Page:Why colored people in Philadelphia are excluded from the street cars.djvu/26

 tually to join in the celebration of our great national anniversary. This is progress, but it is slow, and the causes of the obstruction to it must be sought in the incomplete emancipation of 1780. But another cause which gives Philadelphia a bad eminence in respect to the treatment of colored people, is the comparatively large numbers of them which she possesses over other northern cities, with the one exception above noted; and this cause seems simply to connect with and form part of another—the fear of amalgamation. This fear greatly disturbs a large portion of our white population. In discussing the car question, an opponent of admission at once urges that it will be a stepping stone to amalgamation. The suggestion that seven disabled colored soldiers might safely be allowed equal privileges in a military hospital with 160 white soldiers, is put aside with the remark that such a rule would countenance amalgamation. The matron, with downcast eyes and timid horror, intimates this objection to the reception, into the same Orphan Home, of little white and colored children, mostly between the ages of four and ten. All this sounds very illogical. Hitherto, there has been little amalgamation of the two races at the North, and as the colored people never make advances to the Whites, that little cannot be increased until the Whites make advances to them. When is this to begin? Let each one answer this question individually. This matter, in its negative aspect, rests entirely within the control of the white population. The broad distinction, so often pointed out, between political and social equality, is still by many of our people persistently confounded, and perhaps it may be necessary to say once more, in respect to it, that the former, everybody has the present or prospective right to demand—the latter, nobody; for the barrier which separates the two is made up of private doorsteps. Each of these, its owner has absolutely at his own command, and no man has a right to prescribe, even by implication, whom he shall permit, or forbid, to pass it. It is not an open question. But supposing the relations, so long sustained at the North, between the two races, and which the Blacks do not complain of, when unaccompanied with wrongs, were suddenly to cease; and everywhere, North and