new one. It affected the
rights of States and the equality of citizens. To concede four and a
half millions of negroes to the basis of Southern representation, and
at the same time to confine the suffrage to the whites, was not merely
a harsh injustice to the colored race, but it was an insulting
discrimination against Northern white men. It gave, as was well said
at the time, a far greater influence in National affairs to the vote of
the Confederate solider in the South than to the vote of the Union
soldier in the North. In Congressional districts where the colored
race constituted one-half of the total population (and in many
instances the proportion was even larger), the vote of one white man
offset the vote of two in a Northern district where suffrage was
impartial. This ratio of influence went into the Electoral College,
and gave to the white men of South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana
double the power of that enjoyed by white men in New York, Illinois
and California. The loss of Representatives to the Northern States, or
more properly speaking the gain to the Southern States on existing
numbers, would be nearly one-eighth of the entire House, and fully
one-quarter of those likely to occupy seats on the Democratic side of
the chamber. In the Electoral College, the loss to the North and the
gain to the South would be nearly in the same ratio. In the rapid
increase of the negro race the offensive discrimination against the
North would be continually enlarging in its proportions. The
corrective provision in the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to
prevent this grave injustice both to the negro and to the white
man--but every Democrat in Congress and in the State Legislatures
voted against it through all the stages of its enactment and its
ratification, and thereby expressed a willingness to give an unfair
advantage to the Southern white man, and to establish an unfair
discrimination against the Northern white man.

Important and essential as are the provisions of the Fourteenth
Amendment just cited, indispensable as they have proved in the system
of Southern Reconstruction, they are relatively of small consequence
when compared with that great provision which is for all time:--that
provision which establishes American citizenship upon a permanent
foundation, which gives to the humblest man in the Republic ample
protection against any abridgment of his privileges and immunities by
State law, which secur