History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States, Vol. 2: With Notices of Its Principle FramersCurtis, George Ticknor
History
History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States, Vol. 2: With Notices of Its Principle Framers
Curtis, George Ticknor
Constitutional history -- United States
The committee of detail, after a review of all these considerations,
presented a scheme that was well adapted to meet the difficulties of
the case. They proposed that the same persons who, by the laws of the
several States, were admitted to vote for members of the most numerous
branch of their own legislatures, should have the right to vote for
the representatives in Congress. The adoption of this principle
avoided the necessity of disfranchising any portion of the people of a
State by a system of qualifications unknown to their laws. As the
States were the best judges of the circumstances and temper of their
own people, it was certainly best to conciliate them to the support of
the new Constitution by this concession. It was possible, indeed, but
not very probable, that they might admit foreigners to the right of
voting without the previous qualification of citizenship. It was
possible, too, that they might establish universal suffrage in its
most unrestricted sense. But against all these evils there existed one
great security; namely, that the mischiefs of an absolutely free
suffrage would be felt most severely by themselves in their domestic
concerns; and against the special danger to be apprehended from the
indiscriminate admission of foreigners to the right of voting, another
feature of the proposed plan gave the national legislature power to
withhold from persons of foreign birth the privileges of general
citizenship, although a State might confer upon them the power of
voting without previous naturalization.
This part of the scheme consisted in the transfer of the power of
naturalization to the general government; a power that was necessarily
made exclusive, by being made a power to establish a _uniform_ rule on
the subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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