ion of Judge Cartter, of the Supreme Court of
the District of Columbia, denying to women the right to vote under the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, says:

If the people of the United States, by amendment of their
Constitution, could expunge, without any explanatory or assisting
legislation, an adjective of five letters from all State and local
constitutions, and thereby raise millions of our most ignorant
fellow-citizens to all of the rights and privileges of electors,
why should not the same people, by the same amendment, expunge an
adjective of four letters from the same State and local
constitutions, and thereby raise other millions of more educated
and better informed citizens to equal rights and privileges,
without explanatory or assisting legislation?

If the Fourteenth Amendment does not secure to all citizens the right to
vote, for what purpose was that grand old charter of the fathers
lumbered with its unwieldy proportions? The Republican party, and Judges
Howard and Bingham, who drafted the document, pretended it was to do
something for black men; and if that something were not to secure them
in their right to vote and hold office, what could it have been? For by
the Thirteenth Amendment black men had become people, and hence were
entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the government,
precisely as were the women of the country and foreign men not
naturalized. According to Associate-Justice Washington, they already
had:

Protection of the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty,
with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and
to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject to such
restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general
welfare of the whole; the right of a citizen of one State to pass
through or to reside in any other State for the purpose of trade,
agriculture, professional pursuit, or otherwise; to claim the
benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, to institute and maintain
actions of any kind in the courts of the State; to take, hold, and
dispose of property, either real or personal, and an exemption from
higher taxes or impositions than are paid by the other citizens of
the State.

Thus, you see, those newly-freed men were in possession of every
possible right, privilege and immunity of the government, except that of
suffrage, an