s and resolutions
and acts of the early fathers, a form of slavery grew up here, but it
was milder than the English villeinage: it resembled apprenticeship
except in the duration. The slave had many of the rights of free men;
the right to marry and the right to testify in court. Either with the
decision of Somerset's case in England or the adoption of the first
Constitution of the Commonwealth, during the Revolution, that
institution passed away forever. The voices of freedom were first raised
here. Whittier, Lowell, and Longfellow sang the songs of Emancipation.
Garrison, Phillips, and Parker were the prophets and disciples of
Lincoln. In the darkest days of slavery, John Quincy Adams held aloft
the torch of liberty and fed its flame with his own intrepid spirit.
Sumner was the scourge of God, the conscience of the state incarnate.

The people of Massachusetts were not only idealists, dreamers, and
molders of public opinion, but when thirty years of agitation had
reached its culmination in the Civil War, Massachusetts sent 150,000 of
her sons to sustain upon the battle-fields of the Republic the ideals
which she had advocated in the Halls of Congress, in the forum and the
market-place. The people of Massachusetts, true to their history and
traditions, have abolished here, so far as laws can do so, every
discrimination between race and color, and every inequality between man
and man.

I have recalled these things for no vainglorious purpose. We should
remind ourselves constantly that we have a history behind us, that we
have a character to sustain. Are we of this generation worthy
descendants of tea spillers and abolitionists? Are we living up to the
traditions of the Commonwealth, to the principles of the fathers in
relation to the treatment of citizens of color? I have observed with
aching heart and agonizing spirit during the last twenty years not only
the growing coldness and indifference on the part of our people to the
fate of the Negro elsewhere; but here in our own city the breaking up of
the old ties of friendship that once existed between people of color and
all classes of citizens, just after Emancipation; the gradual falling
away of that sympathy and support upon which we could always confidently
rely in every crisis. I have watched the spirit of race prejudice raise
its sinister shape in the labor market, in the business house, the
real-estate exchange, in public places, and even in our schools,
colleges,