Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/680

648 Disappearance of old issues. [1879-85 ignorant and credulous race were habitual at elections ; and the upshot was the entire impotence and virtual disappearance of the Southern Republican party except at congressional and presidential elections. In some States even the pretence of running a ticket was abandoned. The " solid South " feared by Stevens and Sumner in 1865 was hence- forward a reality. Simultaneously a series of decisions by the Supreme Court nullified to a considerable extent the powers assumed by the Federal government under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It was in the Slaughter House Cases (1873), that the Court first proclaimed the doctrine that the Fourteenth Amendment, in guaranteeing the rights of citizens of the United States against infringement by the States, was not meant to interfere with the "police power" exercised by the States in legislating for the public health, safety, or convenience. The decisions in later cases along this line such as Bartemeyer v. Iowa (1875), permitting a State law prohibiting the manufacture of liquor ; and Munn v. Illinois (1877), allowing a State to fix rates for grain-elevators carried the doctrine further, until by 1885 it had become perfectly evident that the Court's purpose was rather to restrict than to extend Federal power under that Amendment. But still more significant were decisions which gradually undermined the Reconstruction laws passed to enforce these Amendments. In 1875, in United States v. Reeve, and in 1882, in United States v. Harris, so much of the Force Act of 1870 and the Ku Klux Act of 1871 as purported to punish individuals for conspiring to deprive negroes of their rights under the last two Amendments was declared unconstitutional, the Court holding that the Amendments applied only to State action. For the same reason the Court in 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, declared the Supplementary Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. With these decisions the enforcement legislation was practically disposed of. Reconstruction was not only dead, but buried beyond hope of resurrection. As the Reconstruction issue vanished from the stage, so the financial issue ceased in these years to be of any great significance, industrial and agricultural prosperity turning the farmer's mind away from inflationist dreams, and allowing the silver question to rest undisturbed. With prosperity the "Greenback" party rapidly declined; and it was the irony of fate that in 1884, when they ran their last presidential ticket, the Supreme Court, in the case of Juillard v. Greenman, reaffirmed the doctrine that the issue of government legal tender notes in time of peace was constitutional. In the place of the two great issues growing out of the Civil War, but now practically abandoned, the country began to turn once more to problems of external policy and internal government. This was marked, in the field of diplomacy, by the reappearance of a vigorous foreign policy, lacking since the days of Seward and Fish. Commercial treaties