Our demonstration is complete; but there follows a short corollary: While the colored people always did and still do accept with alacrity an undivided enjoyment of civil rights with the white race wherever cordially offered, they never mistake them for social privileges, nor do they ever attempt to use them to compel social intercourse. We might appeal to the everyday streetcar experience of hundreds of thousands of residents in New Orleans and other Southern cities; or to the uniform clearness with which civil rights are claimed and social advances disclaimed in the many letters from colored men and women that are this moment before the writer. But we need not. We need refer only to our opponents in debate, who bring forward, to prove their own propositions, a set of well-known facts that turn and play Balaam to their Balak. Hear their statement: "They"--the colored people--"meet the white people in all the avenues of business. They work side by side with the white bricklayer or carpenter in perfect accord and friendliness. When the trowel or hammer is laid aside, the laborers part, each going his own way. Any attempt to carry the comradeship of the day into private life would be sternly resisted by both parties in interest."

We prove, by the other side's own arguments, that the colored people always accept the common enjoyment of civil rights and never confound civil with social relations. But in just one phase of life there is a conspicuous exception; an exception especially damaging to the traditional arguments of our opponents. And who furnishes our evidence this time? Themselves again. We allude to the church relation. Whereas to confront the history of an effort made, they say, many times over, by Bishop Haven and the Northern Methodist Church generally, soon after the late war; an effort to abolish racial discrimination in the religious worship of the church in the South composed of Northern whites and Southern blacks; its constant and utter failure; and the final separation of those churches into two separate conferences, and into separate congregations wherever practicable. These facts are brought forward to prove the existence of race instinct, intending to justify by race instinct the arbitrary control, by the whites of the relations between the two races; and the conclusion is sanguinely reached at a bound, that the only explanation of these churches' separation on the color line is each race's race instinct, "that spoke above the appeal of the bishop and dominated the divine influences that holds from pew to pew." But the gentlemen are too eager. What in their haste they omit to do is to make any serious search at all for a simpler explanation. And how simple the true explanation is! Bishop Haven and his colleagues, if rightly reported, ought to have known they would fail. They were attempting under acute disadvantages what none of the Protestant churches in America, faithfully as they have striven for it, has ever been able extensively to accomplish. That is, to get high and low life to worship together. The character of much ritual worship and of nearly all non-ritual worship naturally and properly takes for its standard the congregation's average intelligence. But this good process of assortment, unless held in by every proper drawback, flies off to an excess that leaves the simple and unlearned to a spiritual starvation apparently as bad as that from which non-ritual worship, especially, professes to revolt. Bishop Dudley, of Kentucky, has lately laid his finger upon this mischief for us with great emphasis. But, moreover, as in society, so in the church, this intellectual standard easily degenerates toward a standard of mere manners or station. Thus the gate is thrown wide open to the social idea, and presently not our Dorcases only, but at times our very bishops and elders, are busy trying to make the social relations go extensively with the church relation. With what result? Little, generally, save the bad result of congregations trimming themselves down to fit the limitations of social fellowship. See the case cited. Here were whites, cultured, and counting themselves, at least, as good as the best in the land; and here was an ignorant, superstitious race of boisterous worshipers just emerged from slavery; one side craving spiritual meat, the other needing spiritual milk, and both sides beset by our prevalent American error that social intimacy is one of the distinct earnings of church membership. Of course they separated.

It is but a dwarfed idea of the church relation that cramps it into the social relation. The church relation is the grandest fraternity on earth. [Ftnt.: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female." Gal. iii. 28.] Social relations are good and proper, but can the social relation grasp all these conditions in one embrace? Can any one social circle span from the drawing-room to the stable, from accounting-room or professional desk to the kitchen, from the judge's bench to the tailor's and cobbler's, from the prince's crown to the pauper's bowl? Yet without any social intimacy the prince may be the pauper's best friend, and even the pauper the prince's; and the church relation ought to be so wide and high that all these ranks might kneel abreast in it in common worship, and move abreast in it in perfect, active, co-laboring fraternity and regard, gathering any or every social circle into its noble circumference, never pressing one injuriously upon another, and above all things never letting in the slender but mischievous error of confusing Christian fraternity with social equality. Yet the high and low nigh all our country over are kept apart in divine worship by just this error or the fear of it. Fifty thousand Bishop Havens could not, until they had overthrown the domination of this mistake, get the lofty and the lowly to worship together. How could they but separate? And the dragging in of a race instinct to account for the separation is like bringing a pole to knock down strawberries. Other things will, but a belief in instinct will not, keep the races apart. Look at the West Indies. But not even miscegenation--may the reader forgive us the bedraggled word--could have saved such a scheme from failure.

The gentlemen prove absolutely nothing for their case, but much against it. For here is shown by actual experiment that even where there is not of necessity a social relation, yet when the social idea merely gets in by mistake of both classes, the effect will not be social confusion, but a spontaneous and willing separation along the strongest lines of social cleavage. The log--the church--will not split the wedge--the social impulse; but the wedge will split the log. The uncultured, be they white or black, in North or South, will break away on one side with even more promptness and spontaneity than the cultured on the other, and will recoil, moreover, to a greater distance than is best for any one concerned. Thus far are we from having the least ground to fear from the blacks that emptiest of phantasms, social aggression. Thus far are we from needing for the protection of social order any assumption of race instinct. And so do the advocates of our traditional sentiments continually establish the opposite of what they seek to prove.

They cite, again, to establish this assumption of race instinct, a spontaneous grouping together of colored people in such social or semi-social organizations as Masonic lodges, military companies, etc. But there is no proscription of whites in the lodges of colored Odd-fellows or Masons. In Georgia, for example, the law requires the separation of the races in military companies. The gentlemen forget that the colored people are subject to a strong expulsive power from the whites, which they say must and shall continue whether it is instinct or not; and that the existence of a race instinct can never be proved or disproved until all expulsive forces are withdrawn and both races are left totally free to the influences of those entirely self-sufficient social forces which one of the gentlemen has so neatly termed "centripetal." But even if these overlooked facts were out of existence, what would be proved? Only, and for the second time, that the centripetal force of social selection operates so completely to the fulfillment of these gentlemen's wishes, that there is no longer any call to prove or disprove the existence of race instinct, or the faintest excuse for arbitrary race separations in the enjoyment of civil rights.

Thus, setting out with the idea that the social integrity of the races requires vigorous protection from without, they prove instead by every argument brought to establish it, that every relation really social, partially social, or even mistakenly social, takes--instinct or no instinct--the most spontaneous and complete care of itself. We are debating the freedman's title to a totally impersonal freedom in the enjoyment of all impersonal rights; and they succeed only in saying, never in bringing a particle of legitimate evidence to prove, that "Neither race wants it"; an assertion which no sane man, knowing the facts, can sincerely make until, like these gentlemen, he has first made the most woful confusion in his own mind between personal social privileges and impersonal civil rights.