31 And what is slavery in the traditions of the South ? The inequality of the races, degradation based on color. You will have suffered the whole principle to remain standing ; do not hope that it will henceforth be possible for you to suppress the consequences. Certain enormities will have disappeared, and I grant that this is a great deal; determined to exaggerate nothing, I shall not go so far as to pretend that serfhood, that apprenticeship, will be the pure and simple equivalent of slavery proper. I only maintain that this slavery will subsist in part despite your proclamations and your bills. To those men who, because of their color, will all remain excluded without exception from the civic rights which, among you, belong to all men without exception, you will have refused what I may be permitted to call human rights. You will have failed to keep the promise which you made in abolishing slavery. Why, then, Mr. President, will not your noble country carry out to the end what it has so bravely undertaken ? Let it will this to-morrow, at the opening of Congress, and the negro question will be ended, ended and consequently removed, to the great glory and the great advantage of the United States. Congress will avert at once, both the continuance of the strife and the debasement, and perhaps extermination of a race. It will lay with you the corner-stone upon which must be based the whole edifice of reconstruction. Thenceforth, it will belong to the negroes themselves to conquer, by their labor, by their instruction, by their efforts, in a word, the entire place which may belong to them. Thenceforth, they will be encouraged, instead of discouraged. Thenceforth they will be men. Perhaps there will be some, and even many, "who will spontaneously determine some day to seek another country. To their voluntary exodus, I have not the least objection. Let them go to Mexico, to Cuba, to Porto Rico, to St. Domingo; let them take possession by degrees of the scorching regions which surround the Caribbean sea, let those countries where they have been oppressed become, by a Divine compensation, the seat of a sort of negro empire—this is possible, although
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=