Courts and the indifference of public opinion, the Southern whites have
carried their campaign into the national government, with an ominous
degree of success. If they shall have their way, no Negro can fill any
federal office, or occupy, in the public service, any position that is not
menial. This is not an inference, but the openly, passionately avowed
sentiment of the white South. The right to employment in the public
service is an exceedingly valuable one, for which white men have struggled
and fought. A vast army of men are employed in the administration of
public affairs. Many avenues of employment are closed to colored men by
popular prejudice. If their right to public employment is recognized, and
the way to it open through the civil service, or the appointing power, or
the suffrages of the people, it will prove, as it has already, a strong
incentive to effort and a powerful lever for advancement. Its value to the
Negro, like that of the right to vote, may be judged by the eagerness of
the whites to deprive him of it.

Not only is the Negro taxed without representation in the States referred
to, but he pays, through the tariff and internal revenue, a tax to a
National government whose supreme judicial tribunal declares that it
cannot, through the executive arm, enforce its own decrees, and,
therefore, refuses to pass upon a question, squarely before it, involving
a basic right of citizenship. For the decision of the Supreme Court in the
Giles case, if it foreshadows the attitude which the Court will take upon
other cases to the same general end which will soon come before it, is
scarcely less than a reaffirmation of the Dred Scott decision; it
certainly amounts to this--that in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment,
colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States
are bound to respect. To say this much is to say that all the privileges
and immunities which Negroes henceforth enjoy, must be by favor of the
whites; they are not _rights_. The whites have so declared; they proclaim