leave to you those questions of policy, and we commend them to
your judgment and careful consideration. Does any one claim that
representation should be reduced because of insanity or idiocy, or
because of convicts? Does any one claim that all laws requiring
residence and registration should be done away? And yet they are on the
same line, on the same principle. There is not one of these
prerequsites, on which I have commented, that it is not in the power of
the person who desires to get suffrage to overcome and control and
conquer so that he may become a voter. But if he be a black man he
cannot put off his color. He cannot, if he were born a member of a
particular race, strip himself of that quality; nor can he, if he has
been in servitude; nor can he, if he has been in rebellion, take out
that taint; nor can he, if he has been convicted of other crimes, remove
his record of criminality. These are an inherent, inseparable,
indissoluble part of that man. But his education, his registration, his
residence, his payment of a portion of the burdens of the State, and the
other matters, are in his power and his control. I find it to be in
accord with the wisdom of the people of the country that it is the true
policy to let the States govern those matters for themselves. The
Constitution of the United States touches those things that are out of
the man's control."

In the filibustering contest over the rules in the Forty-seventh
Congress, first session, Mr. Robinson made a very earnest speech, which
commended itself to all except the extreme filibusters. Stripping the
contest of its technical parliamentary points, Mr. Robinson said: "Our
rules are for orderly procedure, not for disorderly obstruction; not for
resistance." Continuing he said that no tyranny is one-half as odious as
that which comes from the minority. "Our fathers," he said, "put our
Government upon the right of the majority to rule." To the charge of one
of the minority that the purpose of the majority to proceed to the
consideration of the election cases was tyranny, Mr. Robinson said:

"Tyranny! Because the majority of this House proposes to go forward to
action in a way that, upon their oaths, they declare to be right and
proper, and in their judgment is to be vindicated, you say that is
tyranny! But it is not tyranny for you in a minority forsooth to say,
unless it goes just the way we want it, it shall not go at all. That is
to say, in the language that