he
remedy? Or if a State should prescribe as a qualification for the
ballot such an ownership of property, real or personal, as would
disfranchise the great body of her people, could not Congress most
undoubtedly interfere? So of an educational test, which might fix the
standard of knowledge so high as to place the governing power in the
hands of a select few. The power in all such cases is a reserved one
in Congress, to be exercised according to its own judgment, with no
accountability to any tribunal save the people; and without such power
the nation would be at the mercy of as many oligarchies as there are
States. It is true that the power of Congress to guarantee republican
governments in the States through its intervention with the question
of suffrage has not hitherto been exercised, but this certainly does
not disprove the existence of such power, nor the expediency of its
exercise now, under an additional and independent constitutional
grant, and when a fit occasion for it has come through the madness of
treason. Why temporize by adopting half-way measures and a policy of
indirection? The shortest distance between two given points is a
straight line. Let us follow it in so important a work as amending the
Constitution.

"How do you know that the broad proposition I advocate will fail in
Congress or before the people? These are revolutionary days. Whole
generations of common time are now crowded into the span of a few
years. Life was never before so grand and blessed an opportunity. The
man mistakes his reckoning who judges either the present or the future
by any political almanac of bygone years. Growth, development,
progress are the expressive watchwords of the hour. Who can remember
the marvelous events of the past four years, necessitated by the late
war, and then predict the failure of further measures, woven into the
same fabric, and born of the same inevitable logic?"

On Monday, January 30th, the proposed constitutional amendment was
recommitted to the joint Committee on Reconstruction. On the following
day Mr. Stevens reported back the joint resolution, with an amendment
striking out the words "and direct taxes," so as to fix simply the
basis of representation in Congress upon population, excluding those
races or colors to which the franchise is denied or abridged.

Mr. Schenck offered a substitute making "male citizens of the United
States over twenty-one years" the basis of representation. Mr. Schen