Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/479

Rh stitution, and were incorporated into it from the fourth article of the Old Confederation, which provided, "that the free inhabitants of each of the States shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the several States."

If you would see a comment upon these terms, read the forty-second number of the Federalist, or a tumefied and diluted edition of it, in Story on the Constitution, which, like some other of his books, contains some remarks of his own, and are not always the best things in them. For the benefit of the Judiciary Committee, made up, as you know, of some of the ablest lawyers and best men of the country, I procured a judicial definition of these terms, "privileges, and immunities," although Mr. Attorney Bates said none exists,and my friend Judge Paschal, a more learned man, repeated it. I referred them to the case of Corfield vs. Coryell, 4th vol. of the so-called "Washington Circuit Court Reports," p. 371, where these terms came up, away back in the old time. Bushrod Washington, the favorite nephew of our Washington, made the decision, ladies. He was the Washington who got all of the brains of the family outside of its great chief; and he put them to a most admirable use. He was one of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, and he judicially defined the meaning of these "privileges and immunities," and said that they included such privileges as are fundamental in their nature. And among them he says, is the right to and to, as provided for by the laws of the various States. And the great Chancellor Kent, quoting this case, thus approvingly incorporates its very language into his text, where it stands unchallenged, unquestioned, and uncontradicted.

Why, the gentlemen of the Upper and of the Lower House, who are familiar with that decision and with its canonization by Kent, are not obliged to resort to Webster (not Daniel) and Worcester, nor to Grant White, nor even to Bouvier's Law Dictionary. They may overrule them all if they will. But they must go back to these sometimes forgotten decisions, which rest in the leaves of these dusty volumes, to these witnesses of the law, who declare that these expressions, "privileges, and immunities "include the elective franchise. And the whole people of these United States have solemnly declared "that all persons are citizens, and no State shall make or enforce any law to abridge the privileges and immunities of the citizens." If such authority and such reasoning were presented to a court on the trial of any other case in the wide world, save that of women and their rights, an advocate would be stopped by the court before he had gone half the length I have in this argument. The court would say that they would hear from the other side. (Laughter.) But this thing of opposition to woman's rights does not rest in intelligence so that it can be grasped in argument. It has no intellectual foundation anywhere. No logic supports it.