In express terms there is admission of the idea of Inequality of Rights founded on race or color.

That this unrepublican idea should be allowed to find place in the text of the Constitution must excite especial wonder, when it is considered how conscientiously our fathers excluded from that text the kindred idea of property in man.

But is it less wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea of Inequality of Rights founded on race or color?

Surely the authors of this proposition have acted inconsiderately and with little regard to the spirit of the Fathers.

Not many words would have been used; but evidently it would have found no place in that text, which, with pious care, was to be guarded against degradation.

But now it is proposed to ingraft upon this revered instrument a principle implying that a State may decree that all men are not born equal, and may disfranchise a majority of her citizens and their sons and their sons’ sons forever!

Good jurists have declared that the Constitution, as it now stands, would forbid any such State action, and that all constitutions and laws disfranchising citizens because of their parentage, color, race, or descent, are null and void.… We…

And now it cannot be that we shall give up our vantage-ground, and stain the triumph bought with so much precious blood with a concession which might be turned to so base a use.

Let every patriot, to whom the good name of America is dear, bestir himself.

It was a compromise; and such is the precise character of the present attempt, which, by its very words, is a plain license to tyranny, in consideration that the tyrants pay in political power.

It is a new sale of “indulgences,” on a larger scale than that of Tetzel.

One of its elementary parts and consequences is that it sanctions the acknowledged tyranny of taxation without representation.

You cannot violate it without again dishonoring the Fathers.

And from these two considerations it is argued that it cannot be invoked for the protection of four million people whose only offence is a dark skin.

Even if it had been originally a claim for communities only, and not for individuals, it is difficult to see how it can be rejected as a rule in determining the rights of fellow-citizens counted by millions.

Our fathers, when they cried out that taxation without representation is tyranny, were not more than two millions and a half.

Our fellow-citizens now renewing the same cry are more than four millions, possessing the weight of numbers, if not of organization.

The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and, if continued, seems to be, in effect, an entire disfranchisement of every civil…

For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man’s property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure, without his consent?

Stronger words for universal suffrage could not be employed.

If they are not represented, they ought to be.

Every man of a sound mind should have his vote.

The original Constitution of Massachusetts recognized property as an element of political power; but it rejected all discrimination founded on color.

If, therefore, under the maxim of Otis, there may be discrimination founded on property, most clearly, according to reason and early practice, there can be none founded on color; so that at the present hour his maxim is of vital force as a…

Let the country now, as aforetime, take it up and repeat it until it becomes the watchword of patriotism.