Page:Justice and Jurisprudence - 1889.pdf/184

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Justice and Jurisprudence.
133

her eyes, guarded by the innumerable hosts of Heaven. This was but for a moment; and then, arrayed in all her magnificence, she appeared to descend from her high eminence, and beckon to her natural guardians in this nether world.

However imaginary the skyborn revelation of the preceding evening, it proved to the student, the next morning, to be not all a dream; for the impossible had happened, as it often does, when least expected. The message came. The journalist excused the seeming delay, saying that a wider range of representatives of the press had united in the discussion than he had at first proposed; several of whom considered the subject an unprofitable one for their business relations; others thought that it was not altogether the time to entertain too liberal opinions about civil rights; and some noodles had only a chuckling grin or a sarcastic leer to contribute to grave and vital questions touching seven million American citizens. He explained further that after their late interview he thought it wiser to feel the pulse of this class of editors, and see beforehand in what direction their course tended. If they proved unruly, it would be necessary hereafter to put bearing-reins upon them. The friends upon whose sagacious co-operation implicit reliance could be placed, he stated, had arrived at a joint judgment; but in the meantime, as the student was in full sight of the un-progressive workings of that jurisprudence which maintained the foundation of caste in America by establishing distinctions and conferring privileges upon classes as classes, he proposed that the student should submit to the press for its analysis not a dry legal review of cases, but a philosophical generalization of the result of the decisions, and an exposure of the viciousness of a system which by legal casuistry so unmercifully abased and scourged seven millions of the society of the American state; a work which should also embody the writer's view of the constitutional status of the civil rights of our American citizens of African descent.

"But for the concise and able summary of the civil-rights cases," he remarked, "which you kindly placed at our disposal, our labors would have been still further protracted. Future investigators will be greatly facilitated in their researches by