Whitelaw Reid: “As a friend, I earnestly advise you to lay your foundations well in morality, industry, education, and, above all…”

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.

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