"In this way we can go on to the end of the chapter. Our traducers and slanderers say that we are unfit for this, that and the other thing, which is a deliberate and willful falsehood. We are well qualified for everything that any other race upon earth is qualified to perform, and that is the very reason why our maligners say we are not; and they are even unwilling to give us the chance to try. It is true that a few of us are educated, but very few. We three, that is, myself and daughter and her husband, were taught a little because we were favorably situated under Mr. Jackson, but the slave-holders, as a general thing, make a specialty of keeping us in the most complete ignorance, and it is a crime for a slave to be taught to read, write and cast accounts, and it is also a crime for any man to be found teaching him. "But there is a better day coming, and will soon be here; only we will have to pass through a time of the most tremendous affliction before the better times arrive. When, by the predetermined will of God, all men and women are free from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, then, indeed, shall we arise and shine forth, for our light will be come, and the glory of the Lord will be risen upon us. Then shall new schools and colleges be established all over the land, into which our sons and daughters will crowd, and they will also go to those which have been long established. Then shall our professional men and women go forth in their thousands and ten thousands, and spread to lands and islands beyond the seas. Then shall our senators and representatives enter the halls of Congress at Washington, and every state legislature. Our surgeons and physicians shall then ride forth precisely the same as their white brothers duly armed with the very same diplomas, authorizing them to heal the sick, and alleviate the ailments of those that are afflicted, instead of wearing their lives away in the cane brakes, the cotton fields and the rice swamp of the South as slaves. They may labor all over the far-extended lands as freemen toiling for themselves and their families at useful trades, and laying up money against a rainy day. Then shall children go forth in their hundreds and thousands to be trained like others for the duties of life, and to become the ornaments of society. Then shall our afflicted sons and daughters sit no longer in the galleries of the churches of the land as so many ’goods and chattels" thrust away up into the corner, but walk forth in freedom to the house of the Lord on the Sabbath day—go forth in their thousands and tens of thousands to our most Holy Communion in all that liberty of soul and body wherein the Lord has made us all free. The time would fail for me to tell, and for you to listen to all the good things that will come with freedom, after every man, woman and child, now in slavery, are at liberty."