Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/162

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Justice and Jurisprudence.
111

and therefore he cannot legitimately share in the treatment practised by their moderators. One party, for the time being, has placed him in quarantine, in one or another of its judicial harbors, to await the disinfecting process, or the expediences of the future. The other has banished him into an infirmary called the State courts. There he will either die an unnatural death, or if ever under their tyrannical treatment he recovers his health, he will be permitted without further molestation to take up his bed and walk , only because his recovery will be universally accepted as a miraculous interposition of Providence. The historical occurrences which I have related were intended to convince you that, although a great party may not lack defenders to maintain and perpetuate its power by thinly-disguised invasions of the Constitution itself, yet we must rationally anticipate, that the reverence of the entire American people for their Constitution will not always tolerate gross violations of its sacred provisions in favor of the civil liberty and civil rights of seven millions of American citizens of African descent. I could almost predict, so many are the new factors and forces which are asserting themselves as our civilization advances, that in the near future the political necessities of the rival factions will oblige their leaders to make the tardy yet marvellous discovery (to borrow the phraseology with which politicians commonly veil their ascent to power), 'that the advancement of the best interests of the nation imperatively demands that those salutary Constitutional Amendments, securing the civil rights of their fellow citizens of African descent, should be enforced by all the power of the nation, executive, legislative, and judicial.'

"In my mind's eye," he continued, "I can see inserted in the Democratic platform, in the near future, the following plank: 'That the Trust Gorgons, Labor tyrants, common carriers, hotel-keepers, proprietors of places for public resort, and school commissioners, with whatever divine prerogatives the English common law may have endowed them, are the servants and not the masters of the great body of their wage-earning fellow-citizens; that the prerogatives of public servants are subordinate and not paramount to the Constitution; and that the decisions of the courts to the contrary are the result of balefully intolerant