* * *

Friends and Fellow-citizens:  I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote.  It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.

Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws.  We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights.  We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights.  Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.  And when 100 or 1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each other in the enjoyment of them, through prescribed judicial and legislative tribunals.  They agree to abandon the methods of brute force in the adjustment of their differences, and adopt those of civilization.

Nor can you find a word in any of the grand documents left us by the fathers that assumes for government the power to create or to confer rights.  The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states and the organic laws of the territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights.  Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.

“All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.  Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, nor exclusion of any class from their full and equal enjoyment.  Here is pronounced the right of all men, and “consequently,” as the Quaker preacher said, “of all women,” to a voice in the government.  And here, in this very first paragraph of the declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for, how can “the consent of the governed” be given, if the right to vote be denied.  Again: 

“That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”