excise tax, which, to use the language of that day, "penetrated a sphere of taxation reserved to the State." Today this party has placed upon the statute books the most inquisitorial tax ever laid in the history of our country by the act of April 9, 1912—a tax on white phosphorus matches, not for the purpose of raising revenues, for which the taxing power is conferred, but admittedly for the purpose of destroying an industry which it could not touch otherwise. The match industry was found to be injurious to a few hundred workingmen, women and children. The Democratic party wisely and justly cast to the four winds all talk about the rights of States, made the match business a national affair and destroyed its dangerous features. Men and women all over the country rose up and pronounced it a noble achievement. Republicans joined with the Democrats in claiming the honor of that great humane service.
I have not yet finished with this tattered shibboleth. The State had the right to nullify Federal law in 1798, so Jefferson taught and Kentucky practiced. Half a century elapsed; the State of Wisconsin, rock-ribbed Republican, nullified the fugitive slave law and in its pronunciamento of nullification quoted the very words which Jefferson used in 1798. A Democratic Supreme Court at Washington, presided over by Chief Justice Taney, the arch apostle of State rights, answered Wisconsin in the very language of the Federalists of 1798, whom Jefferson despised and condemned: "The Constitution and laws of the United States are supreme, and the Supreme Court is the only and final arbiter of disputes between the State and National Governments."
A few more years elapsed. South Carolina declared the right of the State to nullify and Wisconsin answered on the field of battle: "The Constitution and laws of the National Government are supreme, so help us God!".... At the close of that ever to be regretted war the nation wrote into the Constitution the 14th and 15th Amendments, their fundamental principle that the suffrage is a national matter. Those amendments were intended to establish forever adult male suffrage....Mrs. Beard then presented for the record a thorough synopsis of the proceedings in relation to the franchise of the convention that framed the U. S. Constitution, which showed, she declared, that it would have made a national suffrage qualification if the members could have agreed on one. "In all the great federations of the world," she said, 'Germany, Canada, Australia, suffrage is regarded as a national question," and continued: "If respect for the great and wise who have viewed suffrage as a national matter did not compel us so to regard it, the plain dictates of common sense would do so. We are all ruled by the laws made by Congress, from Maine to California; we must all
