about productive co-operation, productive capital, the co-operation of labor, the ebb and flow of the tides of trade, and the survival of the fittest. He is stocked with the principles of political economy and the whole circle of its related sciences. He discourses learnedly about finance and economic laws. He indulges in magnificent speculations about the great advantages of massed capital and the subdivision of labor. He has promulgated sublime theories about lessening the cost to the consumer. Why should Trust,—
"Abominable, unutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived,
Gorgons and hydras and chimæras dire,"—
whose upward gaze is lovingly directed towards a golden uncontrolled enfranchisement, and to a regal state-cap dropping upon his head,—why should Trust, already "dazzled by visions of diadems, of stars and garters, and titles of nobility," not be proclaimed and installed king of values and reign over the American people?
These half-grown kings in wielding their mighty tridents have, one and all, stretched the sides of the Constitution. These ugly-headed monsters stand ready indirectly to subvert it. The sceptre of unlawful power has at times seemed almost within the fast hold of their ambition; and there can be no more fitting opportunity than is now afforded by the timely inquiry of your Order concerning the constitutional status of the civil rights of your race, to proclaim to this degenerate faction of covert traitors, that the majestic, all-powerful sovereign in America is the Constitution, and not a public opinion, which has the cowardice to recognize the usurpations of these embryo kings; and that the civil rights of all classes and interests, irrespective of conditions, are to be judged by this law of Liberty. It is the concealed, gradual, quiet approach of the civil polity which tends towards the creation of a novel and distinct classification of the civil rights of the whole American people,—it is this cloaked attempt to inaugurate an unconstitutional, arbitrary schedule for the arbitrament of civil rights,—as if this sacred and inalienable birthright were to be regarded as merchandise of an ascertainable
