us it seems used only to supply the place of a reason; it keeps up an appearance in spite of the most abject mental poverty; it asserts and insists, in spite of positive enactment, upon an unconquerable aversion to the civic equality of all races, as justifying the violation of the broad, deep, organic law. We feel that the fundamental maxim of a free government, wrought into the organic law , should have a more substantial solution than "the free and untrammelled rules" established by an unenlightened body of tradesmen, whose high standard of civil right accords with the scientific morality of their business code. All those grave questions which puzzled Webster, Calhoun, Hobbes, Bentham, and hosts of other eminent men, have been practically submitted to the enlightened perceptions of the servants of the public, and to the industrial labor-caste, which regulates all artisan vocations by guilds excluding our race from self-development in all their departments of handicraft, and each of them construing the Fourteenth Amendment in a manner closely resembling the doctrine of that profound political sophist of the beer-saloon, Most, who contends that political justice is a mere imposition of the legislative will, a tyrant, a creature which must be overcome by the propagandists of deeds.
Do these people not maintain that, the moral sense of one set of citizens being opposed to the practical principles of government, the government is a tyrant, a creature to be overcome by the propagandists "of a 'free and untrammelled authority'"? Do they not reject with disdain Burke's theory, "That the nation would fall into ruin if the foundations of society rested upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative to every person," and deny that the Fourteenth Amendment is mandatory legislation, that its rule for the decision of civil-rights controversies is the equality of all citizens before the law?
They deem it a monstrous proposition, that a different set of principles, rules, or formulæ should not be applied to the colored citizen, from those by which the white citizen in general is held bound, and is habitually regulated in the enjoyment of his civil rights.
Against all such construction of the color-line let us declare war, war for ourselves and for our children and for our grand-
