The penalties were somewhat grave. They might be as severe as a fine of one thousand dollars, or imprisonment for a year, or both, in the discretion of the courts. But they were not cruel or unusual, and were, therefore, within the power of Congress to prescribe. The officers authorized and required to institute proceedings against violators of the law were the district attorneys, marshals and deputy marshals of the United States courts, the commissioners appointed by the Circuit and Territorial courts of the United States, the officers and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, and every other officer whom the President might see fit to empower thereto. And the jurisdiction established for the trial of such cases was that of the United States courts, upon which was conferred original and exclusive jurisdiction in any case under the law, and to which any case touching these subjects commenced in a "State" court could {70} be removed on motion of the defendant. But all these things were authorized by a liberal construction of the Thirteenth Amendment, which expressly vests in Congress the power to make all laws necessary and proper to enforce the prohibition of slavery throughout the whole country. [Sidenote: The measure sound from the points of view of modern jurisprudence and modern political science.] It was, indeed, a great change in the system of the jurisprudence of the United States that the central Government should define and protect civil equality within the States. But it was a change which history had forced upon the country, and the sovereign power of the nation had deliberately legalized it. There is no question now that it was sound political science, too, and that it was required by public morality. Real civil liberty is always national. Its concepts and principles spring out of the national consciousness of rights and wrongs. And civil equality is the first principle of modern justice, the most pressing behest of the public morality of the age. Moreover, this measure did not militate against the President's plan of Reconstruction. He could have accepted it without compromising that plan in the slightest, and it was a monumental blunder on his part that he did not do so. [Sidenote: The veto of the bill.]