late political revolution has wrought; that an open, honest endeavor to conform the rules of law to the amendments is an imperative necessity for the attainment of their grand purpose; that the varied forces which are ever acting and reacting upon each other, in the wondrous complication of the multiform elements making up the state, require reciprocal action between the principles of jurisprudence and the declared civil polity of the nation; that the attitude of jurisprudence towards this great charter of freedom should be independent of the conflict between the old and the new form of political society; and that the new fashioned modesty, cold, coy, reserved, and doubtful, introduced since these amendments, should give way to a larger charity, a broader humanity, and a more decided juristic recognition of the new members of the state. It is indisputable that to be numbered among freemen but at the same time to be subjected to servile discriminations clogs the moral faculties, and reduces the conduct of the man to the standard of a beast, by compelling a degrading submission; that the Dred Scott case demonstrated the fact that jurisprudence, even in a republic of republics, might be made a vehicle of tyranny; that, when the old customs of slavery have a hiding-place in the heart of the public, its errors die hard; that its spirit, still possessed of vital force, may unconsciously incline the ministers of justice to create, within the circumference of a government professedly thoroughly constitutional, a despotism, which may remorselessly crush out all that is most precious and most essential to the enjoyment by this race of their new-born citizenship.
It must be apparent to all men of reflection, that, if the execution of the national purpose to endow this race with the immunities and privileges of American citizenship be committed to a judiciary which disapproves of the polity of the state, whose head and heart are against it (the spirit of liberty commanding only its hands), the revolution in favor of their civil rights will not be progressive. If the noble efforts of wisdom and equity which these amendments embody are intrusted to the management of monopolistic labor-caste and to the public servant, who are under the dominion of vulgar prejudices, jurisprudence is stripped of one of her most glorious prerogatives: she can no
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