dangerous navigators, because incapable of taking the deeper soundings of the sea of civil liberty. They are daily steering millions of the hardy sons of toil, in the way they themselves would veer the ship of state, to dangerous coasts, strewn in by gone centuries with the wrecks of civil liberty.
"It is true," he continued, "the general press follow in the broad deep channels as did our forefathers, who sounded all the depths and shoals mapped out in the Constitution for the preservation of our American civil rights. But I also think, with you, that the courts, which ought to be calm and collected and in command when we are at sea, should not, in the face of such a multitudinous array of formidable public enemies of high and low degree as is daily gathering, be unguarded, or give any loose or equivocal construction to these Amendments, which constructions in the end may come back to plague the inventors. The descendants of the freedmen, whose birthrights as citizens you charge to-day are openly sold for a mess of pottage, may yet be called upon, as were their forefathers in the days just gone by, to stand between the Constitution and its ruthless invaders, 'to shield it and save it, or perish there too.'[1]
"In the mysterious workings of Providence, to whose inscrutable ways the wisdom of man is foolishness, it may transpire that the present agitation of the constitutional enforcement of civil rights in favor of American citizens of African descent, may be another instrumentality for the establishment of civil rights as distinguished from the communistic principle of equality of right in property and from the despotism of trusts, upon a solid constitutional foundation, for all our citizens, irrespective of the color-line caste, prejudice, or previous condition. The time has arrived when it is no longer desirable
- ↑ It is a curious matter of judicial history that the Supreme Court of the United States, in the famous Slaughter-House cases, 16 Wall. 36, use the following language: "When the armies of freedom found themselves upon the soil of slavery, they could do nothing less than free the poor victims whose enforced servitude was the foundation of the quarrel; and, when hard pressed in the contest, these men (for they proved themselves men in that terrible crisis) offered their services and were accepted by thousands to aid in suppressing the unlawful rebellion."
