Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.”
Sir, I am not one of those “fools.” I will not postpone this question to any “to-morrow.” The Senate will do as they please; but, God willing, they shall have an opportunity to vote on it. Vote as you please, Sir, but the time has come for a vote.
Mr. President, this is not the only bill on the Calendar which concerns the rights of colored persons. There are two on the Calendar, and one now before the Judiciary Committee. The first on the Calendar was reported by me from the Committee on the District of Columbia as long ago as February 8, 1870, and is entitled “A bill to repeal the charter of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia.” That society has been guilty of an act which I have no hesitation, on all the testimony before us, in declaring to be one of infamy, for which they deserve the promptest judgment of Congress, which shall take from them the power to inflict indignity on their fellow-man. Enjoying a charter from Congress which dedicates them and sets them apart to the cultivation of medical science, they have undertaken to exclude persons otherwise competent simply on account of color. They have set up a test of membership founded on color. The evidence is irrefutable; and yet I have been unable to bring the Senate to a vote on that bill; and meanwhile colored physicians in this District are subjected to the indignity of exclusion from the Society, and thus are shut out from opportunities of medical instruction.
There is another bill, which I reported from the Committee on the District of Columbia May 6, 1870, entitled “A bill to secure equal rights in the public schools of Washington and Georgetown.” That, also, I have tried in vain to press upon the Senate. There is, then, another bill, which I had the honor of introducing May 13, 1870, entitled “A bill supplementary to an Act entitled ‘An Act to protect all citizens of the United States in their civil rights, and to furnish the means for their vindication,’ passed April 9, 1866.” This important bill was duly referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, but I have heard nothing from it since. It slumbers on the table of the Committee.
Of all these measures which concern equal rights, the only one which I have been able to bring before the Senate is that under consideration; and I am now pressed to withdraw it so as to avoid a vote. Why, Sir, again and again in other years have I been pressed in the same way; again and again in other years have Senators spoken to me and of me as the Senator from New York was advised to speak to-day: but it has not been my habit to yield; nor have I been alone, Sir, in such determination. One of the most beautiful instances in parliamentary history, familiar, doubtless, to the Chamber, is that motion of Mr. Buxton in the House of Commons, in 1832, which determined Emancipation. The Ministry professed to be against Slavery; a large number of the House of Commons made the same profession; but they were against declaring it; and when Mr. Buxton gave notice of a motion in favor of immediate emancipation, Ministry, members of the House, and personal friends came to him entreating that he would not press his motion, especially that he would not divide the House. One of his family records in his Memoirs, which I have in my hands, says:—
“He was cruelly beset, and acutely alive to the pain of refusing them, and, as they said, of embarrassing all their measures, and giving their enemies a handle at this tottering moment.”[146]