it is a national Congress living, with the executive, in direct touch with the foreign nations themselves.  Broadly speaking, our national legislation is to exclude immigration, but guarantee equality of property right, at least, to such Mongolian aliens as are actually in the country; and to extend or guarantee such right of treatment by treaties, which treaties are, of course, acts of Congress, like any other act of Congress, entirely valid in favor of the foreign power and enforceable by it even to the issue of war, but possibly, as a constitutional question, not enforceable by the Federal government against the States.  An endless mass of legislation in California and other Western States has been devised, either openly against the Chinese or so couched as to really exclude them from the ordinary civic liberties, and most of our State laws or courts declare that the Japanese are Mongolian although that people deny it.  Many statutes, moreover, are aimed at Asiatics in general; which would possibly include the Hindoos, who are of exactly the same race as ourselves.  Indeed, some judges have excluded Hindoos from naturalization, or persons of Spanish descent, while admitting negroes, which is like excluding your immediate ancestors in favor of your more remote Darwinian ones.  Even in New York and other Eastern States, the employment of aliens, particularly Asiatics, is forbidden in all public work—­which laws may be invalid as against a Federal treaty.  Yet statutes against the employment of any but citizens of the United States in public works are growing more frequent than ever, and seem to me quite within the rights of the State itself to determine.  But Pennsylvania could not impose a tax of three cents per day upon all alien laborers, to be paid by the employer.  Many States are beginning to provide against the ownership of land by aliens.  This, of course, is perfectly constitutional and has full justification in the history and precedent of most other countries, and as applied to foreign corporations it is still more justifiable; and the Western States very generally provide against the ownership of land, other than such as may be taken on mortgage, by foreign corporations, or corporations even of which a large proportion of the stock is held by foreigners.

Racial legislation as to negroes may be divided into laws bearing on their legal, political, and social rights, including, in the latter, contracts of labor and of marriage.  By the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, all adopted within ten years after the war, we endeavored to put the negro in a legal, a political, and a social equality with whites in every particular.  A broad statement, sufficiently correct for the general reader, may be made that only the legal part has succeeded or has lasted.  That legislation which is aimed at social equality, all of it Federal legislation, has generally proved unconstitutional, and that part which has been aimed at political equality