There have been stirring issues and far-reaching upheavals crowded into the eventful years, and things have moved fast in this country since its first settlement. A great war came and changed the legal relations of its inhabitants and conferred upon them new rights, discharged old bonds and imposed new duties. A people achieved independence and brought into existence a nation. Questions of great import came to the surface; questions of national policy demanding solution, questions that were disposed of in a wise and statesman-like and patriotic way. But there was one question, the like of which had never before harassed a nation. It was how to maintain a democratic form of government of thirty millions of people, of whom twenty millions existed under one kind of social and industrial system and ten millions under another totally different from it. The twenty millions of one race forming one section of the country, carried out to some extent among themselves that portion of the Declaration of Independence touching the equal creation and inalienable rights of man. The ten millions forming the other section consisted in nearly equal portions of two races—one Anglo-Saxon, the other African; one master, the other slave; one the descendants of voluntary emigrants who came hither seeking happiness and a broader freedom; the other deriving their blood from forced emigrants who came to the shores of America and were sold as chattels. This condition developed the problem which has harassed the country for more than a hundred years. It raised the question which could be answered only in one way, and that was that such an experiment in government with two such conflicting elements could not succeed. Abraham Lincoln answered it, when he said: “Our country cannot exist half slave and half free.” The thoughtful men of the nation saw the cloud on the horizon, when it was no bigger than a man’s hand. They endeavored to ward off the storm of which it was the precursor, but they were not equal to the task. It grew and grew and became darker and darker, until it finally burst into a tempest, destructive of life and treasure beyond the imagination of man. But this storm was worth all the sacrifice which our country was called upon to suffer, for it carried before it slavery and all its horrors. That glorious storm of shot and shell was sent by the Almighty as a punishment for our country’s greatest crime. It made it possible for us to assemble here tonight as a free people.