Each of you is a unit of the mass. Therefore, sustaining the rights of all, you will sustain your own. Be not satisfied with anything less than the Rights of All. But while generously maintaining the rights of others, I venture to say that you will be entirely unworthy of the vantage-ground on which you now stand, if you do not insist at all times on those Equal Rights which are still denied to you. Here particularly is a duty. The poet has said that “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.” You are all free, God be praised! But you are still shut out from rights which are justly yours. Yourselves must strike the blow,--not by violence, but in every mode known to the Constitution and Law. I do not doubt that every denial of Equal Rights, whether in the school-room, the jury-box, the public hotel, the steamboat, or the public conveyance, by land or water, is contrary to the fundamental principles of Republican Government, and therefore to the Constitution itself, which should be corrected by the Courts, if not by Congress. See to it that this is done. The Constitution does not contain the word “white”; who can insert it in the Law? Insist that the common-school, where the child is prepared for the duties of manhood, shall know no discrimination unknown to the Constitution. Insist, also, that the public conveyances and public hotels, owing their existence to Law, shall know no discrimination unknown to the Constitution, so that the Senator or the Representative in Congress, who is the peer of all at the National Capitol, shall not be insulted and degraded on the way to his public duties. Insist upon equal rights everywhere; make others insist upon them. Insist that our institutions shall be brought into perfect harmony with the promises of the Declaration of Independence, which is grand for its universality. I hold you to this allegiance,--first, by the race from which you are sprung, and, secondly, by the profession you now espouse. CHARITY TO FRANCE OR GERMANY? SPEECH IN THE SENATE, FEBRUARY 4, 1871. February 4, 1871, Mr. Pomeroy, of Kansas, brought forward a Joint Resolution authorizing the President “to cause to be stationed at the port of New York, if the same can be done without injury to the public service, one or more of our naval vessels, to be there held in readiness to receive on board for transportation such supplies as may be furnished by the people of the United States for the destitute and suffering people of France and Germany.” The resolution was passed, after debate, in which Senators Howard of Michigan, Conkling of New York, Morton of Indiana, Casserly of California, Schurz of Missouri, and others, made brief speeches. Mr. Sumner spoke as follows:--