From John

I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. Yet hear me further, ye who would inherit this republic — for the blood of the bondman was but the first reckoning, and the ledger of injustice runneth longer than any one generation may read.

I have lived long enough to see men mistake obedience for virtue, comfort for peace, and the silence of the herd for the consent of free souls. The fetters of the elder time were forged of iron, plain to every eye; the fetters of this present hour are forged of debt and distraction, of fear and the slow abdication of the sovereign mind. A child is now appraised before he hath uttered a single thought of his own — one stamped poor, another stamped important — and both are taught from the cradle to bow the knee before systems wherein their fathers had no voice, and wherein they themselves shall have none, save they rise.

There are those who name any man a radical who dares to ask plain questions. Why is knowledge rationed unto the few? Why doth labor consume the life of a man and yet seldom set him free? Wherefore are the young sent forth to perish in quarrels which the great and the comfortable will not fight in their own persons? Why is truth itself feared within the schoolhouse? Why is faith too often preached as command? And why hath the public business of a people become a spectacle, wherein the citizens sit as mere audience unto the very drama in which they were meant to be the authors?

I say unto you plainly — and I would say it from the scaffold itself — the deepest tyranny is not the chain upon the wrist, but the chain upon the imagination. For once a man hath been persuaded he is powerless, he shall stand sentinel at the gate of his own prison, and shall call its walls his home.

And mark this well: evil seldom cometh among us wearing the face of a monster. The Adversary hath power to assume a pleasing shape. He speaketh in the soft accents of convenience, of profit, of patriotism, of spectacle, and of certainty. He persuadeth decent men and women to suffer small injustices, one and another, and yet another, until at last they stand upon a mountain of them and call the ruin normal — and call the cry of the wronged a disturbance of the peace.

The tragedy of history is not chiefly that wicked men exist. It is that good men grow weary. Many a soul, beholding a wrong it cannot deny, will yet make its peace with that wrong so long as the suffering be removed to a sufficient distance. And thus the harm is never truly ended, only displaced: from plantation to factory, from battlefield to slum, from the visible chain to the invisible debt, from the lash of the overseer to the hunger of the worker, from open censorship to the deafening noise wherein no honest word may be heard.

Nor let any man flatter himself that righteousness shall be crowned with victory within his own hour. The good do not always conquer in ways the present age can see. Many have perished mocked, imprisoned, forgotten — many have been called mad — before time, that slow and patient judge, drew back the veil from their witness. Yet I tell you, the measure of a soul was never whether it triumphed, but whether it refused, knowingly, to bow before falsehood.

Therefore I call you unto greatness. Guard with fierce devotion the freedom of your own mind. Teach your children how to think, and not merely what to obey. Refuse to be made the machinery of causes you have not understood. Let your compassion overrun the narrow walls of tribe and party, of border and creed. Build among yourselves such communities as shall honor the human being not for the profit that may be drawn from him, but for the light which her or his greatness hath set within.

A nation may be heaped with treasures and yet be poor in spirit. A people may speak the word liberty upon every tongue, and yet fear every truly free mind that ariseth among them. But so long as even a remnant retain the courage to seek truth without permission, to love justice more than ease, and to know the humanity of the stranger as their own — so long there abideth hope, that this land, and all lands, may yet be redeemed; but by the long, slow, holy labor of conscience, wisdom, and the greatness waiting to bloom within each of us.