Fifteenth Amendment to the States for their ratification. (2) Maryland was one of the two States—the other being Delaware—that refused to ratify either the Thirteenth, Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment. It is claimed, therefore, that Maryland is not bound by the Fifteenth Amendment, which it did not ratify. (3) The fifth article of the Constitution, after providing the two ways in which the Constitution may be amended, adds that "no State, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate." Upon this last clause, Mr. Arthur W. Machen, Jr., in a recent article in The Harvard Law Review,[70] has founded an ingenious argument that the Fifteenth Amendment is void. His reasoning on this point is, in brief, that the State meant here is the citizens or voters or the government of the State, and not the territory. By the enfranchisement of the Negroes after the War, the composition of the State was changed, a body of persons became part of the State who were not a part of it before, and thus the State was deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. Mr. Machen says: "The Fifteenth Amendment amounts to a compulsory annexation to each State that refused to ratify it of a black San Domingo within its borders. It is no less objectionable than the annexation of the San Domingo in the Spanish main."
Whether or not any or all of the above objections and the others that are urged against the Fifteenth Amendment are valid cannot now be answered, because the validity of the Amendment has been assumed by the courts rather than decided upon after argument. Until after the election of November, 1911, attention will be centered upon Maryland. If the proposed amendment to the State
