Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/89

38 that it is color." If this be freedom, it is the freedom of Nero." Can a citizen be daily excluded from paths of industrial progress and exposed to insults, hold his rights, immunities, and privileges at the mercy of a contemptuous public, and yet be a citizen of the United States? If this be a true exposition of constitutional la, the civil rights and the happiness of our race are alike words without meaning, only lofty phrases, mere declamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment is mere brutum fulmen.

There was a time when there were Catholic and Jewish disabilities; they have passed away, and now a more enlightened civilization has to encounter color disabilities. A citizen of color may be subjected to debasing restrictions and artisan discriminations, and, although constituting one of the people of a common country, must be stripped of a feeling of unity with those about him, and exposed to vulgar insults. Color is made a legal and industrial disability; it is subjected to contemptuous treatment, and told, that it is the reasonable right of the public to visit it with these contumelies because it makes other citizens more comfortable and prosperous in their vocations of trade.

Do not let us cease to remember that the innumerable stars of freedom that shine upon this world shine from other worlds; that it is only the bleared optic of prejudice which beholds all these worlds and is unable to perceive the beneficent uses for which they were placed in the firmament by their divine Creator. We are not unmindful that every advancing civilization which has touched the pride of race has encountered proscription, but for the dwellers in the calm realm of truth, whose habitation is not in strife, "the indifference of the great, the sneers and the enmity of the mass," have no terror. They well know that before the age when manuscripts were written with a pointed stick, centuries before the sea had abandoned the salt deserts of Iran and Chaldea, or the mud deposits of the Nile had joined lower Egypt to the plains of Memphis and Thebes, distinctions founded on wrong and injustice have endured for the night; but after the night of sore travail came the day in its glory.

We know that American civil rights cannot always be