the Supreme Court, the
Fourteenth Amendment has been deprived in part of the power which
Congress no doubt intended to impart to it. Under its provisions, as
construed by the Court, little, if any thing, can be done by Congress
to correct the evils or avert the injurious consequences arising from
such abuses of the suffrage as distinguished the vote of Louisiana in
the Presidential election of 1868, and in the numerous and flagrant
cases which followed that baleful precedent of unrestrained violence
and unlimited wrong. Those outrages are the deeds of individual
citizens or of associated masses, acting without authority of law and
in defiance of law. Yet when a vitiated public opinion justifies
their course, and when indictment and conviction are impossible, the
injured citizen loses his rights as conclusively as if the law had
denied them, and indeed far more cruelly.

Undoubtedly a large proportion of the members of Congress, while
following the lead of those who constructed the Fourteenth Amendment,
sincerely believed that it possessed a far greater scope than judicial
inquiry and decision have left it. It is hazarding little to say that
if the same political bodies which submitted the Amendment to the
people could have measured both the need of its application and the
insufficiency of its power, it would have been seriously changed, and
would have conferred upon the National Government the unquestioned
authority to protect individual citizens in the right of suffrage, so
far as that suffrage is used in the choice of officers of the United
States. The opportunity was neglected and may never return. It is not
at all probable that any political party will succeed in time of peace,
upon financial and industrial issues, in electing two-thirds of the
Senate and two-thirds of the House of Representatives. No further
change in the Constitution of the Republic is probable therefore,
within any period whose line of thought or action may now be
anticipated with reasonable certainty; and if a sudden political
convulsion should possibly give two-thirds of each branch of Congress
to one political party, it would be found impracticable to propose any
change in the Constitution, in the direction of enlarging the scope
of liberty, that would be likely to secure the support of three-fourths
of the States of the Union.

The Constitutional Amendments were proposed and adopted under the
belief that they would be honorably obser