Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/668

660 extends only to the District of Columbia and the Territories—to where the people have no votes, and to where the land has no people. All else is subject to the States. In the name of common sense, I ask what right have we to call ourselves a nation, in view of this decision and of this utter destitution of power?

In humiliating the colored people of this country, this decision has humbled the nation. It gives to the railroad conductor in South Carolina or Mississippi more power than it gives to the National Government. He may order the wife of the Chief Justice of the United States into a smoking-car full of hirsute men, and compel her to go and to listen to the coarse jests and inhale the foul smoke of a vulgar crowd. It gives to hotel-keepers who may, from a prejudice born of the Rebellion, wish to turn her out at midnight into the storm and darkness, power to compel her to go. In such a case, according to this decision of the Supreme Court, the National Government has no right to interfere. She must take her claim for protection and redress, not to the nation, but to the State; and when the State, as I understand it, declares that there is upon its statute-book no law for her protection, and that the State has made no law against her, the function and power of the National Government are exhausted and she is utterly without any redress.

Bad, therefore, as our case is, under this decision, the evil principle affirmed by the court is not wholly confined to or spent upon persons of color. The wife of Chief-Justice Waite—I speak it respectfully—is protected to-day, not by the law, but solely by the accident of her color. So far as the law of the land is concerned, she is in the same condition as that of the humblest colored woman in the Republic. The difference between colored and white here is that the one,