As the nation has grown to know the needs of liberty, it has from time to time thrown new safeguards around it, as I have shown in its fifteen progressive steps since 1776. For sixty years there was no change. Slavery had cast its blight upon our country, and the struggle was for State supremacy. Men forgot the rights, and need of freedom; but in 1861, the climax was reached, and then came the bitter struggle between state and national power. Although our underlying principles were all right, freedom required new guards, and the right of all men to liberty, was put in a new form. An especial statute or amendment was added to our National Constitution, declaring that involuntary servitude, unless for crime, could not exist in this republic. This statute created no new rights; it merely affirmed and elucidated rights as old as creation, and which, in a general way, had been recognized at the very first foundation of our government--even as far back as the old Articles of Association, before the Declaration of Independence. This amendment was the sixteenth step in _securing_ the rights of the people, but it was not enough. Our country differs from every other country, in that we have _two kinds_ of citizenship. First, we have national citizenship, based upon equal political rights. A person born a citizen of the United States, is, by the very circumstances of birth, endowed with certain political rights. In this respect, the circumstances of birth are very different from those of a person born in Great Britain. A person born in Great Britain is not endowed with political rights, simply because born in that country. Political rights in Great Britain are not based upon personal rights; they are based upon property rights. In England, persons are not represented; only property is represented. That is the very great political difference between England and the United States. In the United States, representation is based upon individual, personal rights--therefore, every person born in the United States--_every person_,--not every white person, nor every male person, but every person is born with _political_ rights. The naturalization of foreigners also secures to them the exercise of political rights, because it secures to them citizenship, and they obtain naturalization through _national_ law. The war brought about a distinct and new recognition of the rights of national citizenship. States had assumed to be superior to the nation in this very underlying national basis of voting rights, but when certain States boldly attempted to thwart national power, and vote themselves out of the Union,--when by this attempt they virtually said, there is no nation, a new protection was thrown around individual, personal, political rights, by a seventeenth step, known to the world by the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined, (not created) citizenship. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the