tion, local.

Men who commit crimes against the civil laws of the United States
forfeit their rights of citizenship. State law cannot
re-habilitate them, but within the last five years 2,500 such men
have been pardoned by congressional enactment, and thus again
been made voters in States by United States law. Is it not
strange that with a knowledge of these facts before him
Chief-Justice Waite could base his decision against the right of
a woman to the ballot, on the ground that the United States had
no voters in the States of its own creation?

Criminals against the military law of the United States, who
receive pardon, are still another class of voters thus created. A
very large body of men, several hundred thousand, forfeited their
rights of citizenship, their ballot, by participation in the
rebellion; they were political criminals. When general amnesty
was proclaimed they again secured the ballot. They had been
deprived of the suffrage by United States law and it was restored
to them by the same law.

It may be replied that the rebellious States had been reduced to
the condition of territories, over whose suffrage the general
government had control. But let me ask why, then, a large class
of men remained disfranchised after these States again took up
local government? A large class of men were especially exempted
from general amnesty and for the restoration of their political
rights were obliged to individually petition congress for the
removal of their political disabilities, and these men then
became "voters in States," by action of the United States. Here,
again, the United States recognized citizenship and suffrage as
synonymous. If the United States has no voters of its own
creation in the States, what are these men? A few, the leaders in
the rebellion, are yet disfranchised, and no State has power to
change this condition. Only the United States can again make them
voters in States.

Under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments the colored men of
the South, who never had possessed the ballot, and those colored
men of the North over whom some special disqualification hung,
were alike made voters by United States law. It required no
action of Delaware, Indiana, New York, or any of those States in
which the colored man w