20 evil passions ; it exempts one from the necessity of treating as men these individuals encamped on the soil which they are unworthy long to inhabit, and necessarily condemned to quit by their race. It is convenient to cite Liberia, and to preach future colonization in such a manner as to quiet one’s conscience, and to throw off all constraint; we wait for the opportunity to be beneficent, and are exempted meanwhile from the necessity of being just. This path once entered upon, there is an end to all progress. And how can you expect the negroes to progress ? They would gladly lend the ear to the virile counsels, Mr. President, which you addressed to them of late ; they would gladly walk in that path of labor and good conduct through which “ blacks become whites,” but what would be the use ? The future offered to them w’ould be exile I Their race would be proscribed in advance ! They would be loaded with contempt and loathing ! What is granted to all men without exception, to the lowrest emigrants from Europe, would be wholly refused to them ! Whither would they flee ? Would not men seek everywhere to rid themselves of their race ? And how hope for the progress of the w’hites if expatriation is in store as one of the chances of the future ? The whites would accept what was inevitable ; in the presence of a race definitively admitted to the enjoyment of all the civic rights, they would adopt a new mode of action. Facts accomplished have a prodigious power. But so long as the fact is not accomplished, so long as the negro is encamped, not settled on the territory of the Union, so long as he is made a provisional and contingent citizen, something that is no longer a slave and that is not a citizen, so long as the prospect of expulsion is kept open, the prejudice of skin will have full scope. By humiliating the negro, by violating his rights, by trampling his person under foot, by forbidding all contact between his epidermis and the noble epidermis of the whites, will you not be thwarting the designs of Providence, and aiding in an exile that is not desired by God ?
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