s, but whatever room there was for doubt, under the
old regime, the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment settled that
question forever in its first sentence:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and
of the State wherein they reside.

The second settles the equal status of all citizens:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property
without due process of law, or deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? I
scarcely believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say
they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens, and no State has
a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, which shall
abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination
against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is
today null and void, precisely as is every one against negroes.

Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I
think the disfranchised ex-rebels and ex-State prisoners all will agree
that it is not only one of them, but the one without which all the
others are nothing. Seek first the kingdom of the ballot and all things
else shall be added, is the political injunction.

Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define citizen to be a person, in the
United States, entitled to vote and hold office. Prior to the adoption
of the Thirteenth Amendment, by which slavery was forever abolished and
black men transformed from property to persons, the judicial opinions of
the country had always been in harmony with this definition: In order to
be a citizen one must be a voter. Associate-Justice Washington, in
defining the privileges and immunities of the citizen, more than fifty
years ago, said: "They include all such privileges as are fundamental in
their nature; and among them is the right to exercise the elective
franchise, and to hold office." Even the Dred Scott decision, pronounced
by the Abolitionists and Republicans infamous because it virtually
declared "black men had no rights white men were bound to respect," gave
this true and logical conclusion, that to be one of the people was to be