n in forming a State government should have an equal
vote, is because each individual, before he enters into government,
is equally free and equally independent.

James Madison said:

Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the
mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the
laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who
are to administer them.... Let it be remembered, finally, that it
has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights
for which she contended were the rights of human nature.

These assertions by the framers of the United States Constitution of the
equal and natural right of all the people to a voice in the government,
have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation
throughout the entire history of our government. Thaddeus Stevens, of
Pennsylvania, said in 1866: "I have made up my mind that the elective
franchise is one of the inalienable rights meant to be secured by the
Declaration of Independence." B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three
days' discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan's
motion to strike "male" from the District of Columbia suffrage bill,
said:

Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I
stand for universal suffrage and as a matter of fundamental
principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any
ground of race or sex. I will go farther and say that I recognize
the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right. I do
not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations
upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social
state itself. Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this
debate, to hear senators declare this right only a conventional and
political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and
others; not a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President,
I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I
believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you
crystallize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring
the death-knell of American liberties.

Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, insisted that so soon as by the Thirteenth
Amendment the slaves became free men, the or