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400 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

than in anger; more in a tone of regret than in bitterness and reproach, and
more to promote sound views than to find bad motives for unsound views.

"We cannot, however, overlook the fact that though not so intended, this
decision has inflicted a heavy calamity upon seven millions of the people of
this country and left them naked and defenceless against the action of a
malignant, vulgar and pitiless prejudice from which the Constitution plainly
intended to shield them.

"It presents the United States before the world as a Nation utterly desti-
tute of power to protect the constitutional rights of its own citizens upon its
own soil.

"It can claim service and allegiance, loyalty and life, from them, but it
cannot protect them against the most palpable violation of the rights of
human nature; rights to secure which, governments are established. It can tax
their bread and tax their blood, but it has no protecting power for their per-
sons. Its National Power extends only to the District of Columbia and the
Territories–to where the people have no votes– and to where the land has
no people. All else is subject to the States. In the name of common sense. I
ask what right have we to call ourselves a Nation, in view of this decision
and of this utter destitution of power?

"In humiliating the colored people of this country, this decision has
humbled the Nation. It gives, to the Rail-Road Conductor in South Carolina
or Mississippi, more power than it gives to the National Government. He
may order the wife of the Chief Justice of the United States into a smoking
car, full of hirsute men, and compel her to go and to listen to the coarse jests
and inhale the foul smoke of a vulgar crowd. It gives to hotel-keepers who
may, from a prejudice born of the rebellion, wish to turn her out at midnight
into the storm and darkness, power to compel her to go. In such a case
according to this decision of the Supreme Court, the National Government
has no right to interfere. She must take her claim for protection and redress,
not to the Nation, but to the State; and when the State, as I understand it,
declares that there is upon its Statute Book, no law for her protection, and
that the State has made no law against her, the function and power of the
National Government are exhausted and she is utterly without any redress.

"Bad, therefore, as our case is, under this decision, the evil principle
affirmed by the Court is not wholly confined to, or spent upon persons of
color. The wife of Chief-Justice Waite – I speak it respectfully – is protected
to-day, not by the law, but solely by the accident of her color. So far as the
law of the land is concerned, she is in the same condition as that of the hum-
blest colored woman in the Republic. The difference between colored and