n of a fixed income, or
upon a certain degree of education, or upon nativity, or religious
creed. It is still in the power of the States to apply any one of
these tests or all of them, if willing to hazard the penalty prescribed
in the Fourteenth Amendment. But it is not probably that any one of
these tests will ever be applied. Nor were they seriously taken into
consideration when the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress.
Its prime object was to correct the wrongs which might be enacted in
the South, and the correction proposed was direct and unmistakable;
viz., that the Nation would exclude the negro from the basis of
apportionment wherever the State should exclude him from the right of
suffrage.

When therefore the nation by subsequent change in its Constitution
declared that the State shall not exclude the negro from the right of
suffrage, it neutralized and surrendered the contingent right before
held, to exclude him from the basis of apportionment. Congress is thus
plainly deprived by the Fifteenth Amendment of certain powers over the
representation in the South, which it previously possessed under the
provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the adoption of the
Fifteenth Amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage,
the next step would be for Congress to exclude the negro from the basis
of apportionment. After the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, if a
State should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be
for the Supreme Court to declare that the act was unconstitutional, and
therefore null and void. The essential and inestimable value of the
Fourteenth Amendment still remains in the three other sections, and
pre-eminently in the first section.

The contentions which have arisen between political parties as to the
rights of negro suffrage in the Southern States, would scarcely be
cognizable judicially under either the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth
Amendment to the Constitution. Both of those Amendments operate as
inhibitions upon the power of the State, and do not have reference
to those irregular acts of the people which find no authorization in
the public statutes. The defect in both Amendments, in so far as their
main object of securing rights to the colored race is involved, lies in
the fact that they do not operate directly upon the people, and
therefore Congress is not endowed with the pertinent and applicable
power to give redress. By decisions of