discuss, the nature and origin of the right of voting, that there is not the least possible connection between service in the army and navy and the exercise of the elective franchise,—none whatever. These men have performed service, and I am for dealing justly with them because they have performed service. But I am more anxious to deal justly by them because they are men. And when it is remembered, that, for months and almost for years after the opening of the rebellion, we refused to accept the services of colored persons in the armies of the country, it is with ill grace that we now decline to allow the vote of any man because he has not performed that service.

"The second is the property qualification. I hope it is not necessary in this day and this hour of the Republic to argue anywhere that a property qualification is not only unjust in itself, but that it is odious to the people of the country to a degree which cannot be expressed. Everywhere, I believe, for half a century, it has been repudiated by the people. Does anybody contemplate such a qualification to the elective franchise, in the case of black people or white?

"And next, reading and writing, or reading as a qualification, is demanded; and an appeal is made to the example of Massachusetts. I wish gentlemen who now appeal to Massachusetts would often appeal to her in other matters where I can more conscientiously approve her policy. But it is a different proposition in Massachusetts as a practical measure.

"When, ten years ago, this qualification was imposed upon the citizens of Massachusetts, it excluded no person who was then a voter. For two centuries, we have had in Massachusetts a system of public instruction, open to the children of the whole people without money and without price. Therefore all the people there had had opportunities for education. Why should the example of such a State be quoted to justify refusing suffrage to men who have been denied the privilege of education, and whom it has been a crime to teach?

* * * "The negro has everywhere the same right to vote as the white man, and I maintain still further, that, when you proceed one step from this line, you admit that your government is a failure. What is the essential quality of monarchical and aristocratic governments? Simply that by conventionalities, by arrangements of conventions, some persons have been deprived of the right of voting. We have attempted to set up and maintain a government upon the doctrine of the equality of men, the universal right of all men, to participate in the government. In accordance with that theory, we must accept the ballot upon the principle of equality. It is enjoyed by the learned and un- learned, the wise and the ignorant, the virtuous and the vicious.

"The great experiment is going on. If, before the war, any man in this country was disposed to undervalue a government thus conducted, he should have learned by this time the wisdom and strength of a government which embraces and embodies the judgment and the will of the whole people. If the negroes of the South, four million strong, had been endowed with the elective franchise, and had united with the white people of that region in the work of rebellion, your armies would have been powerless to subdue that rebellion, and you would to-day have seen your territory limited by the Potomac and the Ohio.