All men of sense recognize and cheerfully assent to the exigencies demanding the exercise of a reasonable discretion in adopting rules regulating industrial pursuits and the conduct of the servant of the public. But they regard with grave distrust the undermining policy of the courts, and the encroachment of the public servant. Our onward march must depend upon agitation, demonstration, protestation, and the stimulating of public thought. There is no power to solve the dark problems of the future except law,—in its highest essence, the soul of the universe—the will of God,—not silent, abstract, sleeping law, but law diffused like the fresh air permeating the hidden places wherein race-prejudice coils its dark and venomous folds.
The silent circumspection with which the courts have walked around the Fourteenth Amendment has not been unespied by the faithful determined friends who have the battle to fight with unfettered hands. We cannot stand idly by and permit a reactionary movement towards the mediæval regulations of slavery. We cannot suffer the doctrine of civic equality in the state to sink under the dark current of prejudice. Tyrannical proscription stalks abroad in the land, and the spectacle of civil rights drinking the hemlock of race-prejudice is daily witnessed in America. Its executioners, unlike the jailer who presented the hemlock to the great Greek, do not turn aside and weep at the sight. No lover of freedom can fail to view with ill-suppressed alarm the transformations of the jurisprudence of civil rights in America. The way to their destruction is easy: first one civil right is dispensed with on certain conditions, the observance of others is then rendered unnecessary, then technicalities represent the remainder, until at last all of their original elements pass out of sight.
One of two conclusions seems to us inevitable: either our ignorance upon the subject of civil rights is simply abysmal, or else jurisprudence stands accused. Is the tenure by which we hold these great guarantees merely permissive? Are they only colorable civil rights,to be weighed as mere dust in the balance, beside the prejudice of by-gone slavery, to be determined only according to the best of the prejudices of our judges? Can it be that the Constitution, repaired by the Fourteenth Amend-
