subjects, to pursue the matter further would carry us into
constitutional law.

In the third field, that of social legislation, there has been a
vast number of laws, first by Congress with the intention, under the
Fourteenth Amendment, of enforcing social and industrial equality and
providing Federal machinery for securing it (the great substance of
this has been held unconstitutional and has passed away); later by the
States, usually the Southern States, with the exactly opposite purpose
of separating the races, at least in social matters, and of subjecting
them to a stricter law of labor contract than has, in our country at
least, been imposed upon other citizens.

Even this matter of social legislation, which alone remains to be
discussed in this book, is quite too vast for more than a brief
sketch. Among the many monographs on the subject may be mentioned the
article of G.T. Stevenson on the "Separation of the Races in Public
Conveyances."[1] Even this comparatively narrow matter is by no means
exhausted in an article covering twenty pages. Much of the social
separation of the races is, of course, brought about without statute
law, but by custom, or even we may say customary law, which is always
apt to be the better enforced; and under the civil rights decisions of
the United States Supreme Court in 1883, such customary law has been
rendered immune from Federal control. Legislation now exists in all
Southern States as to separate, though equal, accommodations in public
conveyances; at one time such statutes were restricted to interstate
commerce, but the present tendency of court decision appears to be to
recognize even their interference with interstate commerce as part
of the reasonable State police jurisdiction. Such statutes apply
generally to railroads, steamboats, and street cars, or other
conveyances of transportation. They are not so usual as to hotels,
eating-houses, theatres, or other public places, probably because
in such it is more easy to secure the desired segregation without
legislation. We may, therefore, conclude that legislation on this
point will be universal in the South and in Oklahoma or other
border States with Southern sympathies, and will not be declared
unconstitutional by the courts.

[Footnote 1: _American Political Science Review_, vol. III, No. 2,
1909.]

The labor unions very generally exclude negroes, both in the South
and North, and in many Southern States the whites refuse to