Page:Studies in constitutional law Fr-En-US (1891).pdf/168

160 question of franchise. It distributes a certain share of electoral representation to each State, and then each State decides, according to its own pleasure under a single slight restriction, who are to be the persons qualified to choose its representatives in Congress, and its presidential electors.

The principle that political rights are a personal attribute of the individual citizen, leads necessarily to the consequence that the will of the majority of the citizens is sovereign. Now the chief article of the Constitution concerning the composition of the Senate completely contradicts this latter principle. All the States, however unequal the number of their population, are each represented by two members in the Senate. There we have equality among the States but not among the citizens. The presidential election itself, which the convention of 1787 had intended to reserve to the nation and to the majority, was recovered by the States. Nowadays it is the regular rule that in each State the voting for the presidential electors takes place not in separate districts, but in the mass and by “general ticket,” and these presidential electors make up the college called upon to choose the President of the Union. The candidate who gets a majority even of a few hundred votes in the hundreds of thousands of voters in any State — as was once the case at New York — gets the whole vote of that