Will not our “Chief Captain,” will not Senators, take heed what they do, that the scourge may not continue to fall upon a whole race, each one of whom is an American and uncondemned? Is our citizenship a feebler safeguard than that of Rome? Shall the cry, “I am an American citizen,” be raised in vain against perpetual outrage? In speaking of the citizen as of our household, I adopt a distinction employed by a great teacher in Antiquity. Aristotle, in counsels to his former pupil, Alexander, before his career of Asiatic conquest, enjoined a broad distinction between Greeks and Barbarians. The former he was to treat as friends, and of the household; the latter he was to treat as brutes and plants.[218] This is the very distinction between Citizenship and Slavery. The Citizen is of the national household; the Slave is no better than brute or plant. But our brutes and plants are all changed into men; our Barbarians are transformed into Greeks. There is no person among us now, whatever his birth or complexion, who may not claim the great name of Citizen, to be protected not less at home than abroad,--but always, whether at home or abroad, by the National Government, which is the natural guardian of the citizen. EQUAL RIGHTS AND AMNESTY. MR. PRESIDENT, asking you to unite now in an act of justice to a much-oppressed race, which is no payment of that heavy debt accumulated by generations of wrong, I am encouraged by the pending measure of Amnesty, which has the advantage of being recommended in the President’s Annual Message. I regretted, at the time, that the President signalized by his favor the removal of disabilities imposed upon a few thousand Rebels who had struck at the life of the Republic, while he said nothing of cruel disabilities inflicted upon millions of colored fellow-citizens, who had been a main-stay to the national cause. But I took courage when I thought that the generosity proposed could not fail to quicken that sentiment of justice which I now invoke.