e has a tendency to encourage and promote race
intermixture, rather than to discourage and prevent it; because under
existing circumstances local sentiment in our part of the country
tolerates the intermixture, provided that the white husband and father
does not lead to the altar in honorable wedlock the woman he may have
selected as the companion of his life, and the mother of his children.
If, instead of prohibiting race intermarriage, the law would compel
marriage in all cases of concubinage, such a law would have a tendency
to discourage race intermixture; because it is only when they marry
according to the forms of law that the white husband and father is
socially and otherwise ostracized. Under the common law,--which is the
established and recognized rule of action in all of our States in the
absence of a local statute by which a different rule is established,--a
valid marriage is nothing more than a civil contract entered into
between two persons capable of making contracts. But under our form of
government marriage, like everything else, is what public opinion sees
fit to make it.

"It is true that in our part of the country no union of the sexes is
looked upon as a legal marriage unless the parties to the union are
married according to the form prescribed by the local statutes. While
that is true it is also true that there are many unions, which, but for
the local statutes, would be recognized and accepted as legal marriages
and which, even under existing conditions, are tolerated by local
sentiment and sanctioned by custom. Such unions are known to exist, and
yet are presumed not to exist. None are so blind as those who can see
but will not see. One of the unwritten but most effective and rigid laws
of our section,--which everyone respects and never violates,--is that a
man's private and domestic life must never be made the subject of
political or public discussion or newspaper notoriety. The man, who at
any time or under any provocation will so far forget himself as to say
or do anything that can be construed into a violation of that unwritten
law, will be likely to pay the penalty with his own life and that, too,
without court, judge, or jury; and the one by whom the penalty may be
inflicted will stand acquitted and justified before the bar of public
opinion. If, then, this able and brilliant young man,--whose bread and
meat you now have at your disposal,--had lived in concubinage with the
mother of his chil