Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/166

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Justice and Jurisprudence.
115

fixed each on his own rock, mighty lieutenants overthrown like trees, and popular opinion driven around like a whirligig. The color-line discriminators, who, you say, are now obliged to conceal their hostility to the Constitution under the reasonable rules of the common law respecting public servants, which I own are merely a tissue-paper mask for racial prejudice, will disband when the courts, with stern impartiality, rebuke their impudent attempts under this dupery to repudiate this Amendment. There are other and more portentous enemies than the color-caste, whose aim is not the limitation of the civil rights of any one class, but the overthrow of the civil rights of all classes, by substituting the trust values of the plutocrats or of the communistic principle of the State for the individual. These peculiar theorists, both of whom equally make the individual nothing, and the plutocrats or the State the reservoir, and eventually the representatives of plutocracy or communism or the national government a distributing depot for all civil rights, have proved the most formidable enemies of civil liberty. The history of the decline and fall of liberty everywhere proves that whenever this same horde of barbarians, differing through all ages only in surrounding conditions and in the assumption of mere names, have first invaded her fair dominions, after devouring and destroying her substance, they have reared alternately the thrones of anarchy and of despotism upon her ruins, and then, in the sheer helplessness of despair, have raised to royal power some bloody butcher tyrant or usurping despot."

"But," interrupted the student, "are not these public enemies whom you fear only a handful?"

"It is evident," replied the journalist, "that this topic requires other treatment than the opportunities of a cursory conversation can afford. The subject is as illimitable as the universal history of the government of mankind when it is carried on not by fixed constitutional laws, but by the temporary substitution of human expedients.

"To unfold my meaning," continued the journalist, "would require volumes, but I may disprove your generalization by particularization. John Brown was a convict, and expired on the gallows. The Abolitionists originally did not number a corporal's