These are marked instances; but they are types. If Frederick Douglass
and Oscar James Dunn could be made to suffer, how much must others be
called to endure! All alike, the feeble, the invalid, the educated,
the refined, women as well as men, are shut out from the ordinary
privileges of the steamboat or rail-car, and driven into a vulgar
sty with smokers and rude persons, where the conversation is as
offensive as the scene, and then again at the roadside inn are denied
that shelter and nourishment without which travel is impossible. Do
you doubt this constant, wide-spread outrage, extending in uncounted
ramifications throughout the whole land? With sorrow be it said, it
reaches everywhere, even into Massachusetts. Not a State which does
not need the benign correction. The evidence is on your table in
numerous petitions. And there is other evidence, already presented by
me, showing how individuals have suffered from this plain denial of
equal rights. Who that has a heart can listen to the story without
indignation and shame? Who with a spark of justice to illumine his soul
can hesitate to denounce the wrong? Who that rejoices in republican
institutions will not help to overthrow the tyranny by which they are
degraded?
I do not use too strong language, when I expose this tyranny as a
degradation to republican institutions,--ay, Sir, in their fundamental
principle. Why is the Declaration of Independence our Magna Charta? Not
because it declares separation from a distant kingly power; but because
it announces the lofty truth that all are equal in rights, and, as a
natural consequence, that just government stands only on the consent
of the governed,--all of which is held to be self-evident. Such is
the soul of republican institutions, without which the Republic is a
failure, a name and nothing more. Call it a Republic, if you will, but
it is in reality a soulless mockery.
Equality in rights is not only the first of rights, it is an axiom of
political truth. But an axiom, whether of science or philosophy, is
universal, and without exception or limitation; and this is according
to the very law of its nature. Therefore it is not stating an axiom to
announce grandly that only white men are equal in rights; nor is it
stating an axiom to announce with the same grandeur that all persons
are equal in rights, but that colored persons have no rights except to
testify and vote. Nor is it a self-evident truth, as declared; for no
truth is self-evident which is not universal. The asserted limitation
destroys the original Declaration, making it a ridiculous sham, instead
of that sublime Magna Charta before which kings, nobles, and all
inequalities of birth must disappear as ghosts of night at the dawn.