23

LIFE AND TIME OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
397

"We have been, as a class, grievously wounded; wounded in the house
of our friends, and this wound is too deep and too painful for ordinary and
measured speech.

'When a deed is done for freedom,
Through the broad earth's aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic,
Trembling on from east to west.'

"But when a deed is done for slavery, caste and oppression, and a blow
is struck at human progress, whether so intended or not, the heart of humanity
sickens in sorrow and writhes in pain. It makes us feel as if some one
were stamping upon the graves of our mothers, or desecrating our sacred
temples. Only base men and oppressors can rejoice in a triumph of injustice
over the weak and defenceless, for weakness ought itself to protect from
assaults of pride, prejudice and power.

"The cause which has brought us here to-night is neither common nor
trivial. Few events in our national history have surpassed it in magnitude,
importance and significance. It has swept over the land like a cyclone, leaving
moral desolation in its track. This decision belongs with a class of judicial
and legislative wrongs by which we have been oppressed.

"We feel it, as we felt years ago, the furious attempt to force the
accursed system of slavery upon the soil of Kansas: as we felt the enactment
of the Fugitive Slave Hill: the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the
Dred Scott decision. I look upon it as one more shocking development of
that moral weakness in high places which has attended the conflict between
the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery, and I venture to predict that it
will be so regarded by aftercoming generations. Far down the ages, when
men shall wish to inform themselves as to the real state of liberty, law, religion
and civilization in the United States at this juncture of our history, they
will overhaul the proceedings of the Supreme Court, and read this strange
decision declaring the Civil Rights Bill unconstitutional and void.

"From this, more than from many volumes, they will learn how far we
had advanced, in this year of grace, from the barbarism of slavery toward
civilization and the rights of man.

"Fellow-citizens: Among the great evils which now stalk abroad in our
land, the one, I think, which most threatens to undermine and destroy the
foundations of our free institutions in this country, is the great and apparently
increasing want of respect entertained for those to whom are committed the
responsibility and the duty of administering our government. On this point,