r clearly expressed wishes. Their happiness,
their welfare, their advancement, are the sole objects of the
institution of government; of these they are not only the best,
but they are the exclusive judges. They have commissioned us to
exercise for their good the great powers which they have
intrusted to us by their letter of attorney, the constitution;
not to assume to ourselves a superior wisdom, or usurp a
guardianship over them, dictating reforms not demanded by them,
and attempting to grasp power not granted.

The organization of our political institutions is such that the
great mass of the powers of government, the proper exercise of
which so deeply concerns the welfare of the people, is left to
the States. In that depository the will of the people is most
certainly ascertained, and the exercise of power is more directly
under their guidance. Our free institutions have had their great
development and owe their stability more to causes connected with
the direct exercise of the power of the people in local
self-government than to all other causes combined. Recent events,
though tending strongly to centralization, have not destroyed in
the public mind the inestimable value of local self-government.
Among the powers which have hitherto been esteemed as most
essential to the public welfare is the power of the States to
regulate their domestic institutions in their own way; and among
those institutions none has been preserved by the States with
greater jealousy than their absolute control over marriage and
the relation between the sexes.

Another power of the States, deemed by the people when they
assented to the Constitution of the United States most essential
to the public welfare, was the right of each State to determine
the qualifications of electors. Wherever the federal constitution
speaks of elections for a federal office, it adopts the
qualifications for electors prescribed by the State in which the
election is to be held.

Nor has this fundamental rule been departed from in the fifteenth
amendment. That impairs it only to the extent that race, color,
or previous condition of servitude shall not be made a ground of
exclusion from the right of suffrage. In all else that pertains
to the qualifications of electors the absolute will