Permit me to remind you, Gentlemen, that, living at the national capital, you have a peculiar responsibility. In the warfare for Equal Rights you are the advance guard, sometimes the forlorn hope. You are animated to move forward, not only for your own immediate good, but because through you the whole colored population of the country will be benefited. What is secured for you will be secured for all,--while, if you fail, there is small hope elsewhere. Do not forget--and let this thought arouse to increased exertion--that your triumph will redound to the good of all. The District of Columbia is the place where all the great reforms born of the war have begun. It is the experimental garden and nursery where all the generous plants have been tried. Emancipation, colored suffrage, the right of colored persons to testify, and the right to ride in the street-cars,--all these began here, and I remember well how they were all encountered. On the abolition of Slavery we were solemnly warned that riot, confusion, and chaos would ensue. Emancipation took place, and not a voice or sound was heard except of peace and gladness. I was soberly assured by eminent politicians, that if colored persons were allowed to vote there would be massacre at the polls. Then, again, colored testimony was deprecated,--while it was insisted that the street-cars would be ruined, if opened to colored persons. But all these changes, demanded by simple justice, have been in every way beneficent. Nobody would reverse them now. Who would establish Slavery again? Who would drive the colored citizen from the polls? Who would exclude him from the court-room? Who would shut him from the street-cars? And now the old objections are revived, and made to do service again, in order to defeat the effort for common schools,--being schools founded on the very principle of Equal Rights recognized in the elective franchise, in the court-room, and in the street-car. If this principle is just for all the latter,--and nobody says the contrary now,--why hesitate to apply it in education? How often we are enjoined to train the child in the way he should go! Why, then, compel him in those tender years to bear the ban of exclusion? Why, at that early period, when impressions are received for life, impose upon him the badge of inferiority? He is to be a man; therefore he must be trained to that self-respect without which there can be no true manhood. But this can be only by removing all ban of exclusion, and every badge of inferiority from color.