that if that section could stand the test of a judicial decision all the others could and should. And yet the court, through a decision handed down by Mr. Justice Strong, affirmed the constitutionality of that section, but in a decision delivered by Mr. Justice Bradley the section providing for equal accommodations in hotels, inns and places of amusement was declared unconstitutional except in the District of Columbia and the territories. In several subsequent decisions, giving in the main the opinion of Chief Justice Waite, some of the most vital and important sections of the enforcement acts, especially those having for their object the protection of individual citizens, through federal machinery, when necessary, against domestic violence, were also declared to be unconstitutional and void. I am of the opinion, shared in by many others, that if men of the type of Edmunds and Conkling had been appointed Supreme Court Justices instead of Waite and Bradley, the rulings of the court in the important cases referred to might have been, and I think would have been, different. The unfortunate thing about those decisions is the wide scope of authority thus conceded to the States. In other words, they amount to a judicial recognition of the dangerous doctrine of States Rights--a doctrine which has been the source and the cause of most of our domestic troubles and misfortunes since those decisions were rendered. But for those unfortunate decisions our country would not be cursed and disgraced today by lynch law and other forms of lawlessness and racial proscription and discrimination. But for those unfortunate decisions lynchings could have been and I am sure would have been held to be an offense against the peace and dignity of the United States as well as the State in which the crime is committed. Consequently, the criminals could be, and in most cases would be, prosecuted in the United States courts, as was done in the case of many of the leaders of that secret criminal organization called the Ku Klux Klan. But this took place before the decisions referred to were rendered. The court has also decided that a State law providing separate accommodations for white and colored people on railroad trains, at least for a passenger whose journey begins and ends in the same state, is not an abridgment in violation of the constitution, provided the accommodations for the two races are exactly equal. This means that the validity even of those laws will not be affirmed whenever it can be shown that the accommodations are not equal, which can be very easily done. _Equal_ separate accommodations are both a physical and a financial impossibility. It is simply impossible for a railroad company to provide the same accommodations for one colored passenger that it provides for one hundred whites. If, then, a colored passenger cannot occupy a seat or a sleeping berth in a car in which white persons may be passengers, this will not only be an abridgment,