involves the unconstitutional exercise of a terrific power, the boundaries of which are distant and shadowy, and not within sight of this constitutional limitation. Instead of fashioning an easy yoke for the neck of these citizens, what if this enlightened, beneficent, but experimental despotism, which substitutes the arbitrary decree of Jurisprudence in the place of a constitutional limitation, should in the end prove to be the setting of a precedent for the destruction of the civil rights of the last posterity of the Constitution? What if its prolific progeny shall hereafter claim constitutional primogeniture, and under the color of this legal precedent assert unlimited authority of less dubious utility in other directions? Future usurpations may not be prompted by the same large and far-seeing benevolence, nor be in quite so full accord with the social tone of other times, or as well assured of strong political support from the mass of the people. It may not be so possible hereafter, as it now is, to stay so dark a torrent from invading other constitutional domains, than the empty shadowy one which seven millions of citizens are forced now to occupy, under this unconstitutional curtailment of their civil rights. It may hereafter be the lot of the patrons of tyrannical right in America, who entertain contrary convictions, to discover the necessary political alexipharmac for this jurisprudential suicide.
The purpose of this "Inquiry concerning the constitutional limitations of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments" is to institute a general search and inquisition upon which presentment may be found against Jurisprudence: First, for deliberate, palpable, and persistent violation of the letter and spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment. Secondly, for the usurpation of colossal powers which aid, abet, and compass an abridgment of the substantial justice of equality of right by due process of law, in deference to the prevailing delusions of popular sentiment, so gross that it acquiesces in the formidable tyranny of civil discrimination against certain citizens because of their color, race, and previous condition; notwithstanding the solemn guarantee of our Federal Constitution for the equality and universality of civic freedom, irrespective of race, birth, creed, color, or previous condition,—a delusion so monstrous, that it breathes
