d national banks. It will not trust its
question of finance to individual States; shall it trust the
personal political rights of its citizens where it can not its
money? Is it not an anomaly that the lesser rights shall be held
by the Nation, the greater by the States?
In the case of the 10,000 naturalized citizens of Rhode Island,
and that of Susan B. Anthony and other women of New York and
elsewhere, who try to vote, there is one great dissimilarity. The
suffrage of the 10,000 is only regulated. As soon as each one
secures real estate to the small value of one hundred and
thirty-four dollars, he votes; but there women can never vote,
simply because they are _women_. Property amounts to nothing;
education amounts to nothing; even native-born citizenship
amounts to nothing; the ballot for them is not regulated but
prohibited because they were born women instead of men. Congress
would quickly waken up to an appreciation of its power over the
ballot, if under pretense of "regulating" suffrage, all the male
citizens of a State were denied the ballot simply because they
were men. The Nation would lose no time in deciding that a
regulation of a character not possible to overcome was not a
regulation, but a prohibition destructive of every natural right.
The word "deny" would be elucidated by able lawyers and
lexicographers. We should then be told that to deny pre-supposes
an existing right; that only positive rights can be denied, and
force of arms would be invoked to maintain the existence of those
rights.
The battle for suffrage is narrowed down to the meaning of
"privileges and immunities." Those who believe the consent of the
governed to be the fundamental principle of the Nation, define
"privileges and immunities" as the right of voting, which is the
only "consent." Thaddeus Stevens went so far as to affirm that
"inalienable rights" in the Declaration meant the ballot. Persons
who thus define "inherent rights" belong to the true national,
patriotic class. But others, deeply tinctured with belief in the
supreme right of States, declare "privileges and immunities" to
comprehend anything and everything except the ballot. Even some
good Republicans, contrary to the principles indorsed and
sustained by them in the war amendments, led by t
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