We have now half as many millions of people as we have years, and many of us will live until a hundred millions stand beneath the flag. We are getting more real solid sense. The schoolhouse is the finest building in the village. We are writing and reading more books; we are painting and buying more pictures; we are struggling more and more to get at the philosophy of life, of things--trying more and more to answer the questions of the eternal Sphinx. We are looking in every direction--investigating; in short, we are thinking and working. Besides all this, I believe the people are nearer honest than ever before. A few years ago we were willing to live upon the labor of four million slaves. Was that honest? At last, we have a national conscience. At last, we have carried out the Declaration of Independence. Our fathers wrote it--we have accomplished it. The black man was a slave--we made him a citizen. We found four million human beings in manacles, and now the hands of a race are held up in the free air without a chain. I have had the supreme pleasure of seeing a man--once a slave--sitting in the seat of his former master in the Congress of the United States. I have had that pleasure, and when I saw it my eyes were filled with tears. I felt that we had carried, out the Declaration of Independence--that we had given reality to it, and breathed the breath of life into its every word. I felt that our flag would float over and protect the colored man and his little children, standing straight in the sun, just the same as though he were white and worth a million. I would protect him more, because the rich white man could protect himself. All who stand beneath our banner are free. Ours is the only flag that has in reality written upon it: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality--the three grandest words in all the languages of men. Liberty: Give to every man the fruit of his own labor--the labor of his hands and of his brain. Fraternity: Every man in the right is my brother. Equality: The rights of all are equal: Justice, poised and balanced in eternal calm, will shake from the golden scales in which are weighed the acts of men, the very dust of prejudice and caste: No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the rights of men. The Declaration of Independence has at last been carried out in letter and in spirit. The second century will be grander than the first. Fifty millions of people are celebrating this day. To-day, the black man looks upon his child and says: The avenues to distinction are open to you--upon your brow may fall the civic wreath--this day belongs to you. We are celebrating the courage and wisdom of our fathers, and the glad shout of a free people the anthem of a grand nation, commencing at the Atlantic, is following the sun to the Pacific, across a continent of happy homes.