Congress may at any time, by law, make or
alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing
Senators."

Here is conceded the power only to prescribe times, places and manner of
holding the elections; and even with these Congress may interfere, with
all excepting the mere place of choosing Senators. Thus you see, there
is not the slightest permission in either section for the States to
discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote. Surely,
to regulate cannot be to annihilate! nor to qualify to wholly deprive.
And to this principle every true Democrat and Republican said amen, when
applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches for EQUAL
RIGHTS TO ALL from 1865 to 1869; and when, in 1871, I asked that Senator
to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women
in their right to vote--as he had done for black men--he handed me a
copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said:

"Miss Anthony, put 'sex' where I have 'race' or 'color,' and you
have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman.
There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to
vote, and I will never vote for a sixteenth amendment to guarantee
it to them. I voted for both the fourteenth and fifteenth under
protest; would never have done it but for the pressing emergency of
that hour; would have insisted that the power of the original
Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of
their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But
the newly made freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth nor
time to wait that slow process. Women possess all these in an
eminent degree, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts,
and through them establish the powers of our American _magna
charta_, to protect every citizen of the Republic. But, friends,
when in accordance with Senator Summer's counsel, I went to the
ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's right to
vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them--they
appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted
illegally."

Senator Sumner, putting sex where he did color, said:

"Qualifications cannot be in their nature permanent or
insurmountable. Sex cannot be a qualification any more than size,
race, color, or previous c