oldiers who seized their muskets and went to the front and fought
for us, and with us, in those dark days of 1864, when the draft was
failing and when volunteering had failed, that there might be soldiers
to stand in the front and to dig in the trenches, and of whom eighty
thousand gave their lives for us. There was manhood in those cabins in
which all over the South, our fleeing soldiers, escaping from prison,
never failed to find support, help, and guidance. Oh! how disastrous a
business it is that that manhood, which all those years of slavery could
not extinguish, should now be extinguished by the priests of a proud,
arrogant, and selfish aristocracy.

But, my friends, as we felt in those days, and feel to-night, there is
still no help for us but in the Christian solution of this problem and
in the Christian destiny God has given to us. Liberty and faith, the two
elements, must be conjoined. For us to deny the rights of the Negro now
is to say that God did not make man in his image. It is to say that
liberty is not a sacred right, but a selfish acquisition; that
government does not exist to establish rights, but to protect
privileges, and that mankind are not brothers, but foes. It is to turn
the shadow upon the dial of human progress backward toward the ages of
oppression and chaos.

And just there is the problem that confronts us, South and North
together. What shall be done in this dire extremity? I remember years
ago hearing of a fire in Charleston in which that beautiful spire of St.
Michael's took fire and some one had to be found to go up beyond the
reach of the hose to put out the flame kindling and flickering there. No
one was found until a Negro stepped forth and climbed that tower, taking
his life in his hands, and put out that flame. And when he came down
again, one man said, "Name your reward," and he replied, "Let me but be
counted a man." And that we have got to do, or God will shake down our
civilization and our Nation as he shook down that spire of St. Michael's
in the earthquake three years ago. It is certain to come unless we
follow the line of God's appointing that this must be a free Nation,
absolutely free, free everywhere. As yet, emancipation is but an outward
and formal thing. What we wait for now, is the emancipation of a true
and an elevated will in the South, and Christian citizenship. Into that,
this Association pours its strength, its money, and its life. It took
half a million lives t