The Birmingham age-herald., 1904-07-04
JUDGE sPEER's DECISION.
pr. UlIman commends The Aee-Her-
 aids Editorials.

To the Editor of The Age-Herald.
 Your editorials, on the opinion of Judge Sheer of the United States district court. are indeed timely, and therefore have been echoed by number of our thinking i and conservative people This, In my humble judgment is due to the fact that there is so much in the opinion or decis- lon of Judge Speer which applies in a measure to existing conditions at home, or here. Reading your views with ap- proval. I obtained copy of the ruling in the habeas corpus proceedings of Henry Jamison against the mayor and council of Macon, Ga, as 1t appeared In the Macon Telegraph on June 29, 1904, Disclaiming any pretense to knowledge of legal lore, I regard the conclusions reached as a lucid document, at once an opinion and arralgnment of the practice prevailing in our sister state.
 When we take into consideration that Judge Speer is a southerner and demo- crat, his opinions have mare than ordi- nary favor, and like Nathan the prophet he has given evidence of preserving a sublime moral courage that cannot fail to make us all think, and thus create a public sentiment to cure the existing evils. l desire to quote the learned judge:
 Not a little has been said in the ar- gument to the effect that the majority of those who are sentenced to this chaingang merit all the punishment they receive. One witness, formerly a road commissioner, who was familiar with tho operations on the chaingang, testified that in his opinion, while sentence there would forever ruin a white man previous ly respectable, it had no such effeect on respectable negro. Such considerations do not appeal to court charged with the equal enforcement of the law. Nor do I believe they meet the appreciation of the best people of the southern states. Nor are such sentiments conducive to our welfare or hopeful for our future. Twen- ty-one years ago when at the bar, in an l argument to a jury, in the great case of Exparte Marlborough, declared the i conviction that:
 Never in the history of the world has any considerable class of people been debased and degraded by force and law ] lessness, but that the entire people suf- fered because of that degradation. The white people of this country control the government, state and federal They en- | joy every conceivable advantage. They have superiority in wealth. education, social influence, everything. A magnan- imous people. a just people. they owe it to themselves to be magnanimous and just to the colored people,
 Tt was true then. It Is true now. I | further declared:
 For my part, l love my country. am proud of it's traditions. I glory in the heroism and manhood of its people l know that they despise cruelty and bar parity to the helpless and oppressed This was true then. It Is true now. Though the color line expert may so paint 1t, this is no color line case. 1t Is a negro today. It will be a white man, aye, a white child and a white woman tomorrow. In this court the law is equal for all.
 Judgment absolute will be ordered in favor of the petitioner and he will be discharged from custody and permitted to go hence"
 Permit me before concluding to call the attention of our people to the prac- tce of making an exhibition of our chain gang, paraded daily upon our streets, with shackles upon the limbs of white and negro culprits many of them in their teens. It Is too far fetched to say that this practice has tendency to dwarf the moral force of our people. In my hum- ble opinion this practice should be abated by carrying the "chaingang- to and fro in wagons, and thus In a measure pre- vent the dulling of moral concepts of our children. SAMUEL ULLMAN.
 Birmingham July g. 1904