the Indian.

The Chinese problem is not how to keep Chinese laborers out of California, but how to keep Chinese politics out of Congress.

The negro question will be settled when the education of the white man is complete.

We easily forgive our own white fellow citizens for the unutterable and terrible cruelties they have committed on men of other races.

But if a people just coming out of slavery or barbarism commit a hundredth part of the same offence our righteous indignation knows no bounds.

We have no recognition for their eager desire for civilization or for liberty, no generous appreciation of their improvement and promise.

And the thousand things in them that give promise of good in the future are disregarded if there be any trace left in them of the old barbarism.

We must remember that the relations of the black and white races to each other, which have existed almost from the foundation of the world, cannot be changed in a single generation.

There are eleven States in which the negro is not yet secure in his political rights; and there are as many, and perhaps two or three more, in which if he be suspected of a crime of the first magnitude, he is likely to undergo a cruel…

It is a bad thing that any man who has the Constitutional right to vote should fail to have his vote received and counted.

My opinion is that as the colored man gets land, becomes chaste, frugal, temperate, industrious, veracious, that he will gradually acquire respect, and will attain political equality.

Evils, if they be evils, which have existed from the foundation of the world, are not to be cured in the lifetime of a single man.

The men of the day of reconstruction were controlled by the irresistible logic of events; by a power higher than their own.

I introduced a bill for establishing an education system by National authority in States which failed to do it themselves.

Later, I introduced and carried through the House a measure for distributing the proceeds of the public land and sums received from patents and some other special funds, among all the States in aid of the common schools.

I have been assured by many Southern men that that measure, and the report and speech in which I advocated it, had a very strong and wide influence in restoring good feeling toward the Union in the minds of the people of Virginia.

Let me just add a sentence more, to say that if Rebellion and Sectional Hate are to be eradicated-- and I hope they are--that is the way to do it.

With unaffected gratitude for your Speech, I pray you will not pause upon it, but keep the bill to its passage through both Houses of Congress.

He has fallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave.