Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/101

50 Whether the opening statement or the argument which follows may aid in the accomplishment of your purpose, all-trying time can alone determine. If the close mode of combat adopted shall be deemed in some quarters a transgression against conventional usage, this system of warfare has not been chosen without adequate motive or justifiable occasion.

Apparently your purpose is, by national education, to influence national character; to induce white American citizens to favor the declared policy of the nation, rather than to foster prevailing popular error. Assuredly, the subject is deserving of the gravest reflection by every citizen, who is truly anxious for the welfare of his country and the maintenance of her freedom. In its practical execution, this attempt at rudimentary political education, which you desire to see progress, has encountered many embarrassments. The measured movement of logic, which custom prescribes in arguments concerning matters governed by the exact science of the law, and an abstruse, profound, dry treatise would prove wearisome, if not repulsive, to the average reader unaccustomed to thought. If a discussion of civil rights can be made interesting to a larger number (who are able to grapple with more extended bearings and magnitudes than are afforded by strict, narrow issues of law, not always having a close connection with the specific subject), it appears to the writer that, as the avowed mode of accomplishing your great purpose is to educate the nation by the conversion of the individual citizen, conventional dignity could rarely be sacrificed with more advantage than in an undertaking of the proposed character.

However infelicitous to trained thinkers, long hackneyed in anatomizing legal distinctions, may be the general arrangement of this work and the frequent interpolation therein of apparently irrelevant matter, the hope is indulged that the plan adopted, even with its manifold imperfections, may prove less unattractive to the general reader, in whom it is your main purpose to stimulate thought.

The work is directed towards a practical end; and it is matter of regret, that the connection and drift of the argument, at times, has apparently not been clearly preserved nor the