Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/169

118 that any class of citizens should be allowed to hoist their colors and fly their anti-constitutional flags in the face of the courts. Higher considerations than the significant factor of the colored man's vote and of his well-known loyalty to the Constitution and institutions of the country ought to influence the American people in the enforcement of the constitutional rights of all American citizens. It is to be remembered that we are manufacturing by the million each year, out of foreign material, citizens who do not regard the Constitution as the central orb around which we and they must continue to revolve, or fly off into chaos.

"Our Constitution, sir, was not the gift of man: it was the grant of Heaven. It is the natural luminary for whose rays the world should long. I confess it makes my cheeks burn when, in the warm radiance of its ever-beaming light, I see a meagre, ghastly, shrivelled relic of the Color Line, or Squatter-Sovereign of Property Equality, political Pharisee of Trust, illiterate vagabonds and demagogues of Labor, sitting upon that sacred instrument, so dear to every American heart, and with brazen effrontery holding aloft their black, red, or mixed colors, with such mottoes as 'Our rules and regulations are paramount to the Constitution,' 'The right of private property is lodged in the State as a public trust, and land is the only public debtor,' To the chain-gang with co-educationists,' 'Human nature is human nature.'"