en upon somewhat more durable than marble or
brass, that the destiny of this nation for more than one century to
come hinges upon its justice to that outcast race,--outcast, but not
henceforth to be cast out by us, save to the utter casting down of
ourselves. Once it might have been otherwise; now we have made it
so. Justice to the African is salvation to the white man upon this
continent. Oh, my America, you must not, cannot, shall not be blind
to this fact! America, deeper in my love and higher in my esteem than
ever before, newly illustrated in worth, newly proven to be capable
still, in some directions, of exceeding magnanimity, open your eyes
that your feet may have guidance, now when there is such need! Open
your eyes to see, that, if you deliberately deny justice and human
recognition to one innocent soul in all your borders, you stab at your
own existence; for, in violating the unity of humanity, you break the
principle that makes you a nation and alive. Give justice to black
and white, recognize man as man; or the constituting idea, the vital
faith, the crystallizing principle of the nation perishes, and the
whole disintegrates, falls into dust.

I invite the attention of conservative men to the fact that in this
due paying of costs lies the true conservation. I invite them to
observe, that, as every living body has a principle which makes it
alive, makes it a unit, harmonizing the action of its members,--as
every crystal has a unitary law, which commands the arrangement of its
particles, the number and arrangement of its faces and angles,--so
it is with every orderly or living state. To this also there is a
central, clarifying, unifying faith. Without this you may collect
hordes into the brief, brutal empire of a Chingis Khan or Tamerlane;
but you can have no firm, free, orderly, inspiring national life.

Whenever and wherever in history this central condition of national
existence has been destroyed, there a nation has fallen into chaos,
into imbecility, losing all power to produce genius, to generate able
souls, to sustain the trust of men in each other, or to support any of
the conditions of social health and order. Even advances in the right
line of progress have to be made slowly, gradually, lest the shock of
newness be too great, and break off a people from the traditions in
which its faith is embodied; but a mere recoil, a mere denial and
destruction of its centralizing principle, is the last and utmos