The colored passenger is, to be sure, an American citizen on paper, but what is it worth to him under the circumstances? Can it compel railroads to furnish him decent accommodations, which federal law provides shall be equal to those furnished to white passengers, and for which the colored passenger pays the same fare as the white one? It is notorious that the accommodations furnished by the railroads in interstate commerce to their colored passengers are inferior to those which they furnish white passengers for the same fare. The Interstate Commerce Commission knows this and knows it well, yet it makes no determined and persistent attempt to compel railroads to give to their colored passengers accommodations equal to those which they furnish their white ones. It is too busy attending to the more important business relating to the property rights and interests of shippers and capitalists to spare the time to break up an evil which makes the existence of colored interstate passengers an unbroken experience of bitter hardships and humiliations. Surely there are American citizens and American citizens--citizens whom Government protects and enables to make good their claim to equality before the law, and other citizens whom Government does not protect or enable to make good their claim to equality before the law. And to this latter class belongs the Negro nearly every time and almost everywhere. The Negro is the great American anomaly. Judged by his rights on paper his citizenship is indisputable, but judged by his rights in fact it is full of mutilations and amputations which disfigure it almost beyond recognition. One-half of it appears in the light clothed with fragments of his rights, and the other half is in eclipse, exposed naked to biting cold and bitter wrong. He appeals to good men and true in the South and in the North and in the Government too, to give him what he is entitled to. He does not get it or anything like it. There does not appear to be common honesty and decency enough in the railroads to give him what he pays for as an interstate traveller, human compassion to say nothing of common justice enough in the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce against the railroads the law made by the Government to conciliate the race prejudice of the South. The separate car feature of the Railroad Rate Bill was inserted in deference to the demand of the South, and the equal accommodation feature as an act of plain commercial justice to the Negro. The South has never failed to get its separate cars, while the Negro has never failed either to receive the most unequal accommodations in open violation of the provisions of that bill.