Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 February 1879 — LEI US HAVE PEACE. [ARTICLE]

LEI US HAVE PEACE.

Senator Bayard’s Protest A gainst the Passage of the Edmund’s Buncombe Resolutions. We have in many of the States punished, and in the adjoining State of Maryland I read daily of prosecutions continuing against men, convictions followed by fine and imprisonment for violation or interference with the abridgment and denial of the right of voting. There is no pretense in these cases that there was an abridgment of the right of any colored man. In Maryland I read the review of the trials and they are for not holding polling places in convenient places, for abridging the right of voting by the inconvenient locality of the polls, and qjider such charges men are being sentenced and deprived of their liberty and their property. The Supreme Court of the United States m these two cases of Oruikshank and Reese have clearly and emphatically excluded any such jurisdic'ion. They have declared that the United States had no class of voters of their own creation, that they never made a voter, that they never bestowed the right of suffrage, that they have nc control over it, but that there was simply the inhibition of a State or of the United States to abridge or deny the right of suffrage by reason of one of three particular causes—the race, the color or the previous condition of servitude of the party concerned. For any abridgment for any and all causes except those three are no more within the power of the Federal Gove nment by legislation to prevent or direct than they are to decide in any question between two citizens of the same State in regard to any matter of their private and local contracts. This is the language of the Supreme Court of the United States. This is their decision, made, I believe, almost unanimously in the two cases to which I have referred. Yet we are asked by these resolutions to continue the enac'ment of general laws "of the character already passed” for that purpose. lam as clear as I ever was of a proposition in my life that the oath I have taken to support the constitution would compel me to vote against such a proposition as that. Therefore, the whole object of these resolutions is to procure from the donate an approval of this class of unconstitutional legislation, against which, at the time of its enactment on this floor, I struggled in vain, and to extend this usurping and fatal attempt at the centralization of all police powers of the States in the hands of the Congress of the United States. Mr. President, this is nothing but the overthrow of our inherited system of government Such a construction cannot be accepted; it would be utterly fatal to freedom and local selfgovernment. there is no necessity for such a construction. All over this land, and I challenge the denial, there is no law in any State in conflict with these amendments. All over this laud there is acquiescence in their provisions; all over this land there is obedience. The language, as Justice Miller says, which prohibits a State from passing a law which violates the obligation of a contract and gives the Congress of the United States power to pass laws to make that effective, is just as full as that which prohibits a State from abridging the privileges and immunities of citizens. It is just as reasonable to find power to penalize by fine and imprisonment a citizen in a State who fails to pay bis promissory note as it is to punish by fine and imprisonment the man who interferes with another’s right to vote at an election. The inhibitory language of the constitution is the same and as full in the one case as in the other. No State shall pass a law violating the obligation of a contract. The State shall not pass a law discriminating in favor of one race or the other. Both are addressed to States as States. A law passed by a State in violation of that provision is null and void. By writ of error it can come either before the State court, or that failing in its duty it can be transferred to the Supreme Court of the United States, Every decision which involves the interpretation of the constitution of the United States, every decision which is in alleged conflict with any provision of the constitution of the United States, is subject to review by the Supreme Court of the United States. The guarantee is full and the protection by the judicial branch is complete. No law can be sustained that gives to a man of one race or color a right withheld from his fellow-citizen of a different race or color. Any law so pretending must meet with speedy overthrow at the hands of the judicial branch. These amendments have brought more and more fully into recognition and force the great object of our Government, which was to secure to all men the great equality, the equality of opportunity. But it was not intended that individual or class differences, weaknesses, or imperfections, on one side, or the extraordinary powers on the other, should be all leveled down by force of statutes, and that we'sbould be forever vainly enacting laws to destroy all the natural inequalities with which God has marked his creations. These amendments do give equality of opportunity. Any law that attempts to do more will prove futile and mischievous, por can it be executed, and it is vain in the exigency of party, in the exigency of a false and sentimental philanthropy, to be attempting to do more than this. All men are equal before the law. Every day of our lives we see instances—where from ignorance or poverty or imbecility men fail to obtain their legal rights —and no general statutes can prevent this. A thousand reasons prevent it, and all that we may do is to say that when the law does speak it shall speak with the same voice to all alike, and be administered equally and freely to all

I believe that I can see in these resolutions and in others of a similar tenor a desire to renew doubt, suspicion, and distrust in one party and one section of our country against the other. Sir, we have had too much of that already. I believe that all the difficulties that have arisen in our land, that have darkened our houses with mourning, and spread their baleful shadow over ffie face of our country, have chiefly come from the fact that our countrymen were ignorant of each other; it was the want of proper mutual understanding, it was the want of proper confidence that bred strife and confusion. If this spirit of renewed confusion is to be invoked, if the exigencies of party shall still call upon men to raise the standard of strife and distrust among their countrymen, whatever may be the result, I shall be found on the olher side invoking the methods of peace and good will and not those of war, invoking generous confidence and kind feeling and not suspicion and hostility, asking our countrymen to dwell not upon their mutual faults but upon their mutual virtues, of which every day and every hour we can witness haupy illustrations if we do but seek to realize anti comprehend them. This country to-day needs peace and rest, recuperation from the losses of war and from the unwisdom of angry legislation. The man serves his country best who seeks to avoid confusion and strife, who seeks to diearm suspicion and to recreate confidence; and, if this is to be the issue that this hateful, dangerous geographical line of sentiment and action is sought to be established, I, for one, will not accept it; I will be of no party, I will aid in no legislation that shall not recognize the rieht of each man in all parts of this country and their duty to do that which no legislation can enforce, I mean the great duty of the creation of a spirit of nationality among the inhabitants of this broad land. How can that be created if men are to be permitted to stand on this floor and elsewhere and denounce with railing accusations, and unmeasured assaults whole sections and States of a Union and hold them up to scorn, to opprobrium, to detestation? Mr. President, there must be, and please heaven there shall be yet the unwritten law that will visit with popular execration and denunciation the man who seeks to establish the domination of a party at the cost of the peace and security and welfare of the entire American people. Among the measures which the Brazilian Government proposes to bring forward is one for the total suppression of the religious orders in Brazil, the pensioning of the existing monks and nuns and the application of the property to the reduction of the national debt. This property is estimated at $2,500,000 to $3,000,000, and the number of persons to be pensioned would not be more than forty or fifty, most of them aged, as for years the admission of novices has beep rigidly prohibited.