Page:Why colored people in Philadelphia are excluded from the street cars.djvu/20

 Gov. Seymour, the representative of a great party. And, to bring this subject up to date, may be added the late rebel mob at New Orleans, which was hissed on, in its wholesale work of murder, by the President of the United States through the telegraph. The brain does not more surely impel or restrain the hand, than do the more educated and influential classes, however imperceptibly, those which are less so, in all cases in which premeditated violence is forseen. And had there really existed any considerable degree of this moral restraining power in this community, these outrages against our people of color would long since have ceased. We are forced then to the conclusion that this community, as a body, by long indulgence in. the wicked habit of wronging and maltreating colored people, has become, like a moral lunatic, utterly powerless, by the exercise of its own will, to resist or control the propensity. And unless it finds an authoritative and sane guardian and controller in the Supreme Court—unless this Court has itself, by chance, escaped this widely spread moral imbecility of vicious type, there seems to be no cure for the disease, nor end to its wickedness. And Philadelphia must still continue to stand, as she now does, alone, among all the cities of the old free States, in the exercise of this most infamous system of class persecution. When Lear cries out "Let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart," we are made to perceive that his mind was not so wholly absorbed in the effect of his wrongs as to prevent it from speculating, in a wild way, on their cause. This touch of nature suggests that any statement of wrongs which does not enter into the causes and conditions which made their commission possible, is imperfect. And to the question which constantly recurs—what is it that has caused the people of Philadelphia thus to stand apart from those of the other northern and western free cities, in this disposition to persecute negroes? the true answer seems to be this: Philadelphia once owned more of them as slaves than any other northern city, with the possible exception of New York; she retains a greater number of them now, in proportion to her white population, than any other such city,