[Footnote 1:  Commonwealth v.  Pierce, 138 Mass. 165.]

XVI

LEGISLATION CONCERNING PERSONAL AND RACIAL RIGHTS

This is, of course, a matter of which books might be, and indeed have been, written; our general essay on popular legislation can do no more than summarize past law-making and the present trend of legislatures, much as some history of the people of England might broadly state the economic facts and laws of the Corn-law period in England.  Racial legislation may, of course, be considered from the point of view of the negro, the Indian, and the alien, and indeed it differs much in all three.  Other personal legislation is largely concerned with the right to exercise trade, already discussed, and the questions of marriage and divorce we reserve for the next chapter.  In the past we have been very unjust, not to say cruel, to the Indian, and though naturally in some respects a high-natured race, have constantly denied him any political share in the government, and only in the very last few years grudgingly extended it to such Indians as renounce their tribe and adopt the habits and mode of life of the white man, or, as in early England, to such freeholders as acquire a quarter section of land.  In the negro’s case, however, we atoned for the early crime of enslavement by the sentimental hurry with which we endeavored in the ’60’s and ’70’s of the last century to take him up by law and force him into exact equality, social as well as political, with the white man.  To aliens, in the third hand, we have been consistently generous, having shown only in the very last few years any attempt whatever to exclude the most worthless or undesirable; except that the prejudice against the Mongolian in the far West is quite as bitter as it ever was against the negro in the South, and he is still sternly refused citizenship, even national citizenship, which we freely extend to the African.  We are thus left in the ridiculous situation of providing that nobody may be a citizen of our great Republic except a white Caucasian and a black African, with considerable ambiguity still as to what the word “white” means.  The American Indians are, indeed, admitted under the conditions before mentioned, so that as a catch-word the reader may remember that we are a red, white, and black country, but not a brown or yellow one.  All this is, of course, the accident of history; but the accidents of history are its most important incidents.

Taking Asiatic races first, the far Western States vie with each other in passing legislation which shall deny them the right to life, or at least to live upon any equality of competition with the white.  Most of such laws are, of course, unconstitutional, but they were at one time enacted with more rapidity than the Supreme Court of the United States could declare them so.  Congress tries to be more reasonable and, indeed, has to be so, in view of the fact that