fix the day upon which
such votes shall be given. The United States secures the right,
merely leaving the States to prescribe the qualifications of
voters. This is all, with one exception that woman asks; she
demands that her right shall be recognized and secured by the
United States, which shall then prohibit the States from
prescribing qualifications not within the reach of all citizens.

A 7th class of United States voters are those men who having been
deprived of citizenship through civil offenses against the power
and majesty of the United States are afterward pardoned, or
"restored to citizenship."

Still an 8th class over whom the United States exercises its
authority are deserters from the army--military criminals. An act
of Congress of March 3, 1865, imposed forfeiture of citizenship
and its rights, as an additional penalty for the crime of
desertion. In accordance with this act, the President issued a
proclamation the eleventh of that same month, declaring that all
deserters who failed to report themselves to a Provost Marshal
within sixty days thereafter should be deemed to have forfeited
their rights of citizenship, and should be declared forever
incapable of holding any office of interest or profit under the
United States. This act was passed previous to the submission of
the XIV. Amendment.

Thus at the time of Chief-Justice Waite's decision asserting
National want of power over the ballot, and declaring the United
States possessed no voters of its own creation in the States
(where else would it have them?), the country already possessed
eight classes of voters, or persons whose right to the ballot was
in some form under the control or sanction of the United States.
The black man, the amnestied man, the naturalized man, the
foreigner honorably discharged from the Union army, voters for
the lower House of Congress, voters for Presidential electors,
pardoned civil and military criminals. Further research may bring
still other classes to light.

Thus when woman claims that her right to the use of the ballot
shall be secured by the United States, she has eight
distinguished precedents in favor of her demand for National
protection. No more inconsistent assertion was ever made than
that the United States possesses no c