Do you know that I would rather belong to a race that started with skull-less vertebrae in the dim Laurentian seas, wiggling without knowing why they wiggled, swimming without knowing where they were going; but kept developing and getting a little further up and a little further up, all through the animal world, and finally striking this chap in the dug-out. A getting a little bigger, and this fellow calling that fellow a heretic, and that fellow calling the other an infidel, and so on. For in the history of the world, the man who has been ahead has always been called a heretic. Recollect this! I would rather come from a race that started from that skull-less vertebrae, and came up and up and up, and finally produced Shakespeare, who found the human intellect wallowing in a hut, and touched it with a wand of his genius, and it became a palace--dome and pinnacle. I would rather belong to a race that commenced then, and produced Shakespeare, with the eternal hope of an infinite future for the children of progress leading from the far horizon, beckoning men forward--forward and onward forever. I had rather belong to this race, and commence there, with that hope, than to have sprung from a perfect pair on which the Lord has lost money every day since. These are the excuses I have for my race. Now, my friends, let me say another thing. I do not pretend to have floated even with the heights of thought; I do not pretend to have fathomed the abyss. All I pretend is to give simply my honest thought. Every creed that we have today has upon it the mark of whip and chain and fagot. I do not want it. Free labor will give us wealth, and has given us wealth, and why? Because a free brain goes into partnership with a free hand. That is why. And when a man works for his wife and children, the problem of liberty is, how to do the most work in the shortest space of time; but the problem of slavery is, how to do the least work in the longest space of time. Slavery is poverty; liberty is wealth. It is the same in thought. Free thought will give us truth; and the man who is not in favor of free thought occupies the same relation to those he can govern that the slaveholder occupied to his slaves, exactly. Free thought will give us wealth. There has not been a generation of free thought yet. It will be time to write a creed when there have been a few generations of free-brained men and splendid women in this world. I don't know what the future may bring forth; I don't know what inventions are in the brain of the future; I don't know what garments may be woven, with the years to come; but I do know, coming from the infinite sea of the future, there will never touch this "bank and shoal of time" a greater blessing, a grander glory, than liberty for man, woman and child.