local self-government consist in? It consists in a political organization of society, which secures to the generality of its members—that is to say, as nearly as possible to the whole people—the right and the means to coöperate in the management of their common affairs, either directly or, where direct action is impossible, by a voluntary delegation of powers. It ceases to be true self-government in the same measure as the means of taking part in the management of common affairs are confined as an exclusive privilege to one portion of the people, and are withheld from the rest. And how is self-government exercised? By means of the suffrage. To make self-government genuine, general and secure, therefore, the right of suffrage must be made secure to the generality of the citizens. You limit the right of suffrage by arbitrary exclusion, and just in that measure you impair the integrity of self-government. You protect every citizen in the free exercise of suffrage, and you do the best thing calculated to make self-government a general and living reality.
And now what is, in this respect, the object of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments? Simply to secure to every citizen those civil rights which make him a freeman and the suffrage which enables him to participate in the functions of self-government. But you say the amendments have limited the rights of the States. So they have, but in what point? Not, strictly speaking, in the administration of their local affairs, but only in this direction: they have prohibited the States from depriving one class of citizens of rights which another class of citizens enjoy; from conferring all governmental powers upon one class and excluding another from all participation in self-government; in other words, from transforming self-government into the privilege of one set of people to govern another. You are thus irresistibly driven to the conclusion that the amendments, instead of encroaching
