The right of voting, or the privilege of voting, is a right or privilege arising under the Constitution of the State, and not of the United States.  The qualifications are different in the different States.  Citizenship, age, sex, residence, are variously required in the different States, or may be so.  If the right belongs to any particular person, it is because such person is entitled to it by the laws of the State where he offers to exercise it, and not because of citizenship of the United States.  If the State of New York should provide that no person should vote until he had reached the age of 31 years, or after he had reached the age of 50, or that no person having gray hair, or who had not the use of all his limbs, should be entitled to vote, I do not see how it could be held to be a violation of any right derived or held under the Constitution of the United States.  We might say that such regulations were unjust, tyrannical, unfit for the regulation of an intelligent State; but if rights of a citizen are thereby violated, they are of that fundamental class derived from his position as a citizen of the State, and not those limited rights belonging to him as a citizen of the United States, and such was the decision in Corfield agt.  Coryell.  (Supra.) The United States rights appertaining to this subject are those first under article I, paragraph 2, of the United States Constitution, which provides that electors of Representatives in Congress shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature, and second, under the 15th Amendment, which provides that the right of a citizen 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.  If the Legislature of the State of New York should require a higher qualification in a voter for a representative in Congress than is required for a voter for a Member of Assembly, this would, I conceive, be a violation of a right belonging to one as a citizen of the United States.  That right is in relation to a Federal subject or interest, and is guaranteed by the Federal Constitution.  The inability of a State to abridge the right of voting on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, arises from a Federal guaranty.  Its violation would be the denial of a Federal right—­that is a right belonging to the claimant as a citizen of the United States.

This right, however, exists by virtue of the 15th Amendment.  If the 15th Amendment had contained the word “sex,” the argument of the defendant would have been potent.  She would have said, an attempt by a State to deny the right to vote because one is of a particular sex, is expressly prohibited by that Amendment.  The amendment, however, does not contain that word.  It is limited to race, color, or previous condition of servitude.  The Legislature of the State of New York has seen fit to