Personal privilege, depending not upon race, but upon legislation, or inheritance, is, of course, strictly forbidden in each State by both constitutions, State and Federal.  The growth of a contrary principle is only noteworthy on the two lines touching respectively the whites in the South and veterans of wars in the North.  It must be said that legislation in the interest of the Grand Army of the Republic, and even of the veterans of the Spanish War, and even in some States of the sons or descendants of such veterans respectively, has come very near the point of hereditary or social privilege.  The struggles of so-called “Organized Labor” to establish a privileged caste have so far been generally unsuccessful, always so in the courts, and usually so in the legislatures; but in many States those who have enlisted in either wars, Civil or Spanish, wholly irrespective of actual service or injury, are entitled not only to pensions, Federal and State, but to a diversity of forms of State aid, to general preference in public employment, and even to special privilege or exemption from license taxes, etc., in private trades, and their children or descendants are, in many States, entitled to special educational privilege, to support in State schools or industrial colleges, to free text-books, and other advantages.  Presumably some of these matters might be successfully contested in the courts, but they never have been.  As to pensions, nothing here need be said.  The reader will remember the familiar fact that our pensions in time of peace now cost more than the maintenance of the entire German army on a war footing or than the maintenance of our own army.  The last pensioner of the Revolutionary War, which ended in 1781—­that is to say, the last widow of a Revolutionary soldier—­only died a few years ago, early in the twentieth century.  The Order of the Cincinnati, founded by Washington and Lafayette, was nevertheless a subject of jealous anxiety to our forefathers; but apparently the successful attempt of volunteers disbanded after the Civil and the Spanish Wars, although far more menacing because embodying social and political privilege, not a mere badge of honor, seems to call forth but little criticism.

XVII

SEX LEGISLATION, MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

The notion that a woman is in all respects a citizen, entitled to all rights, political as well as property and social, was definitely tested before our Supreme Court soon after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, on the plea that the wording of that amendment gave a renewed recognition to the doctrine that a woman was a person born or naturalized in the United States and therefore a citizen and entitled to the equal protection of the laws.  The court substantially decided [1] that she was a citizen, was entitled to the equal protection of the laws, but not to political privileges or burdens any more than she was liable