Rights Bill, seemed ominous of its fate. The author of the bill had been stricken down in the Senate Chamber from the rear, by a valorous champion of the "Crime against Kansas," who boasted that "a blow struck by him would be followed by a revolution." On the 17th of July, 1881, just sixteen years after the memorable words of Garfield had been pronounced over the martyred President, the utterer of those famous words was himself dying from the bullet of an assassin. Too faint for utterance, he wrote on a piece of paper his name, followed by "Strangulatus pro republica." These were his last words. What was thus spoken by the martyr-President Garfield over the body of the martyred Lincoln, and the words written of himself on his death-bed, linked together by the chain of destiny, seemed, in the mysterious mechanism of events, to be almost a prediction of the fate which overtook the Civil-Rights Bill, the favorite daughter and reputed heiress of the Republican party, for whose life these martyrs and hundreds of thousands more had laid them down to their last sleep on many a hard-fought battle-field.
The lowering face of Jurisprudence in the Civil-Rights Cases at first plunged the hopes of the African race into outer darkness; but when the smoke of the great Civil-Rights contest had cleared away from this temple of the giants, and when at last the morn of reason dawned and smiled upon this "grim-looked night," the dark-skinned children of the sun, who had kept watch, saw that this decision had not condemned their race to a kingdom of perpetual night, for the Fourteenth Amendment was still standing, in proprio vigore. And as the fiery cross appeared to Constantine in the noonday sky, so, in their journey towards their land of promise, the luminous sign of Civil Rights shone upon their sorrow-stricken vision, and they read in the Fourteenth Amendment, as if the words had been placed there by the nation, "In hoc signo vinces."
The Supreme Court had adjudged, in the Civil-Rights Cases, that the Fourteenth Amendment clothed Congress with no authority to adopt a civil code for the regulation of the conduct of individuals in the States in their corporate or personal capacity. It had decided that the Fourteenth Amendment is a prohibition
