But do not, Sir, forget the necessity of the case. How can justice be administered throughout States thronging with colored fellow-citizens, unless you have them on the juries? Denying to colored fellow-citizens their place on the juries, you actually deny them justice. This is plain, and presents a case of startling wrong. I am in the receipt of letters almost daily, complaining of the impossibility of obtaining justice in State courts because colored fellow-citizens are excluded from juries. I say, therefore, from the necessity of the case, and also from the analogy of witnesses, the courts should be opened to colored jurors. The Senator makes a mistake, when he deals his blow in the very Temple of Justice. He strikes down the safeguards of justice for the whole colored race; and what is the excuse? That to sit on the jury is a question of politics,--that it is a political right, and not a civil right. Sir, I cannot bring myself to make any question whether it is a civil right or a political right; it is a right. It is a right which those men have by the Law of Nature, and by the National Constitution interpreted by the National Declaration. But, Sir, not content with striking at the colored race even in the very Temple of Justice, the Senator, finding an apology in the Constitution, insists upon the very exclusion from churches which the famous Petroleum V. Nasby had set up before. From juries I now come to churches. The Senator is not original; he copies, as I shall show, from a typical Democrat, who flourished during the war. But before I come to his prototype, let us consider the constitutional question presented by the Senator with so much gravity, without even the smile that plays so readily on his countenance. He seemed in earnest, when he read these words of the National Constitution:-- “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And still without a smile he argued that the application of the great political principles of the Declaration and of the recent Constitutional Amendments to a church organization incorporated by law was a violation of this provision, and he adduced the work of the much-venerated friend of my early life, and my master, the late Judge Story, expounding that provision. I do not know if the Senator read these words from the commentary of that great jurist:-- “The real object of the Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects,”-- Observe, Sir, what it is,-- “but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the National Government.”[227]