After his nomination to the Presidency, in his first regular speech, made in response to a serenade in New York City by the Boys in Blue, he said, speaking of the Freedmen: “We will stand by them until the sun of liberty, fixed in the firmament of the Constitution, shall shine with equal ray upon every man, white or black, throughout the Union. Fellow-citizens, fellow-soldiers, in this there is all the beneficence of eternal justice, and by this we will stand forever.” A noble sentiment, which must become a fact established beyond the possibility of successful assault before the nation can enter upon the path of peace or safety. In reply to an address by a delegation of colored men who visited him in Mentor, just before he left home to assume the duties of his high office, he said, in effect, that it was not within the power of the President by appointments and official recognitions to raise the colored people to the level of social recognition and honor. The path to this leads through education and thrift. The negro, like every one else, must be the architect of his own fortunes, and compel by worth the respect he seeks. But turning from the negro who would have appointment to the nation which he held responsible for his condition—to the nation endangered by that condition—he said in his inaugural address, which his successor, nor Congress, nor the people should neither forget nor fail to heed: “The census has already sounded the alarm in the appalling figures which mark how dangerously high the tide of illiteracy has risen among our voters and their children. To the South this question is one of supreme importance. But the responsibility for the existence of slavery did not rest upon the South alone. The nation itself is responsible for the extension of the suffrage, and is under special obligation to aid in removing the illiteracy which it has added to the voting population. For the North and South alike there is but one remedy. All the constitutional power of the nation and of the states, and _all the volunteer forces of the people_, should be summoned to meet this danger by the saving influence of universal education. It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them by intelligence and virtue for the inheritance which awaits them. In this beneficent work sections and races should be forgotten, and partisanship should be unknown.”