DISSENTING OPINIONS atoms." Certainly these are serious charges to be laid by any one at the door of our highest court : and coming as they do from the body of that court itself, their effect upon the public may easily be conceived. "I earnestly hope," says Justice Wayne, dissenting in the Slaughter-house Cases, re ferring to the opinion of the court, "that the consequences to follow may prove less seri ous and far-reaching than the minority fear they will be." But the most drastic treatment of this kind to which the court has ever had to submit at the hands pf one of its members, is, perhaps, that furnished by Mr. Justice Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 556, in which the Jim Crow law of Louisiana came to be questioned. "It is to be re gretted," he says, "that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race. In my opin ion, the judgment this day rendered will in time prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case. . . . The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the be lief that it is possible, by means of state en actments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amend ments of the Constitution. . . . The thin dis guise of ' equal ' accommodations for passen gers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done." Moreover, the attitude of discussion which the Dissenting Opinion assumes, and the heat of argument which it sometimes evokes, create naturally a tendency to travel far out of the law and to extend the discussion to all manner of subjects, political, social, and economic, and cause the objecting judges to forget that it is not their province
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to make the law, nor even to direct its policy, but merely to interpret it. Thus, concerning the political policy regulating our relations with the Chinese, Mr. Justice Brewer had this to say, in April, 1904, in a dissenting opinion in United States v. Sing Tuck: "Finally,.let me say, that the time has been when many young men from China came to our educational institutions to pursue their studies; when her commerce sought our shores, and her people came to build our railroads, and when China looked upon this country as her best friend. If all this be reversed, and the most populous nation on earth becomes the great antago nist of this republic, the careful student of history will recall the words of Scripture, 'they have sown the wind; they shall reap the whirlwind,' and for cause of such an tagonism need look no further than the treatment accorded during the last twenty years by this country to the people of that nation." A most remarkable instance of this ten dency is to be found in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Harlan in the Jim Crow Case, above referred to: "Sixty mil lions of whites," he says, "are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. . . . What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?" "Such laws," says the distinguished jurist, "can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive the conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned It is scarcely just to say that a colored citizen should not object to occupying a public coach assigned to his own race. He does not object, nor perhaps would he ob ject, to separate coaches for his race, if his rights under the law were recognized. But
