al kindness, trusting to the
future for our meed of gratitude.

"Giving equal political rights to all the inhabitants of the Southern
States will be their shortest way to quiet and to wealth. It will avert
what is else almost certain,--a war of races; since all experience shows
that the ballot introduces the very politest relations between the
higher and lower classes. If the right be restricted, let it be by
requirements of property and education, applying to all the population
equally.

"Meanwhile, we citizens and citizenesses of the North should remember
that Reconstruction means something more than setting things right in
the Southern States. We have saved our government and institutions, but
we have paid a fearful price for their salvation; and we ought to prove
now that they are worth the price.

"The empty chair, never to be filled,--the light gone out on its
candlestick, never on earth to be rekindled,--gallant souls that have
exhaled to heaven in slow torture and starvation,--the precious blood
that has drenched a hundred battle-fields,--all call to us with warning
voices, and tell us not to let such sacrifices be in vain. They call on
us by our clear understanding of the great principles of democratic
equality, for which our martyred brethren suffered and died, to show to
all the world that their death was no mean and useless waste, but a
glorious investment for the future of mankind.

"This war, these sufferings, these sacrifices, ought to make every
American man and woman look on himself and herself as belonging to a
royal priesthood, a peculiar people. The blood of our slain ought to be
a gulf, wide and deep as the Atlantic, dividing us from the opinions and
the practices of countries whose government and society are founded on
other and antagonistic ideas. Democratic republicanism has never yet
been perfectly worked out either in this or any other country. It is a
splendid edifice, half built, deformed by rude scaffolding, noisy with
the clink of trowels, blinding the eyes with the dust of lime, and
endangering our heads with falling brick. We make our way over heaps of
shavings and lumber to view the stately apartments,--we endanger our
necks in climbing ladders standing in the place of future staircases;
but let us not for all this cry out that the old rat-holed mansions of
former ages, with their mould, and moss, and cockroaches, are better
than this new palace. There is no lime-dust, no clink of tr