How vain to argue that there is no denial of Equal Rights when this separation is enforced! The substitute is invariably an inferior article. Does any Senator deny it? Therefore, it is not Equality; at best it is an equivalent only. But no equivalent is Equality. Separation implies one thing for a white person and another thing for a colored person; but Equality is where all have the same alike. There can be no substitute for Equality,--nothing but itself. Even if accommodations are the same, as notoriously they are not, there is no Equality. In the process of substitution the vital elixir exhales and escapes: it is lost, and cannot be recovered; for Equality is found only in Equality. “Nought but itself can be its parallel”; but Senators undertake to find parallels in other things. As well make weight in silver the equivalent for weight in diamonds, according to the illustration of Selden in his famous “Table-Talk.” “If,” remarked the learned interlocutor, “I said I owed you twenty pounds in silver, and you said I owed you twenty pounds of diamonds, which is a sum innumerable, ’tis impossible we should ever agree.”[180] But Equality is weight in diamonds, and a sum innumerable,--which is very different from weight in silver. Assuming--what is most absurd to assume, and what is contradicted by all experience--that a substitute can be an equivalent, it is so in form only, and not in reality. Every such assumption is an indignity to the colored race, instinct with the spirit of Slavery; and this decides its character. It is Slavery in its last appearance. Are you ready to prolong the hateful tyranny? Religion and reason condemn Caste as impious and unchristian, making republican institutions and equal laws impossible; but here is Caste not unlike that which separates the Sudra from the Brahmin. Pray, Sir, who constitutes the white man a Brahmin? Whence his lordly title? Down to a recent period in Europe the Jews were driven to herd by themselves, separate from the Christians; but this discarded barbarism is revived among us in the ban of color. There are millions of fellow-citizens guilty of no offence except the dusky livery of the sun appointed by the Heavenly Father, whom you treat as others have treated the Jews, as the Brahmin treats the Sudra. But, pray, Sir, do not pretend that this is the great equality promised by our fathers.