"Harsh as my words may have seemed, I do my kinsmen and brethren of the free States no such injustice as to deny that great allowances are to be made for the demoralization I have described. We inherited complicity with the slaveholding class, and with it prejudices of caste. We inherited confidence and affection toward our Southern brethren--and with these, our political organizations, and profound reverence for political authorities, all adverse to the needful discussion of slavery. Above all, we inherited a fear of the dissolution of the Union, which can only be unwholesome when it ceases equally to affect the conduct of all the great parties to that sacred compact. All these inheritances have created influences upon our political conduct, which are rather to be deplored than condemned. I trust that at last these influences are about to cease. I trust so, because, if we have inherited the demoralization of slavery, we have also attained the virtue required for emancipation. If we have inherited prejudices of caste, we have also risen to the knowledge that political safety is dependent on the rendering of equal and exact justice to all men. And if we have suffered our love for the Union to be abused so as to make us tolerate the evils that more than all others endanger it, we have discerned that great error at last. If we should see a citizen who had erected a noble edifice, sit down inactively in its hall, avoiding all duty and enterprise, lest he might provoke enemies to pull it down over his head, or one who had built a majestic vessel, moor it to the wharf, through fear that he might peradventure run it upon the rocks, we should condemn his fatuity and folly. We have learned at last that the American people labor not only under the responsibility of preserving this Union, but also under the responsibility of making it subserve the advancement of justice and humanity, and that neglect of this last responsibility involves the chief peril to which the Union is exposed. "I shall waste little time on the newly-invented apologies for continued demoralization. The question now to be decided is, whether a slaveholding class exclusively shall govern America, or whether it shall only bear divided sway with non-slaveholding citizens. It concerns all persons equally, whether they are Protestants or Catholics, native-born or exotic citizens. And therefore it seems to me that this is no time for trials of strength between the native-born and the adopted freeman, or between any two branches of one common Christian brotherhood.