Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/222

Rh which these laws, after all, are only an assertion. Remember that human liberty, in individuals as in societies and governments, implies the necessity of conforming to a supreme national law, which emanates from the Creator. Let it be borne in mind that the greatest and wisest statesmen, worthy to live forever in the memory of mankind, gave their profoundest consideration to the subject of civil rights, and then framed these three memorial monuments to themselves; insisting that it was the gravest of errors to regard the aversion between the races as irreconcilable; that the whole experience of mankind as jurors, legislators, voters, and tax-payers disproves this assumption; that, the adopted citizens being under the same government, and having the same language, manners, learning, faith, and worship as those of longer standing, the object of this legislation was to better our civil institutions by establishing upon an eternal foundation the civil rights of a class of people, not fierce, savage, or indomitable, but rather the most sensitive, modest, inoffensive, good-hearted, simple, affectionate, truly loyal race on earth, who were now declared to be citizens; and who were closely connected with the rest of the community by a common religion, language, and literature, by common interests and a concern for one another's fate, property, and happiness, and by varied associations which, subjecting them to the discipline, fitted them to be competitors in the active arena of life.

But aside from these amendments, independent of their spirit and the spirit of the earlier decisions of the Supreme Court which is clearly discernible in every line of its recorded wisdom, who is so pitifully ignorant of the mighty drama enacted upon the theatre of time, "with suns for lamps, and eternity for background," as not to know, that the white, not the black skin, was formerly the badge of human bondage; and that, as late as the period when Charles V. took Tunis, he released twenty thousand white Christian slaves? Those who read history with the discrimination of Christian philosophers can see clearly, that, as Charles released these white Christian slaves, so do these Amendments operate to release seven millions of black Christian slaves. If men would make philosophical inquiries respecting the annals of the past, what lessons could be learned! Look for a moment