has, for one reason or another, been inefficient.  Moreover, the great attempt in the Fourteenth Amendment to place the ordinary social, civil, and political rights of the negro, and necessarily, therefore, of every one else, under the aegis of the Federal government, Federal courts, and Federal legislation, has been nullified; first, by court decision, and later, if we may trust the signs of the times, by contemporary public opinion.  The only thing that remains is that the States cannot make laws which, on their face, are discriminations against the negro, or in social matters against any other race; and in political matters, the Fifteenth Amendment has proved effective to render null State laws which on their face are designed to restrict or deny their equal right of suffrage.

Legislation concerning labor, the industrial condition, and contract rights of the negro, such as the peonage laws, we have considered in an earlier chapter; both State and national laws exist, and the Thirteenth Amendment, being self-executing, has proved effective.  Under the Fifteenth Amendment there is little political legislation, except the effort in Southern States by educational or property qualifications, and most questionably by the so-called “grandfather clause,” to exclude most negroes from the right of suffrage.  Laws imposing property and educational qualifications are, of course, valid, although designed to have the effect of excluding a large proportion of the negroes from voting; laws, on the other hand, which give a permanent right of suffrage to the descendants of a certain class, as of those voters, all white, who were entitled to vote in Southern States in the year 1861, are probably unconstitutional as establishing an hereditary privileged class, though there has as yet been no square decision on this point by the Supreme Court of the United States.  But as there is no further legislation on these subjects, to pursue the matter further would carry us into constitutional law.

In the third field, that of social legislation, there has been a vast number of laws, first by Congress with the intention, under the Fourteenth Amendment, of enforcing social and industrial equality and providing Federal machinery for securing it (the great substance of this has been held unconstitutional and has passed away); later by the States, usually the Southern States, with the exactly opposite purpose of separating the races, at least in social matters, and of subjecting them to a stricter law of labor contract than has, in our country at least, been imposed upon other citizens.

Even this matter of social legislation, which alone remains to be discussed in this book, is quite too vast for more than a brief sketch.  Among the many monographs on the subject may be mentioned the article of G.T.  Stevenson on the “Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances."[1] Even this comparatively narrow matter is by no means exhausted in an article covering twenty pages.  Much of the