* * * I will not take any time in talking about the policy of the law. There are some and many people in the State who do not think it wise to require the prepayment of a poll tax. People differ about that. Some time or other that may be changed; but for sixty years it has been the law, and it so remains. Looking into the Constitution and the laws of the sister States of Virginia and Georgia and Delaware and Pennsylvania we find similar provisions of the same antiquity justified by the communities that have adopted such legislation. And we say to all the States we leave to you those questions of policy, and we commend them to your judgment and careful consideration. Does any one claim that representation should be reduced because of insanity or idiocy, or because of convicts? Does any one claim that all laws requiring residence and registration should be done away? And yet they are on the same line, on the same principle. There is not one of these prerequsites, on which I have commented, that it is not in the power of the person who desires to get suffrage to overcome and control and conquer so that he may become a voter. But if he be a black man he cannot put off his color. He cannot, if he were born a member of a particular race, strip himself of that quality; nor can he, if he has been in servitude; nor can he, if he has been in rebellion, take out that taint; nor can he, if he has been convicted of other crimes, remove his record of criminality. These are an inherent, inseparable, indissoluble part of that man. But his education, his registration, his residence, his payment of a portion of the burdens of the State, and the other matters, are in his power and his control. I find it to be in accord with the wisdom of the people of the country that it is the true policy to let the States govern those matters for themselves. The Constitution of the United States touches those things that are out of the man's control." In the filibustering contest over the rules in the Forty-seventh Congress, first session, Mr. Robinson made a very earnest speech, which commended itself to all except the extreme filibusters. Stripping the contest of its technical parliamentary points, Mr. Robinson said: "Our rules are for orderly procedure, not for disorderly obstruction; not for resistance." Continuing he said that no tyranny is one-half as odious as that which comes from the minority. "Our fathers," he said, "put our Government upon the right of the majority to rule." To the charge of one of the minority that the purpose of the majority to proceed to the consideration of the election cases was tyranny, Mr. Robinson said: