what that spirit is we have witnessed in the character of the people among whom we have lived, across the waters; in their strong institutions; in the history of their ancestors; in the distinctive features of their governmental antecedents; in their colonies; their religion, letters, and commerce. The spirit of the English language is the spirit of Independence, both personal and national; the spirit of free speech and a free press, and personal liberty; the spirit of reform and development; the spirit of enterprise; the spirit of law, of moral character, and spiritual beneficence.
With these ideas we have been familiar from our youth. Wherever the English language is spoken these sentiments are the daily utterances of men. Even in those cases where there is the widest separation between theory and practice, even there the idea of freedom exists and secures expression. The American black man, even in the States of slavery, has been in a school of freedom, from which even the Italian, the German, the Frenchman, the Russian, and the Sardinian, have been separate and alien. He has had unfolded to him, in harangues, in public speeches, in grand orations, in the social talk of the table and the fireside, in the august decisions of Courts and Legislatures, and in the solemn utterances of State papers, all the sublime abstractions of human rights and civil freedom.
You and I have been accustomed to the utterance of the noblest theories of liberty, the grandest ideas of humanity, all our lifetime; and so were our fathers. And although we have been shorn of our manhood, and have, as yet. attained only a shrivelled
