value if the accident of color can subject them to marks of degradation in public; that the fruits of the whole earth to a citizen refused his civil rights are of no appreciable value; that color-caste constructionists should remember how every living thing—man, beast, bird, or insect—delights in absolute freedom; that the elements of life are no dearer or more inestimable than the right of free and unrestrained action in the business and pleasures of life; and that a limitation or discrimination imposed upon one class of citizens, and not upon another, is destructive of the happiness of the class thus deprived of natural liberty. The color-line constructionists must remember that there is a deep instinct of the soul, founded in man's physical and spiritual nature, which calls for personal liberty; that it matters not that fetters are woven of silk: as chains they are iron; that these citizens thirst for personal freedom; that the desire for exemption from any form of bondage is breathed by the Creator into every human soul, white or black; and that their whole nature is on fire to escape from invidious distinctions.
To those nursed and brought up to look upon their fellow beings as an inferior race, whose inborn, innate instincts, traditions, associations, and education take from them the possibility of realizing that the once inferior creature of the state has become a full-grown citizen, the earlier decisions say, in unmistakable tones,—"like a flash of lightning from a dark cloud,"—The work of force and bloodshed is over; you cannot now sin against light. The virtuous, elevated minds who consecrated their lives to this work; who desired to waken America, South and North, East and West, to the rights, capabilities, purposes, and greatness of human nature, whether clad in a black or a white skin; and whose main object in framing these amendments was to give stability to freedom, by clothing it with civil rights, so that it might be carried forward to fulfil its destiny,—embodying the voice of Anglo-Saxon liberty in these amendments, say to Christian America, Why should these men live under that withering curse, the contempt of their fellow-men? Why should not the paths of honor and gain, education, morals, and civic usefulness be opened to a suffering race rocked in the cradle of slavery for two centuries? Let them be viewed in the light of the spirit of Christianity, of
