a large table, manifested a respectful attention to each speaker in turn, complimenting them warmly at the close.
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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
The whole question is, what is the meaning of the term "citizen" as here used. The term is familiar to law and politics, and the authorities are very numerous and uncontradicted which make citizenship include the right to vote. These authorities consist of lexicographers, English and American, and legal and political writers. It is said, however, that to give the term a meaning by which women become voters under it is contrary to the actual intent of Congress and the State Legislatures in passing the amendment, as, unquestionably, the legislators who voted for it had personally (with, perhaps, a few exceptions) no thought of enfranchising women.
To this it is replied: 1. That the question is not whether they thought of enfranchising women, but whether they used the term as a term of enfranchisement at all; for if it would have enfranchised black men, it would have equally enfranchised women, and unquestionably the predominant idea in these legislators was a political benefit, not very precisely measured, to black men. 2. An inquiry as to actual intent in such a case is never admissible. A rule that allowed it would make every law uncertain. An enactment can be construed only by the language in fact used, and where that language is doubtful, by other parts of the same enactment, and by a consideration of the public evil which the law was intended to remedy. The evil to be remedied in this case was the political disadvantage under which black men, made free by the XIII. Amendment, still labored. The object was to give them a positive political benefit. The terms used are such that, necessarily and confessedly, whatever benefit accrues to black men under it accrues equally to women.
It is said, in the next place, that the term "citizen" has acquired a meaning in American usage, legal and political, that does not carry with it the idea of suffrage; and the report of the majority of the Judiciary Committee on the Woodhull memorial places its adverse construction of this amendment entirely on the ground of an American use of the term in its restricted sense. Such a use of the term undoubtedly exists. Webster recognizes it, and so do some of our political writers. But this meaning is a secondary and lower one, and has not attained such dignity of use as to encroach at all upon the well-established general meaning,