32

406

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

"When a colored man is in the same room or in the same carriage with
white people, as a servant, there is no talk of social equality, but if he is there
as a man and a gentleman, he is an offence. What makes the difference? It is
not color, for his color is unchanged. The whole essence of the thing is in its
purpose to degrade and stamp out the liberties of the race. It is the old spirit
of slavery and nothing else. To say that because a man rides in the same car
with another he is therefore socially equal is one of the wildest absurdities.

"When I was in England, some years ago, I rode upon highways,
byways, steamboats, stage-coaches and omnibusses. I was in the House of
Commons, in the House of Lords, in the British Museum, in the Coliseum,
in the National Gallery; everywhere; sleeping in rooms where lords and
dukes had slept; sitting at tables where lords and dukes were sitting, but I
never thought that those circumstances made me socially the equal of these
lords and dukes. I hardly think that some of our Democratic friends would
be regarded among those lords as their equals. If riding in the same car
makes one equal, I think that the little poodle dog I saw one day sitting in
the lap of a lady was made equal by riding in the same car with her. Equality,
social equality, is a matter between individuals. It is a reciprocal understanding.
I do not think that when I ride with an educated polished rascal he is
thereby made my equal, or that when I ride with a numbskull it makes him
my equal. Social equality does not necessarily follow from civil equality, and
yet for the purpose of a hell-black and damning prejudice, our papers still
insist that the Civil Rights Bill is a Bill to establish social equality.

"If it is a Bill for social equality, so is the Declaration of Independence,
which declares that all men have equal rights; so is the Sermon on the
Mount; so is the Golden Rule that commands us to do to others as we would
that others should do to us; so is the teaching of the Apostle that of one blood
God has made all nations to dwell on the face of the earth; so is the
Constitution of the United States, and so are the laws and customs of every
civilized country in the world; for nowhere, outside of the United States, is
any man denied civil rights on account of his color."

CHAPTER VII.
DEFEAT OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Causes of the Republican defeat---Tariff and free trade--- No confidence in thc Democratic party.

The next event worthy of remark after the decision of the Supreme Court
against the validity of the Civil Rights Law, and one which strikingly [illustrated]