tation of a requisite number of States, reduce the minority to
less than one-third. Congress by these means might be enabled to pass a
law, the objections of the President to the contrary notwithstanding,
which would render impotent the other two departments of the Government
and make inoperative the wholesome and restraining power which it was
intended by the framers of the Constitution should be exerted by them.
This would be a practical concentration of all power in the Congress
of the United States; this, in the language of the author of the
Declaration of Independence, would be "precisely the definition of
despotic government."

I have preferred to reproduce these teachings of the great statesmen
and constitutional lawyers of the early and later days of the Republic
rather than to rely simply upon an expression of my own opinions.
We can not too often recur to them, especially at a conjuncture like
the present. Their application to our actual condition is so apparent
that they now come to us a living voice, to be listened to with more
attention than at any previous period of our history. We have been and
are yet in the midst of popular commotion. The passions aroused by a
great civil war are still dominant. It is not a time favorable to that
calm and deliberate judgment which is the only safe guide when radical
changes in our institutions are to be made. The measure now before me is
one of those changes. It initiates an untried experiment for a people
who have said, with one voice, that it is not for their good. This alone
should make us pause, but it is not all. The experiment has not been
tried, or so much as demanded, by the people of the several States for
themselves. In but few of the States has such an innovation been allowed
as giving the ballot to the colored population without any other
qualification than a residence of one year, and in most of them the
denial of the ballot to this race is absolute and by fundamental law
placed beyond the domain of ordinary legislation. In most of those
States the evil of such suffrage would be partial, but, small as it
would be, it is guarded by constitutional barriers. Here the innovation
assumes formidable proportions, which may easily grow to such an extent
as to make the white population a subordinate element in the body
politic.

After full deliberation upon this measure, I can not bring myself to
approve it, even upon local considerations, nor yet as the beginning