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Sec. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States; or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Sec. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and VicePresident, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection, or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Sec. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in

aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Sec. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Article XV, Ratified March 30, 1870

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Sec. 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

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broken with Church, or with State, or with both. fifty years they governed themselves as they chose. Other colonies had a similar experience. When the mother country began to assert supremacy it was too late to establish it. Tossing the tea into Boston Harbor was nullification of the Stamp Act; the Declaration of Independence consummated a scission, which had practically existed from the outset. Meanwhile there had been twenty-three plans of Union devised between the Colonies; all proving ineffectual, because not one of them yielded the ancient right of a State to tax the commerce of its neighbors. Yet all plans pointed toward, and gradually led to the Constitution of 1787, which abolished and forbade impost taxes between the States. John Adams says that "The Constitution was wrung from the necessities of a reluctant people." The marvel is that no more than six attempts at a breach of fellowship occurred within the first century of national existence.

The questions involved in the attempts at nullification and secession have so far been, The right of States to decide the Constitutionality of Congressional Acts; The right of the select few to control the politics of the

people; The right of genius to supremacy; The right to resist laws that bear unequally on sections; The possibility of holding in union antagonistic social forces. All these questions have been solved favorably to the Republic. But are we sure that other questions may not arise, or are not now under discussion, which will disturb the political solidarity?

First.-Referring to an attempt in 1779 to enact emancipation in Virginia, Jefferson said, "It was found that the public mind would not bear the proposition-nor will it to this day. Yet the day is not distant when it must bear it, and adopt it, or worse will follow." But to set free four millions of slaves, and endow them with the privileges of citizenship, did not bring us to the end of trouble with the Negro Problem. Optimism and philanthropy cannot blind us to the complex evils of race antagonism. This is certain that the blacks will not at present be allowed to exercise their Constitutional right of suffrage. For some time after the War they were voted by carpet-bag Northerners, they are voted now by native-born Southerners. The remedy offered by education, although probably the only one in which the nation can place reliance, is not immediate. Booker Washington has succeeded in demonstrating that this education must add industrial training to intellectual culture.

Apart from the question of suffrage, the South at present offers no hindrance to federalism. Railroads run North and South as freely as East and West, creating a community of population and of popular sentiment. The literature of the South, freed from the influence of the "irrepressible sentiment," is competing fairly with that of the North. Churches that split across the sectional line, are either re-uniting, or fusing in the larger

liberty of a religion of humanity. The self-righteousness of the North, consequent upon a long struggle for a moral principle, is fading no faster than the self-satisfaction of the South with patriarchal society and mediæval customs. We can dismiss the era of sectionalism with confident assurance, that the long rivalry of North and South, of free and slave labor, was of inestimable benefit in developing strength of national character, and a completer knowledge of what our institutions are good for. Our fathers, enumerating the checks established by the Constitution on possible usurpation, did not foresee that but for the influence of one section upon another, in our first century, liberty would have been sacrificed to government. The factional issue went into history with ultimate profit to our national life; so also did the sectional contest.

Second. The same problem of how to deal with ignorance in a government of equal suffrage, confronts us elsewhere as well as with the negro. The firm conviction expressed by Washington, Jefferson, and others among the nation builders, that a republic of freemen could cohere only as cemented by popular intelligence and general education, was not novel to them. It was borrowed of Bradford, Winslow, and Roger Williams. It became an inheritance of the whole nation. If, of late, belief in mere education is expressed with a less confident tone, it is because there is a growing conviction that educational system and substance must improve as rapidly as political theory and social manners. The world heretofore has never seen such universal zeal among educators as is now manifested in the United States. Defective in civic instruction, and in moral stimulus, as our common school system has been, it cannot long remain so. Mediævalism in our higher

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