The words “him” and “his,” are three times mentioned in this amendment, yet no one can be found wild enough to say women were not intended to be included in its benefits.  Miss Anthony, herself, has already come under its provisions, and were she denied a speedy and open trial, she could appeal to the protection of this very amendment, which not only does not say women, or her, but does alone say him and his, and this, notwithstanding the other legal adage, that laws stand as they are written.  This whole question of constitutional rights, turns on whether the United States is a nation.  If the United States is a nation, it has national powers.  What is the admitted basis of our nation?  We reply, equality of political rights.  And what, again, is the basis of political rights?  Citizenship.  Nothing more, nothing less.  National sovereignty is only founded upon the political sovereignty of the individual, and national rights are merely individual rights in a collective form.  The acknowledged basis of rights in each and every one of the thirty-seven States, is citizenship,—­not State citizenship alone, as that alone cannot exist, but first, national citizenship. National rights are the fundamental basis of State rights.  If this is not true, we are then no nation, but merely a confederacy, held together by our own separate wills, and the South was right in its war of secession.  Every sovereign right of the United States exists solely from its existence as a nation.

As the nation has grown to know the needs of liberty, it has from time to time thrown new safeguards around it, as I have shown in its fifteen progressive steps since 1776.  For sixty years there was no change.  Slavery had cast its blight upon our country, and the struggle was for State supremacy.  Men forgot the rights, and need of freedom; but in 1861, the climax was reached, and then came the bitter struggle between state and national power.  Although our underlying principles were all right, freedom required new guards, and the right of all men to liberty, was put in a new form.  An especial statute or amendment was added to our National Constitution, declaring that involuntary servitude, unless for crime, could not exist in this republic.  This statute created no new rights; it merely affirmed and elucidated rights as old as creation, and which, in a general way, had been recognized at the very first foundation of our government—­even as far back as the old Articles of Association, before the Declaration of Independence.  This amendment was the sixteenth step in securing the rights of the people, but it was not enough.  Our country differs from every other country, in that we have two kinds of citizenship.  First, we have national citizenship, based upon equal political rights.  A person born a citizen of the United States, is, by the very circumstances of birth, endowed with certain political rights.  In this respect,