the country,
it is with ill grace that we now decline to allow the vote of any man
because he has not performed that service.

"The second is the property qualification. I hope it is not necessary
in this day and this hour of the Republic to argue anywhere that a
property qualification is not only unjust in itself, but that it is
odious to the people of the country to a degree which cannot be
expressed. Everywhere, I believe, for half a century, it has been
repudiated by the people. Does anybody contemplate such a
qualification to the elective franchise, in the case of black people
or white?

"And next, reading and writing, or reading as a qualification, is
demanded; and an appeal is made to the example of Massachusetts. I
wish gentlemen who now appeal to Massachusetts would often appeal to
her in other matters where I can more conscientiously approve her
policy. But it is a different proposition in Massachusetts as a
practical measure.

"When, ten years ago, this qualification was imposed upon the citizens
of Massachusetts, it excluded no person who was then a voter. For two
centuries, we have had in Massachusetts a system of public instruction,
open to the children of the whole people without money and without
price. Therefore all the people there had had opportunities for
education. Why should the example of such a State be quoted to
justify refusing suffrage to men who have been denied the privilege
of education, and whom it has been a crime to teach?

* * * "The negro has everywhere the same right to vote as the white
man, and I maintain still further, that, when you proceed one step
from this line, you admit that your government is a failure. What is
the essential quality of monarchical and aristocratic governments?
Simply that by conventionalities, by arrangements of conventions, some
persons have been deprived of the right of voting. We have attempted
to set up and maintain a government upon the doctrine of the equality
of men, the universal right of all men, to participate in the
government. In accordance with that theory, we must accept the ballot
upon the principle of equality. It is enjoyed by the learned and un-
learned, the wise and the ignorant, the virtuous and the vicious.

"The great experiment is going on. If, before the war, any man in
this country was disposed to undervalue a government thus conducted, he
should have learned by this time the wisdom and strength of a
government wh