out those decisions is the
wide scope of authority thus conceded to the States. In other words,
they amount to a judicial recognition of the dangerous doctrine of
States Rights--a doctrine which has been the source and the cause of
most of our domestic troubles and misfortunes since those decisions
were rendered. But for those unfortunate decisions our country would
not be cursed and disgraced today by lynch law and other forms of
lawlessness and racial proscription and discrimination. But for those
unfortunate decisions lynchings could have been and I am sure would
have been held to be an offense against the peace and dignity of the
United States as well as the State in which the crime is committed.
Consequently, the criminals could be, and in most cases would be,
prosecuted in the United States courts, as was done in the case of
many of the leaders of that secret criminal organization called the Ku
Klux Klan. But this took place before the decisions referred to were
rendered. The court has also decided that a State law providing
separate accommodations for white and colored people on railroad
trains, at least for a passenger whose journey begins and ends in the
same state, is not an abridgment in violation of the constitution,
provided the accommodations for the two races are exactly equal. This
means that the validity even of those laws will not be affirmed
whenever it can be shown that the accommodations are not equal, which
can be very easily done. _Equal_ separate accommodations are both a
physical and a financial impossibility. It is simply impossible for a
railroad company to provide the same accommodations for one colored
passenger that it provides for one hundred whites. If, then, a colored
passenger cannot occupy a seat or a sleeping berth in a car in which
white persons may be passengers, this will not only be an abridgment,
but in some cases, an absolute denial of such accommodations. The
ultimate nullification of such unfair, unjust and unreasonable laws
must necessarily follow.

In spite of the unfavorable rulings of the court, as above noted,
that tribunal, as at present constituted, has rendered several very
important decisions which have given the friends of national supremacy
and equal rights much hope and encouragement, the most important of
which is the one declaring unconstitutional and void the ordinances
providing for the segregation of the races in the purchase and
occupation of property for re