not only as a vindication of our great republican idea of
individual rights, but as the first blow in favor of national
unity--of a consistent, homogeneous government. As all our
difficulties, State and national, are finally referred to the
constitution, it is of vital importance that that instrument
should not be susceptible of a different interpretation from
every possible standpoint. It is folly to spend another century
in expounding the equivocal language of the constitution. If
under that instrument, supposed to be the _Magna Charta_ of
American liberties, all United States citizens do not stand equal
before the law, it should without further delay be so amended as
in plain, unmistakable language to declare what are the rights,
privileges, and immunities that belong to citizens of a republic.

There is no reason why the people of to-day should be governed by
the laws and constitutions of men long since dead and buried.
Surely those who understand the vital issues of this hour are
better able to legislate for the living present than those who
governed a hundred years ago. If the nineteenth century is to be
governed by the opinions of the eighteenth, and the twentieth by
the nineteenth, the world will always be governed by dead men....

The cry of centralization could have little significance if the
constitution were so amended as to protect all United States
citizens in their inalienable rights. That national supremacy
that holds individual freedom and equality more sacred than State
rights and secures representation to all classes of people, is a
very different form of centralization from that in which all the
forces of society are centered in a single arm. But the
recognition of the principle of national supremacy, as declared
in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, has been practically
nullified and the results of the war surrendered, by remanding
woman to the States for the protection of her civil and political
rights. The Supreme Court decisions and the congressional reports
on this point are in direct conflict with the idea of national
unity, and the principle of States rights involved in this
discussion must in time remand all United States citizens alike
to State authority for the protection of those rights declared to
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