to the equal protection of the
laws. All discrimination is forbidden; and while the rights of citizens
of a State as such are not defined or conferred by the Constitution of
the United States, yet all discrimination, all denial of equality before
the law, all denial of equal protection of the laws whether State or
national laws, is forbidden.

The distinction between the two kinds of citizenship is clear, and the
Supreme Court has clearly pointed out this distinction, but it has
nowhere written a word or line which denies to Congress the power to
prevent a denial of equality of rights whether those rights exist by
virtue of citizenship of the United States or of a State. Let honorable
members mark well this distinction. There are rights which are conferred
on us by the United States. There are other rights conferred on us by
the states of which we are individually the citizens. The fourteenth
amendment does not forbid a state to deny to all its citizens any of
those rights which the state itself has conferred with certain
exceptions which are pointed out in the decision which we are examining.
What it does forbid is inequality, is discrimination or, to use the
words of the amendment itself, is the denial "to any person within its
jurisdiction, the equal protection of the laws." If a State denies to me
rights which are common to all her other citizens, she violates this
amendment, unless she can show, as was shown in the Slaughter-house
cases, that she does it in the legitimate exercise of her police power.
If she abridges the rights of all her citizens equally, unless those
rights are specifically guarded by the Constitution of the United
States, she does not violate this amendment. This is not to put the
rights which I hold by virtue of my citizenship of South Carolina under
the protection of the national Government; it is not to blot out or
overlook in the slightest particular the distinction between rights held
under the United States and rights held under the States; but it seeks
to secure equality to prevent discrimination, to confer as complete and
ample protection on the humblest as on the highest.

The gentleman from Kentucky, in the course of the speech to which I am
now replying, made a reference to the State of Massachusetts which
betrays again the confusion which exists in his mind on this precise
point. He tells us that Massachusetts excludes from the ballot-box all
who cannot read and write, and points to