rights? If some process could be suggested of removing the bandages from the eyes of the pseudo-conservative school, the obscurantist dissenting class of your people, they would soon discover, I think, what is so apparent to the rest of the world, that race-instincts in America involve only prejudice against the helplessness of a fellow-man.
"The glance I have had at the fundamental provisions you have so kindly read, clearly shows that their intention was, that your States and people should constitute a plural unit,—one country, one liberty, one destiny. I can realize, however, what a terrible social upheaval, what a moral earthquake it must have required to unfix and do away with that fossilized race-prejudice which the former institution of slavery had fastened upon the body-politic. I heartily concur in what you have said, that this civil and legal problem ought to be approached without prepossession of any kind, in the same spirit of exact justice and unimpassioned inquiry which has heretofore enabled the benefactors of mankind to solve many other problems not less closely involved in the institutions of their day nor less hotly contested.
"The question of the enforcement of the civil rights of American citizens of African descent is a matter not only of the laws but also of the civil polity of your nation. Should I venture too far if I should assert (it may be in my ignorance) that only a limited class of your people stands in the way of the operation of those mighty instruments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which, it seems to me, are intended to sweep away every vestige of the previous condition of those unhappy people? It appears to me, that these amendments to your Constitution were wrought out in the timing of the Almighty, not so much through the agency of the Republican party, as you think,—and I trust you will pardon my freedom,—as through the instrumentality of Christian civilization. The color-caste philosophers of your country fail to realize the fact that they can no more frustrate this sublime decree of divine Providence, in behalf of a down-trodden race, than they can move from their orbits those heavenly luminaries which, in their ordered and majestic march through space, shed their benign light upon the darkling earth."
6
