recent case of Jackson vs. Giles, brought by a colored citizen of
Montgomery, Alabama, in which the Supreme Court confesses itself impotent
to provide a remedy for what, by inference, it acknowledges _may_ be a
"great political wrong," carefully avoiding, however, to state that it is
a wrong, although the vital prayer of the petition was for a decision upon
this very point.

Now, what is the effect of this wholesale disfranchisement of colored men,
upon their citizenship. The value of food to the human organism is not
measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its
entire deprivation. Whether a class of citizens should vote, even if not
always wisely--what class does?--may best be determined by considering
their condition when they are without the right to vote.

The colored people are left, in the States where they have been
disfranchised, absolutely without representation, direct or indirect, in
any law-making body, in any court of justice, in any branch of
government--for the feeble remnant of voters left by law is so
inconsiderable as to be without a shadow of power. Constituting one-eighth
of the population of the whole country, two-fifths of the whole Southern
people, and a majority in several States, they are not able, because
disfranchised where most numerous, to send one representative to the
Congress, which, by the decision in the Alabama case, is held by the
Supreme Court to be the only body, outside of the State itself, competent
to give relief from a great political wrong. By former decisions of the
same tribunal, even Congress is impotent to protect their civil rights,
the Fourteenth Amendment having long since, by the consent of the same
Court, been in many respects as completely nullified as the Fifteenth
Amendment is now sought to be. They have no direct representation in any
Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the choice of white men