religiously, or politically, to assert them?  It is true, we have hitherto acted in defiance of these acknowledged rights.  We have outraged them.  We have waged a shameful and shameless warfare against them.  The sequences of that warfare are now upon us.  The sin is now being atoned for in blood.  It has not yet been ordained that the principles of injustice should have permanent duration.  If not restrained by humane rationality, they will culminate in convulsion.  The light is now breaking upon the heretofore obscured vision of the American people.  We can now begin to see with clearness that the colored man’s disenthrallment is to become the white man’s future security.  This would almost seem to be the harmony of divine justice in the affairs of men.

No substantial amelioration in the depressed condition of race or class has yet been brought about in disconnection with the powerful agency of such race or class.  Human nature forbids it.  The selfish tenacity of advantage, resting on what is misnamed ‘vested rights,’ but having its foundation in vested wrongs, yields only on compulsion.  It is only when the depressed race or class, acting in somewhat intelligent concert, exhibits the disposition to aid in the purposes of protection, that the mercenary power succumbs to necessity.  History furnishes no examples to the contrary.  It may not be impossible that our own times may make history to corroborate the truth of these premises.

When it is asserted that the colored man is wanting in bravery, and is not endowed with the natural courage to assert and maintain his rights, we are apt to forget that physical bravery is a thing of cultivation.  There is not the least evidence that, with military discipline and something to fight for, the colored population of the United States would not prove as brave as the black regiment of the Revolution.  With such bravery as that regiment exhibited, the four millions and their prospective increase would require a gigantic force to make profitable slaves of them.  Again, there is something beyond the protection from domestic violence that demands consideration, in connection with the military discipline of the colored man.  We may reasonably expect that a large colonization in some quarter will soon take place, and be carried forward.  Education and military discipline, in addition to knowledge in practical industry, are necessary concomitants to successful colonization.  With these qualities, the colored man will cease to feel helpless, and be fitted for enterprise, he will have the confidence to go forward, and the aspirations to impel him.  It may be the lot of the colored man to encounter in some foreign land powers and influences quite as barbarous as those he has hitherto encountered in the white man’s prejudices.  If he is armed for the encounter, he will have little inclination to shrink from it.  Every humane consideration clusters to the policy of disenthralling the colored man, and of making him a being of power.  Nothing can oppose it but the pro-slavery spirit that seeks to enslave the American mind to barbarism and the colored millions and their increase to perpetual bondage.