Flushed with their local success, and encouraged by the timidity of the Courts and the indifference of public opinion, the Southern whites have carried their campaign into the national government, with an ominous degree of success.  If they shall have their way, no Negro can fill any federal office, or occupy, in the public service, any position that is not menial.  This is not an inference, but the openly, passionately avowed sentiment of the white South.  The right to employment in the public service is an exceedingly valuable one, for which white men have struggled and fought.  A vast army of men are employed in the administration of public affairs.  Many avenues of employment are closed to colored men by popular prejudice.  If their right to public employment is recognized, and the way to it open through the civil service, or the appointing power, or the suffrages of the people, it will prove, as it has already, a strong incentive to effort and a powerful lever for advancement.  Its value to the Negro, like that of the right to vote, may be judged by the eagerness of the whites to deprive him of it.

Not only is the Negro taxed without representation in the States referred to, but he pays, through the tariff and internal revenue, a tax to a National government whose supreme judicial tribunal declares that it cannot, through the executive arm, enforce its own decrees, and, therefore, refuses to pass upon a question, squarely before it, involving a basic right of citizenship.  For the decision of the Supreme Court in the Giles case, if it foreshadows the attitude which the Court will take upon other cases to the same general end which will soon come before it, is scarcely less than a reaffirmation of the Dred Scott decision; it certainly amounts to this—­that in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.  To say this much is to say that all privileges and immunities which Negroes henceforth enjoy, must be by favor of the whites; they are not rights.  The whites have so declared; they proclaim that the country is theirs, that the Negro should be thankful that he has so much, when so much more might be withheld from him.  He stands upon a lower footing than any alien; he has no government to which he may look for protection.

Moreover, the white South sends to Congress, on a basis including the Negro population, a delegation nearly twice as large as it is justly entitled to, and one which may always safely be relied upon to oppose in Congress every measure which seeks to protect the equality, or to enlarge the rights of colored citizens.  The grossness of this injustice is all the more apparent since the Supreme Court, in the Alabama case referred to, has declared the legislative and political department of the government to be the only power which can right a political wrong.  Under this decision still further attacks upon the liberties of the citizen