ds "him" and "his," are three times mentioned in this amendment,
yet no one can be found wild enough to say women were not intended to be
included in its benefits. Miss Anthony, herself, has already come under
its provisions, and were she denied a speedy and open trial, she could
appeal to the protection of this very amendment, which not only does not
say women, or her, but does alone say _him_ and _his_, and this,
notwithstanding the other legal adage, that laws stand as they are
written. This whole question of constitutional rights, turns on whether
the United States is a nation. If the United States is a nation, it has
_national_ powers. What is the admitted basis of our nation? We reply,
equality of political rights. And what, again, is the basis of political
rights? Citizenship. Nothing more, nothing less. National sovereignty is
only founded upon the political sovereignty of the individual, and
national rights are merely individual rights in a collective form. The
acknowledged basis of rights in each and every one of the thirty-seven
States, is citizenship,--not State citizenship alone, as that alone
cannot exist, but first, national citizenship. _National_ rights are the
fundamental basis of _State_ rights. If this is not true, we are then no
nation, but merely a confederacy, held together by our own separate
wills, and the South was right in its war of secession. Every sovereign
right of the United States exists solely from its existence as a
nation.

As the nation has grown to know the needs of liberty, it has from time
to time thrown new safeguards around it, as I have shown in its fifteen
progressive steps since 1776. For sixty years there was no change.
Slavery had cast its blight upon our country, and the struggle was for
State supremacy. Men forgot the rights, and need of freedom; but in
1861, the climax was reached, and then came the bitter struggle between
state and national power. Although our underlying principles were all
right, freedom required new guards, and the right of all men to liberty,
was put in a new form. An especial statute or amendment was added to our
National Constitution, declaring that involuntary servitude, unless for
crime, could not exist in this republic. This statute created no new
rights; it merely affirmed and elucidated rights as old as creation, and
which, in a general way, had been recognized at the very first
foundation of our government--even as far back as the old Articles