be assumed that the same enactments are sufficient to give like protection and benefits to those for whom this bill provides special legislation.  Besides, the policy of the Government from its origin to the present time seems to have been that persons who are strangers to and unfamiliar with our institutions and our laws should pass through a certain probation, at the end of which, before attaining the coveted prize, they must give evidence of their fitness to receive and to exercise the rights of citizens as contemplated by the Constitution of the United States.  The bill in effect proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners, and in favor of the negro, to whom, after long years of bondage, the avenues to freedom and intelligence have just now been suddenly opened.  He must of necessity, from his previous unfortunate condition of servitude, be less informed as to the nature and character of our institutions than he who, coming from abroad, has, to some extent at least, familiarized himself with the principles of a Government to which he voluntarily intrusts “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Yet it is now proposed, by a single legislative enactment, to confer the rights of citizens upon all persons of African descent born within the extended limits of the United States, while persons of foreign birth who make our land their home must undergo a probation of five years, and can only then become citizens upon proof that they are “of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the same.”

The first section of the bill also contains an enumeration of the rights to be enjoyed by these classes so made citizens “in every State and Territory in the United States.”  These rights are “to make and enforce contracts; to sue, be parties, and give evidence; to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property,” and to have “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.”  So, too, they are made subject to the same punishment, pains, and penalties in common with white citizens, and to none other.  Thus a perfect equality of the white and colored races is attempted to be fixed by Federal law in every State of the Union over the vast field of State jurisdiction covered by these enumerated rights.  In no one of these can any State ever exercise any power of discrimination between the different races.  In the exercise of State policy over matters exclusively affecting the people of each State it has frequently been thought expedient to discriminate between the two races.  By the statutes of some of the States, Northern as well as Southern, it is enacted, for instance, that no white person shall intermarry with a negro or mulatto.  Chancellor Kent says, speaking of the blacks, that—­