Listening to the champions of Caste and Oligarchy under the National Constitution, and perusing their writings, I think I understand the position they take. With as much calmness as I can command, I note what they have to say in speech and in print. I know it all. I do not err, when I say that this whole terrible and ignominious pretension is traced to direct and barefaced perversion of the National Constitution. Search history, study constitutions, examine laws, and you will find no perversion more thoroughly revolting. By the National Constitution it is provided, that “the electors in each State shall have the _qualifications_ requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature,”--thus seeming to refer the primary determination of what are called “qualifications” to the States; and this is reinforced by the further provision, that “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such _regulations_.” This is all On these simple texts, conferring plain and intelligible powers, the champions insist that “color” may be made a “qualification,” and that under the guise of “regulations” citizens whose only offence is a skin not colored like our own may be shut out from political rights,--and that in this way a monopoly of rights, being at once a Caste and an Oligarchy of the Skin, is placed under the safeguard of the National Constitution. Such is the case of the champions; this is their stock-in-trade. With all their learning, all their subtlety, all their sharpness, this is what they have to say in behalf of an infamous pretension under the National Constitution. Everything from them begins and ends in a perversion of two words,--“qualifications” and “regulations.”