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and was the beginning of the end to both. It placed the National dignity and the National power on the side of emancipation. It was the first step toward a redeemed and regenerated nation. It imparted a moral and human significance to what at first seemed to the outside world, only a sanguinary war for empire.

This great step in National progress, was not taken without a violent struggle in Congress. It required a large share of moral courage, large faith in the power of truth, and confidence in the enlightenment and loyalty of the people, to support this radical measure.

I need not tell you it was bitterly opposed on various grounds by the Democratic members of Congress. To them it was a measure of flagrant bad faith with the slaveholders of the District ; and calculated to alienate the border States, and drive them completely into the Confederate States, and make the restoration of the Union impossible. There was much more force in such arguments then than now. The situation was critical. The rebellion was in the fullness of its strength, bold, defiant, victorious, and confident of ultimate success. The great man on horseback had not then become visible along the Western horizon. Sherman had not begun his triumphant march to the sea. But there were moral and intellectual giants in the councils of the Nation at that time. We saw in the Senate Chamber the towering form of the lamented Sumner, the earnest and practical Henry Wilson, the honest and courageous Benjamin F. Wade, the strong and fearless Zachary Chandler-the man who took the unsuccessful General from the head of the Army of the Potomac. In the House we had an array of brilliant men such as Thaddeus Stevens, Owen Lovejoy and A. G. Riddle, the first to advocate in Congress the arming of the Negro in defence of the Union. There, too, was Thomas D. Elliot, Henry Winter Davis, William D. Kelley, Roscoe Conkling, than whom there has appeared in the Senate of the nation no patriot more pure, no orator more brilliant, no friend to liberty and progress more sincere. I speak all the more freely of him since he is now out of politics and in some sense under the shadow of defeat. I cannot forget that these brave men, and others just as worthy of mention, fully comprehended the demands of the hour, and had the courage and the sagacity to meet those demands. They saw that slavery was the root, the sap, the motive, and mainspring of the rebellion, and that the way to kill the rebellion was to destroy its cause.

Among the great names which should never be forgotten on occasions like this, there is one which should never be spoken but with reverence, gratitude and affection, the one man of all the millions of our countrymen to whom we are more indebted for a United Nation and for American liberty than

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to any other, and that name is Abraham Lincoln, the greatest statesman that ever presided over the destinies of this Republic. The time is too short, his term of office is too recent to permit or to require extended notice of his statesmanship, or of his moral and mental qualities. We all know Abraham Lincoln by heart. In looking back to the many great men of twenty years ago, we find him the tallest figure of them all. His mission was to close up a chasm opened by and earthquake, and he did it. It was his to call back a bleeding, dying and dismembered nation to life, and he did it. It was his to free his country from the crime, curse and disgrace of slavery, and to lift millions to the plane of humanity, and he did it. Never was statesman surrounded by greater difficulties, and never were difficulties more ably, wisely and firmly met. Friends and fellow-citizens, in conclusion I return to the point from which I started, namely : What is to be the future of the colored people of this country? Some change in their condition seems to be looked for by thoughtful men everywhere ; but what that change will be, no one yet has been able with certainty to predict.

Three different solutions to this difficult problem have been given and adopted by different classes of the American people. 1. Colonization in Africa ; 2. Extinction through poverty, disease and death ; 3. Assimilation and unification with the great body of the American people.

Plainly it is a matter about which no man can be very positive. In scanning the social sky he may fall into mistakes as great as those which vexed the souls of Wiggins and Vennor and other weather prophets. Appearances are deceptive. No man can see the end from the beginning.

It is, however, consoling to think that this limitation upon human foresight has helped us in the past and may help us in the future. Could William the Silent have foreseen the misery and ruin he would bring upon his country by taking up the sword against the Spanish Inquisition, he might have thought the sacrifice too great. Had William Lloyd Garrison foreseen that he would be hated, persecuted, mobbed, imprisoned, and drawn through the streets of his beloved Boston with a halter about his neck, even his courage might have quailed, and the native hue of his resolution been sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Could Abraham Lincoln have foreseen the immense cost, the terrible hardship, the awful waste of blood and treasure involved in the effort to retake and repossess the forts and arsenals and other property captured by the Confederate States; could he have foreseen the tears of the widows and orphans, and his own warm blood trickling at the bidding of an assassin's bullet, he might have thought the sacrifice too great.

In every great movement men are prepared by preceding