much within the power of the States
(and the States in view were the disorganized Southern States),
that it would be far easier for Congress to enforce the penalty
for denying the right of suffrage than for the President to
protect that right. It may be regarded as a case, well known to
the law, of cumulative remedies. It is precisely as if, in
addition to the express prohibition by the Constitution of the
making of war by any State, there had been a provision that if
any State should make war upon a foreign State, such State should
pay the entire expense in which the General Government should
become involved by the war. This clearly would be only a penalty
and not a concession of the right, the object being to increase
and not to diminish the security of the General Government
against any attempt of a State to do the act prohibited.

2. The first section of the XIV. Amendment is entirely senseless
and idle, except upon the construction which we claim. The term
"citizen" means either "voter" or merely "member of the nation,"
as distinguished from an alien. Judge Cartter, in his late
opinion in the case of Spencer _vs._ The Board of Registration,
in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, sees this
necessity, and that there is no intermediate status, and holds
that the term means merely a person clothed with the civil rights
of an inhabitant, as distinguished from an alien. Let it be borne
in mind, then, that those who deny the construction which we
claim, must make the word citizen mean merely "not an alien." Let
it also be borne in mind that by the XIII. Amendment, which
abolished slavery, every inhabitant of the land became a free
inhabitant, so that nothing is now added to the force of the term
"inhabitant" by prefixing to it the term "free." It follows,
therefore, that the XIV. Amendment, under the adverse
construction claimed, means only that the persons referred to in
it are _inhabitants of the land_. Let us see, then, how it will
read: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States are
inhabitants of the United States and the State wherein they
reside." This is sheer nonsense. In the construction of an
ordinary law, passed by a Legislature in the crowded moments of
its last hour, every Court would say that it must, if pos