It is not, therefore, a question whether we shall have a Federal election law, for we now have one and have had for nearly twenty years, but whether we shall have an effective law.  The present law stops just short of effectiveness, for it surrenders to the local authorities all control over the certification which establishes the prima facie right to a seat in the House of Representatives.  This defect should be cured.  Equality of representation and the parity of the electors must be maintained or everything that is valuable in our system of government is lost.  The qualifications of an elector must be sought in the law, net in the opinions, prejudices, or fears of any class, however powerful.  The path of the elector to the ballot box must be free from the ambush of fear and the enticements of fraud; the count so true and open that none shall gainsay it.  Such a law should be absolutely nonpartisan and impartial.  It should give the advantage to honesty and the control to majorities.  Surely there is nothing sectional about this creed, and if it shall happen that the penalties of laws intended to enforce these rights fall here and not there it is not because the law is sectional, but because, happily, crime is local and not universal.  Nor should it be forgotten that every law, whether relating to elections or to any other subject, whether enacted by the State or by the nation, has force behind it; the courts, the marshal or constable, the posse comitatus, the prison, are all and always behind the law.

One can not be justly charged with unfriendliness to any section or class who seeks only to restrain violations of law and of personal right.  No community will find lawlessness profitable.  No community can afford to have it known that the officers who are charged with the preservation of the public peace and the restraint of the criminal classes are themselves the product of fraud or violence.  The magistrate is then without respect and the law without sanction.  The floods of lawlessness can not be leveed and made to run in one channel.  The killing of a United States marshal carrying a writ of arrest for an election offense is full of prompting and suggestion to men who are pursued by a city marshal for a crime against life or property.

But it is said that this legislation will revive race animosities, and some have even suggested that when the peaceful methods of fraud are made impossible they may be supplanted by intimidation and violence.  If the proposed law gives to any qualified elector by a hair’s weight more than his equal influence or detracts by so much from any other qualified elector, it is fatally impeached.  But if the law is equal and the animosities it is to evoke grow out of the fact that some electors have been accustomed to exercise the franchise for others as well as for themselves, then these animosities ought not to be confessed without shame, and can not be given any weight in the discussion