and limitations upon the privilege of exercising political rights; and it has always been so, and it always will be so, because when the Senator proposes to say that the other sex may vote—which I admit he has a perfect right to say, and society may so say—he does not undertake to say that ladies of seventeen, instead of eighteen, shall vote, because they come of age in my State at eighteen, and do in many of the States—the Senator does not propose to say that all ladies of seventeen shall vote; and yet it is impossible to say that there is any distinction in respect to intelligence as a matter of right, any philosophical distinction between one year and another. True, as the Senator says, you may run it down so far that at last you have reached a condition of infancy, and there everybody says the child is not wise enough to vote, is not wise enough to do anything without having guardianship and tutelage. But if you put it upon the ground of natural right, the child has just as good a right to say to you that he shall be the judge of it, as you have to say to him that you must be; and this shows that the notion of any natural right of anybody of any age to participate in the government of society is an absolute absurdity. It is one of those figments of the imagination that have crawled into some people's brains within a very few years, and will go out again as other delusions do.
Then when you come to the XIV. Amendment it is equally obvious that that has nothing to do with the subject. If anybody had thought it related to suffrage when the XV. Amendment was passed, nobody would have voted for it, because on that theory the right to vote did exist in all colored persons, females as well as males; and yet nobody of any party or any creed pretended at that time when we proposed the XV. Amendment that we had guaranteed the right to vote by the XIV. Nobody suspected it; nobody suggested it; and nobody believed in it, and very few people do now, for the simple reason that the XIV. Amendment was directed, as everybody knows, by its language, by its history, by its relation to other laws, to what are called civil rights; but I am not going to define what they are, because to do so takes time. So, Mr. President, the XV. Amendment was passed in order to secure a right to vote without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Then you come to the real question which is involved here; and that is the propriety of providing that females, twenty-one years of age, not idiots, not lunatics, not in the penitentiary—standing upon the same limitations that men do in these respects—are to vote. That presents a fair question, one that we have a perfect right to pass upon; and I have only said what I have in order to show that we had not better run crazy over the idea that we were dealing with natural and inalienable rights, and that we were violating human rights if we happened to say no, or that we were vindicating human rights in the sense now spoken of if we should say yes. We are merely considering a question of political expediency, as confessedly we have the power in governing the Territories to let anybody vote we choose. We can put the whole concern in Pembina, if we think it wise, into the hands of the madmen up there, and I do not know but that they are in the majority, for I certainly know nothing about it.... If no other Senator wishes to make any remarks, I move to lay the bill upon the table.
Mr. Sargent: I ask for the yeas and nays on that motion.