al power. The Enforcement Act, and the previous law in
regard to frauds in voting, may be called definitions of these
last centralizing steps, but as yet neither amendments nor
definitions are fully comprehended. A Rhode Island lawyer
astutely said: "The people of the United States have not yet
awakened to a sense of the vast centralizing power hidden in the
XIV. Amendment." Opposition and struggles have already come, and
will continue to arise, but legislators may beat their brains as
they will, the fact of new National centralization still remains.
Though State power dies never so hard, die it must, as only
through reorganized National power can the political rights of
citizens of the United States be protected.

"Citizen suffrage" is to-day the battle-ground of "State Rights,"
and the denial of woman's constitutional right to vote, and of
National protection in voting, is the weapon it uses against the
Nation. This question of citizen suffrage is not a woman question
alone, but it is a question of the rights of citizenship
affecting every man in this wide land. Let us, then, have the
centralization which shall recognize the United States as the
supreme political power of the land, which shall no longer allow
the political rights of citizens of the United States to be the
plaything of thirty-seven petty legislatures, of thirty thousand
ambitious demagogues. Without this, our National experiment is a
failure; without this, we are not freemen, but slaves; without
this, we are neither protected nor self-protecting; without this,
centralized State power, under the specious name of "State
rights," will continue to be a many-headed monster, impossible to
overcome. Elect the President direct by the people, and for a
single term, if you will; take from him his immense official
patronage; base senatorship upon population, not upon State
sovereignty through legislative gift; limit the power of the
judiciary: these steps must come; make of the people in reality
what they now are in theory--sovereigns, not first of States, or
the Nation, but of themselves, possessing in themselves all
rights, all powers, whose exercise is only delegated to the
Nation as their servant.

The call[152] for the annual May Convention in New York announced the
interesting fact t