Douglass cuts deeper than simple moralizing here—he's describing a radically unsentimental politics where principle matters more than loyalty or comfort. Notice he doesn't say he'll unite with *friends* or *his own people*, which reveals something uncomfortable: that doing right often means working alongside those you'd normally oppose, and refusing those you'd naturally embrace. When environmentalists and conservative farmers find common ground protecting a watershed, or when political opponents collaborate on criminal justice reform, they're living this principle—abandoning the tribal comfort of pure camps for the harder work of actual change.