For many years we insisted that our fathers had founded a free Government, that they were the lovers of liberty, believers in equal rights. We were mistaken. The colonists did not believe in the freedom of to-day. Their laws were filled with intolerance, with slavery and the infamous spirit of caste. They persecuted and enslaved. Most of them were narrow, ignorant and cruel. For the most part, their laws were more brutal than those of the nations from which they came. They branded the forehead of intelligence, bored with hot irons the tongue of truth. They persecuted the good and enslaved the helpless. They were believers in pillories and whipping-posts for honest, thoughtful men. When their independence was secured they adopted a Constitution that legalized slavery, and they passed laws making it the duty of free men to prevent others from becoming free. They followed the example of kings and nobles. They knew that monarchs had been interested in the slave trade, and that the first English commander of a slave-ship divided his profits with a queen. They forgot all the splendid things they had said--the great principles they had so proudly and eloquently announced. The sublime truths faded from their hearts. The spirit of trade, the greed for office, took possession of their souls. The lessons of history were forgotten. The voices coming from all the wrecks of kingdoms, empires and republics on the shores of the great river were unheeded and unheard. If the foundation is not justice, the dome cannot be high enough, or splendid enough, to save the temple. But above everything in the minds of our fathers was the desire for union--to create a Nation, to become a Power. Our fathers compromised. A compromise is a bargain in which each party defrauds the other, and himself. The compromise our fathers made was the coffin of honor and the cradle of war. A brazen falsehood and a timid truth are the parents of compromise. But some--the greatest and the best--believed in liberty for all. They repeated the splendid sayings of the Roman: "By the law of nature all men are free;"--of the French King: "Men are born free and equal;"--of the sublime Zeno: "All men are by nature equal, and virtue alone establishes a difference between them." In the year preceding the Declaration of Independence, a society for the abolition of slavery was formed in Pennsylvania and its first President was one of the wisest and greatest of men--Benjamin Franklin. A society of the same character was established in New York in 1785; its first President was John Jay--the second, Alexander Hamilton. But in a few years these great men were forgotten. Parties rivaled each other in the defence of wrong. Politicians cared only for place and power. In the clamor of the heartless, the voice of the generous was lost. Slavery became supreme. It dominated legislatures, courts and parties; it rewarded the faithless and little; it degraded the honest and great.