as Lord Coke says, "The common law is nothing but reason;" if, as the highest authorities have always held, all laws, organic or otherwise, in their interpretation should be held subject to a reasonable intendment, we should like to know how much of Lord Coke's "reason" or what reasonable intendment marked the action of the courts which in substance have given to mere public servants and labor-classes "free and untrammelled authority" to construe the Fourteenth Amendment.
This subject requires heroic treatment. We are convinced that a vigorous, bold writer will put an end to the feeble, imperfect, cowardly, apologetic spirit of justice, which has completely abandoned the weaker citizen to the tyrannies of the stronger class.
We desire your opinion, whether the Fourteenth Amendment is sovereign, or whether citizen-kings in America have prerogatives superior to those dictates of reason and justice which it embodies. We demand to know whether there is not to be a grander solution of the problem of citizenship in America than the labor-kings, the public-servants, and the labor-classes, marshalled by Hall v. DeCuir, practically have evolved. What we earnestly desire is a comprehensive review of the jurisprudence of those motley bodies of legists whose decisions, since the Supreme Court in Hall v. DeCuir gave them "free and untrammelled authority to pass rules and regulations under State laws" for the conduct of the public business, constitute the practical, scientific, philosophic, historical, and commercial judicature of civil rights in America. By an intrinsic strength of social superiority they have ridden roughshod over the Fourteenth Amendment, and all the analogies and doctrines of the common law. The science of this branch of American jurisprudence, since left to their acute perceptions, is in an unsatisfactory condition, and we want a sober investigation and dissection of the decisions of our courts which have produced or suffered the present obscuration of the great political truths of the Fourteenth Amendment. We also desire a philosophic account of the jurisprudence of race-prejudice, and of the history of its lineal descent from the ancestral jurisprudence of slavery.
It may be permitted us, before you set about your work, to
