to build up the living reality of what they conceived and
uttered.

It is not our mission to criticise the past. Nations, like
individuals, must blunder and repent. It is not wise to waste one
energy in vain regret, but from each failure rise up with renewed
conscience and courage for nobler action. The follies and faults
of yesterday we cast aside as the old garments we have outgrown.
Born anew to freedom, slave creeds and codes and constitutions
must now all pass away. "For men do not put new wine into old
bottles, else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and
the bottles perish; but they put new wine into new bottles, and
both are preserved."

Our special thanks are due to you, that by your Proclamation two
millions of women are freed from the foulest bondage humanity
ever suffered. Slavery for man is bad enough, but the refinements
of cruelty must ever fall on the mothers of the oppressed race,
defrauded of all the rights of the family relation, and violated
in the most holy instincts of their nature. A mother's life is
bound up in that of her child. There center all her hopes and
ambition. But the slave-mother, in her degradation, rejoices not
in the future promise of her daughter, for she knows by
experience what her sad fate must be. No pen can describe the
unutterable agony of that mother whose past, present, and future
are all wrapped in darkness; who knows the crown of thorns she
wears must press her daughter's brow; who knows that the
wine-press she now treads, unwatched, those tender feet must
tread alone. For, by the law of slavery, "the child follows the
condition of the mother."

By your act, the family, that great conservator of national
virtue and strength, has been restored to millions of humble
homes, around whose altars coming generations shall magnify and
bless the name of Abraham Lincoln. By a mere stroke of the pen
you have emancipated millions from a condition of wholesale
concubinage. We now ask you to finish the work by declaring that
nowhere under our national flag shall the motherhood of any race
plead in vain for justice and protection. So long as one slave
breathes in this Republic, we drag the chain with him. God has so
linked the race, man to man, that all must rise or fall together.
Our