in the State, the equality of a brother in the church, it could not make him feel better than they, it filled him instead with a righteous sense of wrong, a passionate sympathy, a supreme desire and determination to make his own rights the measure of theirs. "I lose sight of your present situation," he said in his address before Free People of Color, "and look at it only in futurity. I imagine myself surrounded by educated men of color, the Websters, and Clays, and Hamiltons, and Dwights, and Edwardses of the day. I listen to their voice as judges and representatives, and rulers of the people--the whole people." This glowing vision was not the handiwork of a rhetorician writing with an eye to its effect upon his hearers. The ardent hope of the reformer was rather the father of the golden dream. This practical recognition of the negro as a man and a brother was the exact opposite of the treatment which was his terrible lot in the country. Never in all history was there a race more shamefully oppressed by a dominant race than were the blacks by the whites of America. Held as slaves in the South, they were stamped as social outcasts at the North. There was no one, however mean or vicious, who if he possessed a white skin, was not treated more humanely than were they. In the most enlightened of the free States they were discriminated against by public laws and proscribed by public opinion. They were in a word pariahs of the republic. They were shut out from all the common rights, and privileges and opportunities enjoyed by the lowest of the favored race. They were denied equality in the public school. The principle of popular education had no application to a class which was not of the people, a class which the common sentiment of a Christian nation had placed at the zero point of political values, and meant to keep forever at that point. Entrance to the trades were barred to the blacks. What did they want with such things where there was no white trash so forgetful of his superiority as to consent to work by their side. Nowhere were they allowed the same traveling accommodations as white men, and they were everywhere excluded from public inns. Neither wealth nor refinement was able to procure them admission into other than "Jim Crow cars." If heart-sick at the outrages by every one heaped upon them they turned for consolation to the house of God, even there the spirit of proscription and caste prejudice met them, and pointed to the "negro pew" where they sat corraled from the congregation as if they had no equal share in the salvation which the pulpit preached. Everywhere the white man had the right of way, even on the highway to heaven! And in no place was the negro made to feel the prejudice against his color more gallingly than in churches arrogating the name of Christian. He had no rights on earth, he had none in trying to get into the bosom of the founder of Christianity, which the white sinners or saints were bound to respect.