d of marriage. By the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments, all adopted within ten years after the war, we
endeavored to put the negro in a legal, a political, and a social
equality with whites in every particular. A broad statement,
sufficiently correct for the general reader, may be made that only
the legal part has succeeded or has lasted. That legislation which is
aimed at social equality, all of it Federal legislation, has generally
proved unconstitutional, and that part which has been aimed at
political equality has, for one reason or another, been inefficient.
Moreover, the great attempt in the Fourteenth Amendment to place
the ordinary social, civil, and political rights of the negro, and
necessarily, therefore, of every one else, under the _aegis_ of the
Federal government, Federal courts, and Federal legislation, has been
nullified; first, by court decision, and later, if we may trust the
signs of the times, by contemporary public opinion. The only thing
that remains is that the States cannot make laws which, on their face,
are discriminations against the negro, or in social matters against
any other race; and in political matters, the Fifteenth Amendment has
proved effective to render null State laws which on their face are
designed to restrict or deny their equal right of suffrage.

Legislation concerning labor, the industrial condition, and contract
rights of the negro, such as the peonage laws, we have considered
in an earlier chapter; both State and national laws exist, and the
Thirteenth Amendment, being self-executing, has proved effective.
Under the Fifteenth Amendment there is little political legislation,
except the effort in Southern States by educational or property
qualifications, and most questionably by the so-called "grandfather
clause," to exclude most negroes from the right of suffrage. Laws
imposing property and educational qualifications are, of course,
valid, although designed to have the effect of excluding a large
proportion of the negroes from voting; laws, on the other hand, which
give a permanent right of suffrage to the descendants of a certain
class, as of those voters, all white, who were entitled to vote in
Southern States in the year 1861, are probably unconstitutional as
establishing an hereditary privileged class, though there has as yet
been no square decision on this point by the Supreme Court of the
United States. But as there is no further legislation on these