Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of; Slavery to the Present Time
History
Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of; Slavery to the Present Time
African American orators; African Americans -- History -- Sources; Speeches, addresses, etc., American -- African American authors
they fuse into their system the feudal aristocratic imperialism of
Europe.
To govern themselves by law, and secure therewith the largest liberty
with the greatest security of individual rights and property, was their
ideal of statecraft, and this idea, inseparable from the principles they
laid down, must endure while the fabric lasts.
I have told you that the government the fathers planted was Anglo-Saxon
in law; but it was Anglo-Saxon too in religion and spirit. Nothing has
been so conquering in its influence as the Anglo-Saxon spirit; it has
assimilated wherever it has gone, and like the leaven that leaveneth the
whole, homogeneity has followed in its fierce wake of progress with not
a whit lost of its great and fearless impulse of law and freedom.
No race has been so domineering, none stronger and with a more exclusive
spirit of caste, none with a more contemptuous dislike of inferiority,
none more violent in prejudice once formed, or dislikes once engendered;
yet doth the spirit and impulse of freedom move majestic "in the
chambers of their soul," raising them finally above those hated
obliquities, conquering their repugnance, enfeebling and vanishing their
hates. Thus one by one grave wrongs inflicted upon weaker races by the
cold, calculating hand of greed have been arrested and blotted out in
the holy names of right. Thus it is, and has been, that nations, sects,
and creeds coming to these shores lose, in the fascination of free
institutions and the august majesty of liberty, the distinctive
qualities of their old allegiance, and thus it is that over a broad land
composed of all nations, sects, and creeds there reigns one grand
homogeneity and a single patriotic impulse of faith and destiny. Few
there are of Americans who can to-day trace even the faintest spark of
their lineage to an English or even a Norman source. Yet the spirit of
the Anglo-Saxon is the presiding genius of our destiny. Its spirit is
the spirit of our law, and its religion is the evangel of our political
faith.
Inheritors of this great circumstance of power and rule, need I remind
you that, though you sacrifice your labor and toil, though you may have
brought forth this jewel of liberty regulated by law, you cannot keep it
unless you share it with the world. The evils which in days past men had
to wipe out in tears and blood will arise again and precipitate
convulsions in which liberty may expire.
The very spectacle of seeming grandeur and the outward cast of luxury
and splendor invite the enemies' quest and fans into blood-red heat his
latent ire, while pride, vanity, and hate surround the heart with the
humor of death-breeding slime into which the corroding worm is spawned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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