takes me on the warrant. My place to resist is not by my natural force, not by raising a mob, but by going to the court that issued the warrant and showing that it had been issued contrary to law. And yet on the Senator's notion every time a man is brought under the law, if he does not agree with the law, his business is to fight. The community can not get along in that way. There is no such right as that in society.
Mr. Stewart: I ask the Senator what right, whether it be a natural right or an acquired right, has one man to govern another, or has society to govern the individual?
Mr. Edmunds: What right?
Mr. Stewart: Is it a natural or acquired right?
Mr. Edmunds: No man has a natural right to govern another, or an acquired right, or a political right, or a civil right that I know of, unless he is appointed the guardian of somebody. Of course, of that the Senator has not any experience; certainly not on the side of being a ward.
Mr. Stewart: Then what right has society, the body of men, to govern an individual? Is it a natural right or an acquired right?
Mr. Edmunds: Suppose I should answer the Senator and say I do not know?
Mr. Stewart: What right have they to take from him his freedom in his savage state to do as he pleases? And if they have a right to take it from him, what right have they to say he shall not participate with them equally in the regulations that shall be made for his government? If they have a right to govern him, he has a right, whether it be natural or not, to have a voice in it, if the principle of equality and fair play is one of the fundamental principles that should govern mankind.
Mr. Edmunds: I see the Senator's point. The substance of it is, if I correctly understand him, that if society has a right to govern him, he has a right to govern society, and that makes equality; and if the majority has a right to control him, he has a right to control the majority, and there is equality! Very well. I leave the Senator, with his point, to enjoy it.
Now, let us return to the subject. It is perfectly plain that the right to vote is one which society, as it is organized, is to determine by its fundamental laws. Society does determine, in the State of Vermont, if you please, that voting must only be exercised by males above the age of twenty-one years, those who are not in the penitentiary, those who are not in the lunatic asylums, those who are not idiots, and so on. The laws of Indiana may provide the same thing, or may declare that the age shall be twenty, or may declare as the Roman law used to do, that it shall be twenty-five, and so on; or it may declare as the Constitution of the United States does as to the age of Senators and as to the age of the President of the United States. On the argument of Senators in favor of this amendment to this bill, there would exist no right whatever in constituted society to make any limitation upon the free exercise of political rights to vote and hold office in respect to age. Why say a man can not be a member of the Senate until he is thirty years of age? Who can say he is not just as good at twenty-nine?
The Senator from Indiana says that common sense teaches that we must put some limitation on this. So it does; and common sense has taught that it is left to each political community to determine what are the qualifications