Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/753

Rh based upon the Constitution of Missouri, which provides (Art 2, Sec. 18) that "every male citizen of the United States, etc., ... shall be entitled to vote";—and also upon the registration law of said State, approved March 10, 1871, to the same effect; and it was claimed, therefore, that the defendant was justified in refusing to register the plaintiff on account of her sex.

The plaintiff, however, denied the validity of this clause of the Missouri Constitution, and the registration act based thereon, and contended that they are in violation of, and repugnant to, the Constitution of the United States, and particularly to those articles and clauses thereof which she had specified in her petition.

It was admitted, by the pleadings, that the plaintiff was a native-born, free, white citizen of the United States, and of the State of Missouri; that the defendant was a Registrar, qualified and acting as such; that the plaintiff, in proper time, and in proper form, made application to him to be registered, and that the defendant refused to register the plaintiff solely for the reason that she was a female (and that she possessed the qualifications of an elector, in all respects, except as to the matter of sex, as before stated). The question was thus broadly presented of a conflict between the Constitution of the State of Missouri and that of the United States, as contemplated by the 25th section of the Judiciary act of 1789, and 5th February, 1867.

.—We think the chief difficulty in this case is one of fact rather than of law. The practice is against the plaintiff. The States, with one exception, which we shall notice hereafter more in detail, have uniformly claimed and exercised the right to act, as to the matter of suffrage, just as they pleased—to limit or extend it, as they saw proper. And this is the popular idea on the subject. Men accept it as a matter of fact, and take for granted it must be right. So in the days of African slavery, thousands believed it to be right—even a Divine institution. But this belief has passed away; and, in like manner, this doctrine of the right of the States to exercise unlimited and absolute control over the elective franchise of citizens of the United States, must and will give way to a truer and better understanding of the subject. The plaintiff's case is simply one of the means by which this end will ultimately be reached.

We claim, and presume it will not be disputed, that the elective franchise is a privilege of citizenship within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States. In order to get a clearer idea of the true meaning of this term citizenship, it may be well to recur for a moment to its first introduction and use in American law.

Before the colonists asserted their independence they were politically bound to the sovereign of Great Britain, by what is termed in English law, "allegiance"; and those from whom this allegiance was due were termed "subjects." But when these "bands," as they are termed in the Declaration of Independence, were dissolved, the political relation became changed, and we no longer hear in the United States the term "subject" and "allegiance," except the latter, which is used to express the paramount duty of our citizens to our own government. The term citizen was substituted for that of "subject." But this was not a mere change of name; the