died because a poor, deluded wretch was taught that the black man has no rights the white man should respect.

It is this unwritten crime, unpunishable by our laws, that demands the concerted action of an enlightened public sentiment to dethrone and punish it. It calls every friend of law and order to the front. Whatever his political persuasion, or whatever may have been his views as to the wisdom of enacting the laws we have, he is a foe of society and of the honor and prosperity of our beautiful city, who hesitates when called upon to reprobate and put to shame lawless teachings, no matter whence they come. Disorder is ever a crime. It cannot be made exceptional. Nor can it be bounded if tolerated. If it assails the black man to-day with impunity, it is invited to assail the white man to-morrow. If it strikes down the lowly in one outbreak with safety, it will strike at the opulent when prejudice and passion demand it. If it can rob of life it can rob of all else, for all else is less than life. If it can assault the Republican or Democrat for voting or laboring peaceably in accordance with his convictions, it can assault the Catholic at his mass, or the Protestant at his altar, because he worships as his conscience bids him. It has no defenders amongst lawabiding people.

The remedy, and the only remedy, for the wrong is the exercise of the omnipotent power of the order-loving sentiment of our people. It is cherished where honesty, or justice, or charity, or Christianity has a votary. It is limited to no party lines or to no religious belief. It can enlist under its noble banner the great mass of our people of every honest conviction and pursuit; and it has but to organize its grand tribunal, and declare its just mandate, and it will be obeyed. While the courts consign the creatures and victims of this organized fountain of disorder to merited punishment, let the supreme judgment of the law-loving people compel each citizen to

elect, by his precept and example, between honor or shame, and peace will come to the black man and to the white man, and it will come to stay.

There are times when the sacrifice of the life of a citizen does not sink deeply into the national heart. Our brave men, white and black, gave up thousands of lives to preserve and regenerate our government of freedom, and the nation could not measure its single sacrifices. But there are times when by the fewest and the humblest of lives, a great people may receive wounds which cannot heal. The dagger or the bullet that prostrates the least of our fellows because he exercises the sacred rights solemnly guaranteed alike to all, wounds in a vital part our best inheritance and our children's noblest patrimony. To maintain the priceless blessings of liberty and law we have given countless treasure. Life and resources were deemed as but secondary to government. We had made the black man a slave. We disfranchised, oppressed and ostracized him. We interdicted his education by statute, made him a hopeless menial and drove him without the pale of progress. We denied him the right to protect the honor of his own humble fireside, and made his children the property of his oppressors. But in the fullness of time he came up, through the tempest and flame of battle, to the full stature of his manhood. From the graves of the brave Northern and Southern soldiers of every color and condition peace came at last, with justice and equality before the law as her daring attributes, and the nation accepted them as the brightest jewels in the crown of victory. It is solemnly affirmed in our fundamental law that our proud citizenship knows no preference of caste, condition or color. Just when the progress of civilization, expanding and liberalizing as it progressed, had encircled the globe in its flight, and was surging back from our Western shores upon the cradle of the human race, the redeemed Republic of the New World

proclaimed to every nation of the earth that our liberty, our laws, and our citizenship are an offering to all mankind, whether bond or free. It is the pledge of this great government, and it is the personal pride and safety of every citizen, however great or however lowly; and every violation of it aims with deadly purpose at the rights of every individual.

Why Catto, and Chase, and Gordon were murdered, and why many more were brutally wounded, is well known to every citizen in Philadelphia. They suffered death and wounds because of their race. They were hated because we have wronged them; they were killed or disabled because of their misfortune; and we owe it to the majesty of our laws, to our own sense of justice, by which we must expect to be judged hereafter, and above all we owe it to the oppressed and helpless, to throw the broad shield of the protecting power of our government, and of a just people, over every class of our citizens. We have enfranchised this long oppressed race, as did our fathers in the earlier and purer days of the republic. They are granted the blessings and made to assume all the responsibilities of our citizenship, and their nameless tombs on the hillsides and plains of the South testify to the price they have given for equal justice. How they shall discharge the duties and privileges they have acquired it is for themselves to determine within our laws. How they shall vote or speak, or believe, or worship, is for their own free judgment to decide, and the sentiment that would deny them, or any other class of citizens, the full and free enjoyment of their rights, is the enemy of public peace and the author of disorder and death. Let all patriotic citizens unite as one man to vindicate the laws in their full measure of justice and equality, so "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth!"

PLAIN

TRUTHS FOR THE GRANGERS.*

GENTLEMEN:-If it is expected of me that I shall here discuss politics from any particular partisan standpoint, there must be disappointment. I confess to no allegiance in politics, except to my own convictions. While I have read the declared creed of the organization so largely represented in this immense audience, I am not familiar with its accepted rule of political action. It seems to be the basis of the many political diversions of the present day that the body politic is diseased, and sadly needs bold curative remedies. He would be a reckless man who could deny the need of the healing art in our political system; but political doctors imitate the regular profession in differing most widely as to both the disease and the cure.

It is an obvious fact that war inflated money, and gave an unnatural stimulus to almost all channels of industry and trade. Now the war is over, and we have been gradually returning to the ways and habits of peace. Our political economists racked their brains for years to devise some policy of statesmanship by which water should find its own level, and while they were convulsing themselves about their innumerable and irreconcilable theories, the business of the country was almost insensibly ebbing back to its safe moorings, and not until gold and greenbacks, from perfectly natural causes, closely approximated each other in value without revulsion or violence, did our

* Delivered July 4, 1874, at the Grangers' picnic, Minnequa.

theorists understand that as a people we are wise enough for healthy progress, and are a financial law unto ourselves. The inevitable overtrading of a long period of boundless prosperity has given its logical results in panic and general paralysis of business, and forthwith the political doctors come again with their jargon of prescriptions.

It is admitted that we are still somewhat above solid ground, and some of our rulers would reach bottom by immediately jumping out of the upper window as the shortest channel to what they call a solid basis, while other extremists would inflate a balloon and go up indefinitely as the best way to get down. Both seem to be forgetful that either theory, if enforced, would be but a break-neck game; that one would be sudden and hopeless destruction, while the other would postpone the evil day, only to multiply its horrors when reckoning must come. They forget, too, that it is not necessary to take a suicidal leap down to a fixed standard of values, or to go ballooning to reach terra firma by a sudden collapse, when we might go gradually and gently down stairs without a general dislocation of necks or fracture of limbs. A legislative requirement to pay specie this year or next year, or the year after, could not but be the product of imbeciles or knaves, or probably a mixture of both. We could not pay five cents on the dollar in specie, for the tolerably good reason that we have not got it, and the fact that we could not pay would make both speculators and all others insist upon being paid. The result would be a rich harvest for the limited centres of money, and general destruction in all the channels of legitimate industry and trade. And equally ill-advised would be an indefinite or even a greatly enlarged manufacture of irredeemable money on our present financial basis. It would cheapen our currency, inflate all the necessaries of life, and disease the whole monetary system.