MR. SUMNER. I should like to bring home to the Senator that nearly one half of the people of Georgia are now excluded from the equal rights which my amendment proposes to secure; and yet I understand that the Senator disregards their condition, sets aside their desires, and proposes to vote down my proposition. The Senator assumes that the former Rebels are the only people of Georgia. Sir, I see the colored race in Georgia. I see that race once enslaved, for a long time deprived of all rights, and now under existing usage and practice despoiled of rights which the Senator himself is in the full enjoyment of. MR. HILL. … I never can agree in the proposition that, if there be a hotel for the entertainment of travellers, and two classes stop at it, and there is one dining-room for one class and one for another, served alike in all respects, with the same accommodations, the same attention to the guests, there is anything offensive, or anything that denies the civil rights of one more than the other. Nor do I hold, that, if you have public schools, and you give all the advantages of education to one class as you do to another, but keep them separate and apart, there is any denial of a civil right in that. I also contend, that, even upon the railways of the country, if cars of equal comfort, convenience, and security be provided for different classes of persons, no one has a right to complain, if it be a regulation of the companies to separate them.… MR. SUMNER. Mr. President, we have a vindication on this floor of inequality as a principle and as a political rule. MR. HILL. On which race, I would inquire, does the inequality to which the Senator refers operate? MR. SUMNER. On both. Why, the Senator would not allow a white man in the same car with a colored man. MR. HILL. Not unless he was invited, perhaps. [_Laughter._] MR. SUMNER. The Senator mistakes a substitute for equality. Equality is where all are alike. A substitute can never take the place of equality. It is impossible; it is absurd. I must remind the Senator that it is very unjust,--it is terribly unjust. We have received in this Chamber a colored Senator from Mississippi; but according to the rule of the Senator from Georgia we should have put him apart by himself; he should not have sat with his brother Senators. Do I understand the Senator as favoring such a rule? MR. HILL. No, Sir. MR. SUMNER. The Senator does not. MR. HILL. I do not, Sir, for this reason: it is under the institutions of the country that he becomes entitled by law to his seat here; we have no right to deny it to him.