The provision is comprehensive and absolute, and sweeps away at once every form of oppression and every denial of justice.

It abolishes _caste_ and enlarges the scope of human freedom.

It increases the power of the Republic to do equal and exact justice to all its citizens, and curtails the power of the States to shelter the wrong-doer or to authorize crime by a statute.

To Congress is committed the authority to enforce every provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the humblest man who is denied the equal protection of the laws of a State can have his wrongs redressed before the Supreme Judiciary of the Nation.
It is perhaps not strange that the Democrats of the South were hostile to the great results wrought for freedom, for justice, and for popular rights by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Their education, their prejudices, their personal interests had all been in the opposite direction, and it was doubtless too much to hope that all these would be overcome by a victory for the Union--a victory which carried to their minds a sense of personal humiliation and of remediless ruin.