38 unceasing anxiety with respect to state rights ; it will exact the maintenance of exceptional precautions and of a more extended military occupation, the cessation of which is unanimously desired by the friends of liberty. And this guardianship, fatal to the general liberty as to the independence of the states, would be none the less fatal, if prolonged, to the true interests of the colored race. There is a kind of guardianship which never does harm, and which will always subsist—that of charity, that which is due to all the weak. I do not speak of such guardianship which, moreover, will be exercised, I doubt not, by the South itself, by the generous hearts which it contains in great numbers. But official guardianship would defeat the end proposed, should it be of long duration and become an institution. Do not keep eternally in tutelage those whom you are striving to make freemen. Liberty teaches on1y in liberty ; in its struggles, its miseries, and its sufferings. Every transformation has similar sufferings, and it would be puerile to undertake to abolish them. Soften the H^antic transformation which is being effected among you, this is your duty ; give to the first Steps of the freed negroes a protection, without which, the South being what it is, they would certainly succumb ; do not permit the liberty proclaimed by you to be transformed into a snare, a bitter and bloody mockery. Do this, and nothing more. The federal guardianship that should go beyond this would be at once an attack on the rights of the states and perilous to the elevation of the negroes. What they need is not a perpetual minority, but a real emancipation ; the virile education of the common law ; the apprenticeship of life as it is. I do not take the liberty, Mr. President, of demonstrating to you the marvellous power of liberty. You know better than we that liberty resolves insoluble difficulties ; that the great secret almost always is how to diminish the action of the state—not to protect too much, not to regulate too much. You are right, and I am so well convinced of it, for my part, that I have always considered as a fault the attempts at regulation which have been made since the defeat of the
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