ember
of the Senate until he is thirty years of age? Who can say he is
not just as good at twenty-nine?

The Senator from Indiana says that common sense teaches that we
must put some limitation on this. So it does; and common sense
has taught that it is left to each political community to
determine what are the qualifications and limitations upon the
privilege of exercising political rights; and it has always been
so, and it always will be so, because when the Senator proposes
to say that the other sex may vote--which I admit he has a
perfect right to say, and society may so say--he does not
undertake to say that ladies of seventeen, instead of eighteen,
shall vote, because they come of age in my State at eighteen, and
do in many of the States--the Senator does not propose to say
that all ladies of seventeen shall vote; and yet it is impossible
to say that there is any distinction in respect to intelligence
as a matter of right, any philosophical distinction between one
year and another. True, as the Senator says, you may run it down
so far that at last you have reached a condition of infancy, and
there everybody says the child is not wise enough to vote, is not
wise enough to do anything without having guardianship and
tutelage. But if you put it upon the ground of natural right, the
child has just as good a right to say to you that he shall be the
judge of it, as you have to say to him that you must be; and this
shows that the notion of any natural right of anybody of any age
to participate in the government of society is an absolute
absurdity. It is one of those figments of the imagination that
have crawled into some people's brains within a very few years,
and will go out again as other delusions do.

Then when you come to the XIV. Amendment it is equally obvious
that that has nothing to do with the subject. If anybody had
thought it related to suffrage when the XV. Amendment was passed,
nobody would have voted for it, because on that theory the right
to vote did exist in all colored persons, females as well as
males; and yet nobody of any party or any creed pretended at that
time when we proposed the XV. Amendment that we had guaranteed
the right to vote by the XIV. Nobody suspected it; nobody
suggested it; and nobody believed in i