strangely at variance with his usual imperturbable demeanor; then, with heart-felt warmth, he exclaimed:
"The presumption, Mr. Chief Justice, of public servants in assuming the attitude of bold enemies to the Constitution of their country, surpasses the comprehension of a foreigner. If I may make so bold, sir, the 'vulnus immedicabile,' of which you have spoken, is not an incurable wound in the breast of the supercilious grands seigneurs of the public service; it is the attempted overthrow of the Constitutional Amendments themselves. The Amendments are the organic law of the land; and the impudent readiness of these people, upon any pretext whatever, to dethrone and usurp the civil rights of seven million of citizens thus sacredly secured, without any warrant, colorable or otherwise of law, except the unproved fact of injury to their business if they should conform to the declared will of the nation, is without a parallel in the constitutional history of the world. These high-flown bourgeois gentilhommes are guilty of impious and infamous tyranny against the civil rights of seven millions of people, on the simple ground of prospective business losses. These crows of the commonwealth forsooth must needs borrow hawk's wings to fly in the face of the American eagle, and insult the majesty of the nation by trifling with and evading its most sacred laws."
"The Fourteenth Amendment," replied the Chief Justice, "is the universal rule of action,—in fact, the supreme law. It has no relation, special or general, remote or proximate, to the interests of any person as respects his business or calling. For every citizen it provides a rule to which all private interests must be subordinate."
Continuing in the same vehement strain, the student said, "Gravely to maintain that there is any law, lawyer, logic, or logician, sufficiently powerful to defend and maintain their high and mighty arrogance in repudiating the Constitution, is treason against the human understanding. It is as unreasonable as to assert the philosophy of savages against the philosophy of savants: as degrading as to substitute the instinct of the herd of human cattle, for the rational judgment of the highest order of nature. A sadder travesty upon law, reason, philosophy, and
