Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/107

56 enlightenment to be in regard to the portentous struggle of your minority with this majority. Your grievance is, that, as an industrial factor, equal in fitness with others, your race represents as such factor no recognized value, especially in the North, East, and West; that your labor as a commodity, because it is excluded manu forti from just participation in industrial pursuits, represents neither its legitimate value to the nation nor to the individual possessor of the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The czardom of Labor, which thus arbitrarily rejects as contraband the candidate of this race for industrial preferment, violates in principle the civil rights of every American citizen.

That the industrial value of this citizen has thus fallen an easy prey to the ferocious labor mastiff unquestionably results from a civic inferiority which renders him comparatively defenceless. It is the pitch of race-prejudice which, having daubed and defiled his civic equality and compelled it to most ignoble stooping in the high department of the State's Justice, has communicated its touch to inferior tyrants, who boldly refuse all recognition of the value of a national industrial factor in a realm where their sway seems absolutely independent of constitutional limitation. Example in the loftier stations of the government is a most seductive and generative school for the pupilage of tyrants in its lower departments. This result of a denial, to citizens of this race, of the communitive, distributive justice which others of different color enjoy in all their pursuits of life, affords an apt illustration of the contagion of example, and of the pernicious efficacy of the public opinion thus formed, which first suffers to be debased and finally destroys the enormous economic value to the nation of millions of citizens fit for industrial producers, who are thus excluded from opportunities accorded other citizens. That such an incalculable loss to the nation's resources should be tolerated under a government guaranteeing the enforcement of the equality of the right of all its citizens by due process of law is almost incredible. It matters but little to-day, for, thus far, the public or private interests of no class, majority or minority, has suffered so gravely as to arrest national attention; but this gradual undermining of the bases on which repose