of the accommodation, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theatres, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. That any person who shall violate the foregoing section by denying to any citizen, except for reasons by law applicable to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude, the free enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges in said section enumerated, or by aiding or inciting such denial, shall, for every such offence, forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars to the person aggrieved thereby, to be recovered in an action of debt, with full costs.
The fact that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment and of the Civil-Rights Bill were one and the same individuals was well known to the court, and in the opening of their opinion in the Civil-Rights Cases they say,—
"The principal arguments adduced in favor of the Civil Rights Bill were such as were advanced whilst the law [Civil-Rights Bill] was under consideration. We have carefully considered these arguments, as was due to the eminent ability of those who put them forward."
It turned out in the end, however, that these laudatory commendations were merely colorable, and without other warrant than is usual from the courtesy of the bench; for at the close of this now famous decision, it cannot escape observation, that their well-known patriotism, their eminence, the gravity of their reputation as statesmen and constitutional lawyers, saved neither the authors and advocates of the Civil-Rights Bill, nor their argument in the civil-rights cases, from the playful irony of the court, underneath which lurked a deep seriousness of purpose not only to rebuke, but to place upon record the rebuke,—that their eminences, like guilty reprobates, "were running the slavery argument into the ground." The agitation in the breast of the court, its hostile flashes, were regarded as unusual as its display was unwarranted by judicial precedent. If the argu-
