Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/562

532 "political society."[Pg 532] "Political society" is the foundation of our nation, and our political trust is the ballot.

It has been said by a member of the present Congress that no man in that body doubts that the Constitution authorizes women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other rights guaranteed to the citizens of the United States, but that in order to give them practical force there must be legislation; that these guaranteed rights are not self-executing. This is a fine legal quibble, stated for a purpose; but since legal minds disagree upon this point, a caviller might say no law is self-executing; all laws require enforcement. It may be said that the Ten Commandments are not self-executing; yet though given to Moses, not only as the underlying constitution of the Jewish nation and all nations, they contain self-executing provisions, bearing the penalties of their infraction within themselves. By their simple statement they carry within themselves the authority for their enforcement. The provision that the sun shall each day rise and run its accustomed rounds is a self-executing provision, until some Joshua vetoes this divine right of the sun.

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and no difficulty should be found in executing its provisions. But while, as aimed against the exercise of arbitrary power, we have no objection to the passage of a declaratory law which shall make plain to every United States judge, and to the most obtuse inspector of election, that women are voters, we still claim that the recent "Act for enforcing the XIV. Amendment" should protect woman in the exercise of her rights of self-government.

Although the States ratified the XIII., XIV. and XV. Amendments by the requisite two-thirds vote, they still find it difficult to realize the fact that these amendments have actually strengthened the National power. The Enforcement Act, and the previous law in regard to frauds in voting, may be called definitions of these last centralizing steps, but as yet neither amendments nor definitions are fully comprehended. A Rhode Island lawyer astutely said: "The people of the United States have not yet awakened to a sense of the vast centralizing power hidden in the XIV. Amendment." Opposition and struggles have already come, and will continue to arise, but legislators may beat their brains as they will, the fact of new National centralization still remains. Though State power dies never so hard, die it must, as only through reorganized National power can the political rights of citizens of the United States be protected.

"Citizen suffrage" is to-day the battle-ground of "State Rights," and the denial of woman's constitutional right to vote, and of National protection in voting, is the weapon it uses against the Nation. This question of citizen suffrage is not a woman question alone, but it is a question of the rights of citizenship affecting every man in this wide land. Let us, then, have the centralization which shall recognize the United States as the supreme political power of the land, which shall no longer allow the political rights of citizens of the United States to be the plaything of thirty-seven petty legislatures, of thirty thousand ambitious demagogues. Without this, our National experiment is a failure; without this, we are not freemen, but slaves; without this, we are neither protected nor self-protecting; without this, centralized State power, under the specious name of