Now, my friends, we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the Indian, and we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the negro. It has been demonstrated by a sufficient number of individual instances that both these races, having their own peculiarities and their own defects, as the white man has his own peculiarities and his own defects, are fit for civilization, for law, for education, for the family, for the home, for the arts and the industries which belong to civilization and peace. Take the case of the negro, whom we have not all learned to respect as we should. I sat in the House of Representatives with seven members of the negro race, and you could not find seven men in that House, chosen on any principle of selection, who were the equals of those seven men, or who certainly were their superiors, in everything that indicated the conduct of an honorable, sensible and capable representative of the people. I should like to have you take the Congressional Record, and read the speeches of the old slave-masters, and then put by their side the speeches of the slaves! Why, the great orator and statesman of the Southern Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, when he came back to the public service, announced weeks beforehand a speech that he proposed to make upon a political question of the day. The House and the country were in expectation. Mr. Stephens gave months of his best thought and his best care to the preparation of that speech; and when he finished delivering it, a full-blooded negro got up, and, on the moment, answered the argument which had been made by the great champion of the slave-holding race and overthrew it. When our illustrious senator died, his eulogy was pronounced throughout the land from the lips of orator and poet and friend. Massachusetts called to her service, perhaps, the two most brilliant and accomplished orators in the country, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Schurz; and still the one eulogy of Charles Sumner which more than any other deserves to go down into literature and to be found in the school-books of coming generations, is that pronounced by Robert B. Elliot, of South Carolina. It is too late. If you do not educate these black people, it is not because they are your inferiors; it is because, in your selfishness and greed, you prefer to do something else with your money than to expend it for the benefit of these American citizens.