Principles of Government:

The right of voting for representatives is the primary
right, by which other rights are protected. To take away
this right is to reduce man to a state of slavery, for
slavery consists in being subject to the will of another;
and he that has not a vote in the election of
representatives is, in this case. The proposal, therefore,
to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the
proposal to take away property.

In a state of nature, before governments were formed, each person
possessed a natural right to defend his liberty, his life and his
property from the aggressions of his fellow men. When he enters
into the free government he does not surrender that right, but
agrees to exercise it, not by brute force, but by the ballot, by
his individual voice in making the laws that dispose of, control
and regulate those rights. The right to a voice in the government
is but the natural right of protection of one's life, liberty and
property, by personal strength and brute force, so modified as to
be exercised in the form of a vote, through the machinery of a
free government. The right of self-protection, it will not be
denied, exists in all equally in a state of nature, and the
substitute for it exists equally in all the citizens after a free
government is formed, for the free government is by all and for
all.

The people "ordained and established" the Constitution. Such is
the preamble. "We, the people." Can it be said that the people
acquire their privileges from the instrument that they themselves
establish? Does the creature extend rights, privileges and
immunities to the creator? No; the people retain all the rights
which they have not surrendered; and if the people have not given
to the Government the power to deprive them of their elective
franchise, they possess it by virtue of citizenship. The true
theory of this Government, and of all free governments, was laid
down by our fathers in the Declaration of Independence, and
declared to be "self-evident." "All men are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these
rights governments are instituted among men, deriving all their