The fundamental charters are on our side. There are certain statute
limitations which may prove greater or less. But these are temporary and
trivial things, always to be interpreted, often to be modified, by
reference to the principles of the Constitution. For instance, when a
constitutional convention is to be held, or new conditions of suffrage to
be created, the whole people should vote upon the matter, including those
not hitherto enfranchised. This is the view insisted on, many years since,
by that eminent jurist, William Beach Lawrence. He maintained, in a letter
to Charles Sumner and in opposition to his own party, that if the question
of "negro suffrage" in the Southern States of the Union were put to vote,
the colored people themselves had a natural right to vote on the question.
The same is true of women. It should never be forgotten by advocates of
woman suffrage, that the deeper their reasonings go, the stronger
foundation they find; and that we have always a solid fulcrum for our lever
in that phrase of our charters, "We the people."

THE USE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

When young people begin to study geometry, they expect to begin with hard
reasoning on the very first page. To their surprise, they find that the
early pages are not occupied by reasoning, but by a few simple, easy, and
rather commonplace sentences, called "axioms," which are really a set of
pegs on which all the reasoning is hung. Pupils are not expected to go back
in every demonstration and prove the axioms. If Almira Jones happens to be
doing a problem at the blackboard on examination day, at the high school,
and remarks in the course of her demonstration that "things which are equal
to the same thing are equal to one another," and if a sharp questioner
jumps up, and says, "How do you know it?" she simply lays down her bit of
chalk, and says fearlessly, "That is an axiom," and the teacher sustains
her. Some things must be taken for granted.

The same service rendered by axioms in the geometry is supplied in America,
as to government, by the simple principles of the Declaration of
Independence. Right or wrong, they are taken for granted. Inasmuch as all
the legislation of the country is supposed to be based in them,--they
stating the theory of our government, while the Constitution itself only
puts into organic shape the application,--we must all begin with them. It
is a great advantage, and saves great trouble in all ref