Opposition of the sort now referred to is partisan position, and we need not mind it. I hold it to be no part of gratitude to allow our white friends to do all the work, while we merely hold their coats. Your humble speaker has been branded as an ingrate, because he has ventured to stand up on his own and to plead our common cause as a colored man, rather than as a Garrisonian. They talk of the proud Anglo-Saxon blood as flippantly as those who profess to believe in the natural inferiority of races. They don’t like any demonstrations whatever in which colored men take a leading part. This class of Abolitionists don’t like colored celebrations, they don’t like colored conventions, they don’t like colored antislavery fairs for the support of colored newspapers. We may fight, but we must fight like the Sepoys of India, under white officers. I know, my friends, that in some quarters the efforts of colored people meet with very little encouragement. In the great struggle now progressing for the freedom and elevation of our people, we should be found at work with all our might, resolved that no man or set of men shall be more abundant in labors, according to the measure of our ability, than ourselves. They should provide for all wants-mental, moral and religious-and against all evils to which they are liable as nations. Nations no more than individuals can innocently be improvident. This covers the whole ground of nations as well as individuals. Christianity itself teaches that man shall provide for his own house.

These are not the maxims and teachings of a coldhearted world. They were standing up for their own rights against an arrogant and powerful enemy but as soon as they let out their fighting to the Allies, admiration gave way to contempt. The Turks, while they fought bravely for themselves and scourged and drove back the invading legions of Russia, shared the admiration of mankind. Kossuth, fighting for Hungary with his pen long after she had fallen by the sword, commanded the sympathy and support of the liberal world till his own hopes died out. When O’Connell, with all Ireland at his back, was supposed to be contending for the just rights and liberties of Ireland, the sympathies of mankind were with him, and even his enemies were compelled to respect his patriotism. Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow. The poet was as true to common sense as to poetry when he said, It is not within the power of unaided human nature to persevere in pitying a people who are insensible to their own wrongs and indifferent to the attainment of their own rights. Its favors to individuals are measured by an unerring principle in this-viz., respect those who respect themselves, and despise those who despise themselves. It is very polite, and never offers its services unasked. It will cooperate with them in any measure which they propose it will help those who earnestly help themselves, and will hinder those who hinder themselves. The world in which we live is very accommodating to all sorts of people. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone.Ī man of that type will never lay the world under any obligation to him, but will be a moral pauper, a drag on the wheels of society, and if he too be identified with a peculiar variety of the race he will entail disgrace upon his race as well as upon himself. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. They began with the words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” The entire speech appears below. However shortly after he began Douglass sounded a foretelling of the coming Civil War when he uttered two paragraphs that became the most quoted sentences of all of his public orations. Most of the address was a history of British efforts toward emancipation as well as a reminder of the crucial role of the West Indian slaves in that own freedom struggle. On August 3, 1857, Frederick Douglass delivered a “West India Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua, New York, on the twenty-third anniversary of the event.

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