decorum, education, and natural nobleness might become the peer of any American citizen. The same love of freedom, the same hatred of oppression, the same recognition of the rights of humanity wherever the Christian religion has breathed and shown its force have inspired principles of action similar to this amendment. It is a vast, imposing national structure, builded by the people of the United States, and its nationality stands out and towers above all the petty attributes of caste; it sowed a living seed, promising immeasurable good. It has long been known, all over the globe, to be a fundamental maxim of the American Constitution that every rank or character of citizen is equally subject to the laws,—can it be that that national maxim and the sublime principle underlying it may be overturned by the "reasonable discretion" of any class? Must not all rational minds reflect that mutual toleration is one of the penalties of civilized, polite society? That in church, state, business, and personal intercourse, toleration of others is the foundation of all individual, political, and civil social rights? Is not that doctrine in full accord with the Declaration of Independence, "that all men are born free and equal"? Political, civil, public rights are not to be misunderstood, as if they gave license for the indulgence of purely personal and private tastes, predilections, affinities, and attractions; the two are not commingled; they stand apart. The one is a civil, the other a social right. Can there be racial-political civil rights, racial public rights? Are not all civil rights the same in America, independent of race or previous condition?
This "reasonable discretion" of Hall and DeCuir authorizes discrimination, based on color, not on character. It does not pretend to bear any relation to moral worth or civic fitness, but insists upon treating this race as a fallen, degraded offspring of the nation, with whom the government and people of the country where it lives, must not sympathize, but whom they may lawfully ostracise; it denies the existence in America, in so far as these citizens are concerned, of the indiscriminative, unchallenged constitutional freedom and privilege of citizenship.
Hall and DeCuir judicially determines that there is an unlimited power to oppress and wound color, upon the ground
