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.
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