 This is Classics of Liberty from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by Caleb Brown. Today's classic is What to the Slave is the Fourth of July by Frederick Douglass. In this excerpt from a July 4th speech in 1852, Frederick Douglass highlights the contradiction of a country founded on liberty and yet supportive of slavery. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this plantation and the slave plantation from which I escaped is considerable and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised if in what I have to say I have vince no elaborate preparation nor grace my speech with any high-sounding exhortium. With little experience and less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you. This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birthday of your national independence and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day and to the act of your great deliverance and to the signs and to the wonders associated with that act and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow citizens, that your nation is so young. 76 years, though a good age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men, but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought and hope is much needed under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the Reformer is met with angry flashes, pretending disastrous times. But this heart may beat lighter at the thought that America is young and that she is still in the impressible age of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth will yet give direction to her destiny? Where the nation older, the Patriots heart might be sadder and the Reformers brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury and bear away on their angry waves the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel and flow on as serenely as ever. But while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up and leave nothing behind but the withered branch and the unsightly rock to howl in the abyss sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory, as with rivers so with nations. Fellow citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that 76 years ago the people of this country were British subjects, and the style and title of your sovereign people, in which you now glory, was not then born. You were under the British crown. Your fathers esteemed the English government as the home government and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children such restraints, burdens and limitations as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper. But your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, reasonable and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need to say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would certainly prove nothing as to what part I might have taken had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right and England wrong is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it that Dastard, not less than a noble brave, can flippantly discount on the tyranny of England towards the American colonies. It is fashionable to do so, but there was a time when to pronounce against England and in favor of the cause of the colonies tried men's souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, to side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor. Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But to proceed. Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty and of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated. They did so in a decorous, respectful and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back. As the sheet of anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger. As it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure, the greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its injustice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But with that blindness, which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British government persisted in the exactions complained of. On the 2nd of July 1776, the old Continental Congress to the dismay of the lovers of ease and the worshipers of property clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution. And as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. Quote, Resolved, that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be dissolved. Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded, and today you recap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours, and you therefore may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's history, the very ring bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny, so indeed I regard it. The principles gained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions in all places against all foes and at whatever cost. Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of national justice and of independence extended to us? And am I therefore called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions? Then would my task be light and my burden easy and delightful? Would a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Why so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Whoso stallid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee when the chains of servitude have been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, but such is not the state of the case, I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This 4th of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join in your joyous anthems were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean citizens to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct and let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the examples of a nation whose crimes lowering up to heaven were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin. I can today take up the plaintive lament of appealed and woesmitten people. Quote, by the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps and upon the willows of the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive required of us a song. And they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. Fellow citizens, above your national tumultuous joy I hear a mournful wail of millions. Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, may my right hand forget her cunning and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make a reproach before God and the world. My subject then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July. Whether returned to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false in the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call into question and denounce with all the emphasis I can command everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America. I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice or who is not at heart a slaveholder shall not confess to be right and just. Fellow citizens, I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism a sham, your humanity as a base pretence and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad. It corrupts your politics at home. It saps the foundation of religion. It makes your name a hissing and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your union. It fetters your progress. It is the enemy of improvement, the only foe of education. It fosters pride. It breeds insolence. It promotes vice. It shelters crime. It is a curse to the earth that supports it. And yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh, be warned, be warned. A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom. The venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic. For the love of God, tear away and fling from you the hideous monster and let the weight of 20 millions crush and destroy it forever. That was What to the Slave is the Fourth of July by Frederick Douglass. Find more classics of liberty at libertarianism.org.