they have worshipped had retarded their own civilization. Its sublime mission is to keep watch and ward that the stream of time may not be obstructed, or diverted from its true course.
"Justice and Jurisprudence" is intended to be a defence of the civil liberty of the whole American people. It presents the claim of the African race with no fairer gloss than naked truth affords. It is especially designed to be a treatise on the true exposition of the noble principle of equality of rights by due process of law, which these addressers insist is the great seminal doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment; and constitutes an impregnable foundation for the civil tranquillity, present and future, of a strong, proud, loving, and united people. The book is also intended as an unfolding of the true policy of the American state, and endeavors to demonstrate that the safety and uniformity of the constitutional liberties of the whole American people can rest upon no more solid foundation than is afforded by the rigid enforcement of the principle of the equality of the rights of all citizens by due process of law. They believe that the popular specious pretensions and perversions employed for the maintenance of a contrary doctrine by those false-hearted scribes and Pharisees who worship the graven images—the dii inferni—of slavery are factious, fallacious, and dangerous to the civil tranquillity of the whole people of the United States, and they strenuously maintain that the Constitution as amended by Article Fourteen is the most perfect work of political wisdom the world contains, fixed in perfect form by superintending Providence through the mighty efforts of gigantic minds. And if the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment be carried into every region of civil right, if its precepts are observed in sober verity and executed with due charity, even by magistrates of less mental stature and far feebler powers than the transcendent genius which framed that article, it will in time prove to be of the greatest advantage to the inseparable interests, the general happiness, and the practical prosperity of the whole American people.
May a wise, happy, and speedy settlement of this grave issue be soon realized. To the obtaining of this blessed Christian end, subservient alike to the teachings of the gospel of Christ
