Whitelaw Reid: “If any system could fail to make brutish men more brutish, surely it would not be this one!”

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

Let me repeat, that I think it best for all men—white men, black men, and brown men, if you make that distinction, that all men of proper age and unconvicted of crime, should have the right of suffrage.

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

Ordinarily the simple performance of duty is so blessed of God, that men who live in the doing of it, are the best off, in all respects, even in this world.