this race even more freely than did a half-million of their forefathers to emancipate it, the problem would still remain unsettled, and could be determined only by law; that the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, and the placing of eight millions under the tutelage again of the general government, would destroy the material interests of the country, the industrial education of these producers, impede the moral development of both races, and, leading inevitably to the nullification of the amendments, and perhaps to the disintegration of the Constitution itself, would prove as threatening to the unity and happiness of the American people, as did the revolt of the Southern States against the government. That in this age neither social abhorrence of the colored population, nor unintelligent, retrogressive, pro-slavery heresies, obsolete views of a day that is dead, nor myopic, pride-begotten prejudices, can be substituted for the widening character and the growing force of American thought, the sublime mission of which is to restore peace and order to human hearts and human society, by the establishment of the fundamental principle of the civic equality of all American citizens; that, in the Atlantic States south of the thirty-sixth parallel of latitude, the relations of the races are interdependent; that eight millions of Afro-Americans can neither be annihilated nor transported.
The Brotherhood respectfully submit, that if the polity of Catholicism and the spirit of Catholicity, with a governmental control extending over the peoples of every nation of the earth, has preserved the unity of its flock, in spite of the vicissitudes of almost twenty centuries, surely the chosen guardians of the American republic may hope for all time to perpetuate and combine in perfect unity its diverse popular elements, by preserving inviolate the sanctity of that principle which has been rigidly enforced for centuries by the Roman hierarchy,—the catholic doctrine of liberty regulated by law, which is the essence of the spirit of equality of right by due process of law, which the Fourteenth Amendment proclaims; that the freedom of the whole American people is now imperilled by judicial interpretation rendering this beneficent maxim inoperative as to the immunities of the colored race; that juristic impairment of this
