it does not follow, that with them it was not an attribute of citizenship, or that they had a right arbitrarily, or without any good and sufficient reason, to exclude other citizens from the right which they themselves possessed.

They previously had been and still were citizens of the States in which they resided, and as such citizens they there had the right of suffrage. They had not derived it from the State legislatures nor from the State constitutions. The State constitutions are not grants of power or of rights, but mere limitations upon the power of the State legislatures; and all declarations in the State constitutions of the right of suffrage in certain citizens or classes of citizens must be looked upon as equivalent to prohibiting the legislature from preventing such citizens or classes of citizens from voting. It is equivalent to saying that the legislatures may in the exercise of a sound discretion, in regulating the suffrage, exclude, for good reasons, some citizens, (not necessarily all those not mentioned) but that they must not exclude the citizens or classes of citizens specified in the constitutions of their States.

The fallacy consists in assuming that the State constitutions are the sources of the right of suffrage. Suppose all the State constitutions had been silent upon the subject? Would not the State legislatures still have had the power to regulate the elective franchise as a right inherent in the people? Would the entire machinery of government have been suspended, on the ground that there had been a failure to furnish the necessary motive power for putting it into operation?

Having thus the right of suffrage in the States where they resided, a right not dependent upon any State legislature or constitution, but superior to all of them, when, by virtue of their own act, the people who framed the Federal Constitution became citizens of the United States, they at once had the right of voting for members of the national Legislature; a right which could not be taken away by any legislation, state or national.

A State legislature has not such an arbitrary control over the elective franchise that it can rightfully or legally exclude an entire class of citizens from the suffrage so effectually that

they can never attain it. The foreigner can become a voter by being naturalized; the infant can become a voter when he arrives at the age of twenty-one. Even a criminal can become a voter by being pardoned and restored to his civil and political rights. But the class of citizens to which the complainant in Minor v. Happersett belonged, could not, under the construction which has prevailed, by any lapse of time or by any act of their own become voters. To justify such an exclusion as this, it would have been necessary to decide not only that the Constitution did not confer the right of suffrage, but that there was no such right at all in the citizen. But the Supreme Court would have hesitated to say that the people who formed this government had no right to participate in it, except as such right should be granted to them by their State legislatures, or by the constitutions which they had framed.

In the Dred Scott case it was held that a certain class of citizens had no rights which the class in power were bound to respect. But the class thus judicially debarred of all civil and political rights, are to-day in the full enjoyment of these rights. The case of Minor v. Happersett, though less explicit in statement, quite as effectually debarred from the exercise of the most important political right, an entire class of citizens. When the Somerset case was decided by Lord Mansfield, there were 15,000 slaves in the British Isles alone, besides the much larger number under British dominion. An immense number of people obtained their liberty as the result of this decision.

A liberal construction of the Federal and State constitutions, in accordance with their spirit and with the genius of our free institutions, would result in recognizing suffrage as a right of citizenship, subject to regulations, reasonable in themselves and uniform in their operation. When such right, subject to such regulations, shall be recognized as inherent in citizenship, whether such recognition shall be first by legislative or judicial action, then, and not till then will we have in fact as well as in theory, a republican form of government.

Charles B. Waite.

RECOLLECTIONS OF LYSANDER SPOONER

It is not at all remarkable that, upon the announcement of his death, a few days ago, in Boston, at the advanced age of 80 years, some of the admirers of Lysander Spooner should have pronounced him one of the greatest Americans of the age, coupled with the rather incongruous qualification that he is scarcely known to the people of the present generation. The secret of the saying lies in this: While Spooner possessed intellectual qualities of the very highest order a style of writing scarcely equaled in the English language for grace, terseness, clearness and copiousness of illustration, and powers of logic almost irresistible, he bent his energies to tasks that other men would never have undertaken-to the elucidation of subjects that seemed to be entirely out of the range and region of popular thought, and for the most part beyond the reach of human accomplishment.

Thus one of his earliest crusades was against the Post-office department on account of its assumed monopoly of the right to carry the mails; and he carried on such a long and vigorous warfare against it that he nearly ruined himself financially. Later along in the old abolition days he wrote his masterly treatise upon the "Unconstitutionality of Slavery," right in the teeth of the generally acknowledged sanction which the constitution gave to that system-a treatise nevertheless of such marked ability, of such breadth of thought and depth of logic, that men who stood aghast at its boldness, soon became converts to its doctrines; and the greater part of the old abolition party stood fast and swore by Spooner's argument, as if it had been a revelation from heaven. Then he took up

the venerable system of Trial by Jury, and he riddled it from top to bottom with the same kind of hot shot he had employed against other abuses that had become hoary with age.

It is to be remarked that this intellectual giant bore the brunt of the fray on his single shield. He stood almost always alone and in the forlorn hope. Where other men would have faltered and quailed in their championship of a cause, because it seemed so utterly useless and hopeless and beyond human achievement, Spooner would take it up with the high-wrought courage, zeal and fierce assailment of a veritable knight-errant; and whether he battled with true knights, or only with windmills "gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire"-it was all the same this grand old hero never looked to the right or to the left, or asked himself the question whether his high emprise was bound to suffer defeat or win a victory. But he dashed on into the midst of the fray with a mettle, and elevation of purpose and confidence of success, which, if they had been exerted with half their intensity in other fields of thought and action, would have won their possessor the applause of the world for all future time.

I knew Spooner well for many years, and I doubt if such a thing as human applause, the plaudits of the multitude, ever entered his thoughts or directed his purposes in the least. His soul soared above them. And as for personal aggrandizement of any kind, he never thought of it for a moment. He acted solely in all that he did and said from a high sense of rectitude and honor, never according to the conventionalities of worldly or social life. He would scorn to take a fee for defending a criminal, because he believed it his duty to take up his cause gratuitously from a sense of natural justice. Nor would he turn a deaf ear to the importunity of suffering, under any conditions.

"His pity gave, ere charity began."

The better to help others he practiced a rigid self-denial himself. One meal a day, and a frugal one at that, was the limit to his appetite for many years of his life. On a very limited income he managed, like Pope's "Man of Ross," to relieve the wants of many.

"Is there a variance? enter but his door,
Balked are the courts, and contest is no more.

Despairing quacks with curses flee the place,

And vile attorneys, now a useless race."

Had this man but followed the beaten path of his profession, he might have amassed wealth, and gained office and distinction. But he preferred to make sacrifices and remain comparatively poor and obscure rather than abate one jot of what he considered due to his independent manhood.

Is there no lesson, no concernment for the rest of us, in the life of such a brave, spotless, unselfish soul? How high it soars above the insatiable greed and ambition of ordinary natures! above the whole brood of "plumed" politicians, little and big, with which the times are rife! What a contrast such a career to that of the innumerable procession who are climbing, climbing, the back-stair way, into high places of honor and profit!

Here was a man of genius, who thought and wrote much upon public questions, yet never clamorous for distinction, never bustling, never elbowing his way to the front, whose life reminds you of the simplicity of the ancient sages. Nay, more than that, many of his thoughts and reflections upon social and political problems are as profound and original as those of the best of the early and late philosophers, like Plato and Compte. And very likely many of his theories on the same subjects may be as crude and visionary as theirs. The times are not ripe for the realization of Spooner's visions— possibly they may never be; though no one can say that some of these visions shall not become living and breathing forms in the future of the Republic. What he has published upon financial topics, upon the Jury system, upon the "Law of Intellectual Property," and many kindred subjects, was written after mature reflection, and from the original stand-point of a bold and independent and, if you please, erratic thinker. Hence many of his observations clash with the received opinions of the day; and it is only through the justice which posterity shall mete out to him that Spooner or his friends can expect a complete vindication of his purposes, or a verification of his prophecies.