Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/125

74, should have any more relevancy to the question of the infringement of his civil rights than the inquiries of a physiologist concerning the fibre of his muscle or the texture of his brain, or the speculations of a specialist regarding the physiognomy of the plaintiff or the craniognomy of the defendant. Under the oft-repeated declarations of the Supreme Court, with entire confidence that he was standing on solid ground, regardless of all discriminators, the foreigner would stoutly maintain that the plaintiff, if a good citizen, a man of pure morals, well educated, and otherwise gentlemanlike, had only to show that he was denied a civil right enjoyed by all other citizens of the United States, and the controversy would be confined to the single and simple issue of fact, whether or not the enjoyment or exercise of the plaintiff's civil right had been invaded, questioned, or denied by the defendant in his capacity of public servant or in his private duty as a citizen of the commonwealth. He would declare that direct or indirect reference in such trials to the plaintiff's skin could have no more relevancy to the civil-rights issues, than it would have as evidence of his guilt or innocence if he were on trial for high treason, murder, arson, or larceny.

If, however, such a legal tactician as we will suppose our foreign publicist to be, dexterous and versed in the legerdemain of the law, should press his investigations a step further, and, instead of surveying general doctrines, should apply himself to the examination of special cases, he would discover (anomalous as it must appear to him) that not a single controversy between black-faced plaintiffs and black-faced defendants, or between white-faced plaintiffs and white-faced defendants, on the question of the infringement of their civil rights, could the books reveal; but he would find an endless amount of litigation in cases where the plaintiff's cuticle was dark, and the defendant's of thinner and more pellucid texture. Stranger still would be his discovery that in every such controversy the learned court, the counsel of the plaintiff and of the defendant, and the entire bar had at the start unanimously declared that the doctrine of the universality of civil rights was fundamental American law, applicable to all citizens of the United States, irrespective of their several cuticles.