Whitelaw Reid: “He utterly refused to believe that free negroes could be self-supporting.”

It is my firm conviction, that suffrage is not only the best security for freedom, but the most potent agent of amelioration and civilization.

Our national experience has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on the broad base of universal suffrage.

It has proved, also, that universal suffrage is the surest guarantee and most powerful stimulus of individual, social and political progress.

They should persist in this claim respectfully, but firmly, taking care to bring no discredit upon it by their own action.