A glance at this table is enough. Taking the sum total of population in the eleven States, we find 5,447,220 whites to 3,656,112 colored persons; and you are now to decide, whether, in the discharge of imperative duties under the National Constitution, and bound to guaranty a republican form of government, you will disfranchise this latter mass, shutting them out from those Equal Rights promised by our fathers, and from all copartnership in the government of their country. They surpass in numbers, by at least a million, the whole population of the Colonies at the time our fathers raised the cry, “Taxation without Representation is Tyranny”; and now you are to decide whether to strip them of representation, while you subject them to grinding taxation by tariff and excise, acting directly and indirectly, dwarfing into insignificance everything attempted by the British Parliament. Our fathers could not bear a Stamp Act in making which they had no voice, and they braved terrible war with the most formidable power of the globe rather than pay a tax of threepence on tea imposed by a Parliament in which they were unrepresented. Are you ready, Sir, in disregard of this great precedent, and in disregard of all promises and examples of past history, to thrust a single citizen out of all representation in the Government, while you consume his substance with taxation, subject him to Stamp Acts, compel him to pay a duty of twenty-five cents a pound on tea, and then follow him with imposts in all the business of life? Clearly, if you do not recognize his title to representation, you must at least by careful legislation relieve him from this intolerable taxation. Some of the millions you thrust out already contribute largely to the public revenue. How, then, can you deny them representation? Their money is not rejected. Why reject their votes? But if you reject their votes, you cannot take their money. As you detect no color in their money, you ought to detect no color in their votes. In this denial of the right to vote there is a surpassing tyranny, being nothing less than a confiscation of the highest property the citizen can possess. To take his money is robbery; to appropriate his house or land is spoliation; but house and land are less than the right by which the citizen is assured in all other rights. Lord Chief Justice Holt spoke as became one of England’s greatest magistrates, when he said from the bench: “A right that a man has to give his vote at the election of a person to represent him in Parliament, there to concur to the making of laws which are to bind his liberty and property, is a most transcendent thing and of an high nature.”[178] But this “most transcendent thing” is taken from a whole race on an excuse insulting to them as members of the human family.