and yet no case involving the constitutionality of these laws has been squarely presented to the Supreme Court of the United States. The one most nearly in point was Williams v. Mississippi[64] in 1898. Williams, a Negro, had been indicted by a jury composed wholly of white men. The law required that a juror should be an elector. Williams contended that the provisions of the Constitution about suffrage were a scheme to discriminate against Negroes, that the discrimination was effected, not by the wording of the law, but by the powers vested in the admintrative officers. The United States Supreme Court refused to interfere, saying that the laws did not, on their face, discriminate against the races, and that it "had not been shown that their actual administration was evil, only that evil was possible under them."
Several suits[65] have been brought, the purpose of which has been to test the constitutionality of these laws, but they have all been decided on points of procedure or on technical grounds.
At present, the suffrage laws of the Southern States stand judicially unimpugned in the light of the Fifteenth Amendment. Mr. John Mabry Mathews[66] says that the Supreme Court has shown an "apparent desire to shift the duty of redressing such wrongs [those arising under the suffrage laws] upon the political department of the Government. So far as Congress has given any indication of its attitude upon the subject, it has intimated that the matter is one for judicial settlement. But the absence of congressional legislation would in any case hamper the efficiency of the courts in securing the practical enforcement of the Amendment. The real reason
