A GLANCE AT THE PAST ANDPRESENT OF THE NEGRO

A GLANCE AT THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE NEGRO.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen

Two events in the history of our country take a foremost place among the great deeds of the world. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is one, and the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation is the other. In political importance both are unrivaled, and in moral grandeur both unsurpassed. The courage and patriotism of the men who wrote their names on the immortal document that brought on the Revolutionary War will always occupy as bright a page in the annals of our country as the prowess and fierce determination of the heroes who fought its battles on the field. When Abraham Lincoln, of blessed memory, signed the sacred document that gave to the Negro his freedom, he not only immortalized himself, but performed a deed that will live in history as long as the great military engagements of the Civil War. When with the stroke of his pen he broke the chains of four millions of human beings, he crowned his career with a halo of glory that will grow brighter and brighter to the end of time.

The signing of the Declaration of Independence brought on the war which culminated in victory for an oppressed people and in the establishment of our republican form of government. When the Colonial soldier returned to his fireside and laid down his implements of battle he found awaiting him a political system so moulded and vitalized that it secured to him his liberty and those rights which tend to dignify man. The ultimate results of the Revolutionary War were all that the patriots of 1776 had fought for, all that they had hoped for. They are today a blessed inheritance to their descendants. The American Republic is now in the front ranks of great nations, and her white population the first in freedom of all people on earth.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a document far greater in its moral purpose than the Declaration of Independence, for there was in it more humanity and more Christianity. The Colonial fathers declared that all men are created equal—a beautifully wrought truth which meant everything for one part of the population but nothing for another part which was held in a cruel slavery. The historic paper which Lincoln gave to the world nearly a hundred years later abolished that slavery. It has not, however, fulfilled the wishes, the hopes, and the final expectations of those who pleaded so eloquently for the 

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