ure. The complaint came from the brown Greens. The
reader can figure out the psychology of it for himself.

A more certain proof of the fact that Negro blood is widely distributed
among the white people may be found in the laws and judicial decisions
of the various States. Laws, as a rule, are not made until demanded by a
sufficient number of specific cases to call for a general rule; and
judicial decisions of course are never announced except as the result of
litigation over contested facts. There is no better index of the
character and genius of a people than their laws.

In North Carolina, marriage between white persons and free persons of
color was lawful until 1830. By the Missouri code of 1855, the color
line was drawn at one-fourth of Negro blood, and persons of only
one-eighth were legally white. The same rule was laid down by the
Mississippi code of 1880. Under the old code noir of Louisiana, the
descendant of a white and a quadroon was white. Under these laws many
persons currently known as "colored," or, more recently as "Negro,"
would be legally white if they chose to claim and exercise the
privilege. In Ohio, before the Civil War, a person more than half-white
was legally entitled to all the rights of a white man. In South
Carolina, the line of cleavage was left somewhat indefinite; the color
line was drawn tentatively at one-fourth of Negro blood, but this was
not held conclusive.

"The term 'mulatto'," said the Supreme Court of that State in a reported
case, "is not invariably applicable to every admixture of African blood
with the European, nor is one having all the features of a white to be
ranked with the degraded class designated by the laws of the State as
persons of color, because of some remote taint of the Negro race.... The
question whether persons are colored or white, where color or feature is
doubtful, is for the jury to determine by reputation, by reception into
society, and by their exercises of the privileges of a white man, as
well as by admixture of blood."

It is well known that this liberality of view grew out of widespread
conditions in the State, which these decisions in their turn tended to
emphasize. They were probably due to the large preponderance of colored
people in the State, which rendered the whites the more willing to
augment their own number. There are many interesting color-line
decisions in the reports of the Southern courts, which space will not
permit the mention of