this would have been carrying justice too near the ideal. For the
great debt to the slave, who was robbed of his honest wage, we go
behind the slave-holder, who had been invited by the government to
invest his money in blood; we go to the head of the firm for the
payment of debts contracted by the firm, for each member of the
government is, measurably, an agent of the government, contracting and
paying debts by its delegated authority. Thus the law holds him guilty
who willfully breaks a contract entered into in good faith by all the
parties to it. Instead of holding the slave-holder responsible for the
robbery of the black man through a period of a hundred years, we hold
the _government_ responsible.

What man can compute the dollars stolen from the black slave in the
shape of wages, for a period of a hundred years! What claim has the
slave-holder against the government for confiscation of property by
the side of the claim of the slaves for a hundred years of wages and
enervated and dwarfed manhood! A billion dollars would have bought
every slave in the South in 1860, but fifty billions would not have
adequately recompensed the slave for enforced labor and debased
manhood. The debt grows in magnitude the closer it is inspected. And
yet there are those who will laugh this claim to scorn; who will be
unable to see any grounds upon which to base the justice of it; who
will say that the black man was fully compensated for all the ills he
had borne, the robbery to which he had been subjected, and the
debasement--not to say enervation--of his manhood, by the great act by
which he was made a free man and a citizen.

But there is, or should be, such a claim; it rests upon the strongest
possible grounds of equity; while the conference of freedom and
citizenship was simply the rendering back in the first instance that