I wrote and had published in the Washington _Post_ a letter in which I took strong grounds in favor of having the representation in Congress,--from States where the colored men had been practically disfranchised through an evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment,--reduced in the manner prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. In that letter I made an effort to answer every argument that had been made in opposition to such a proposition. It had been argued by some fairly good lawyers, for instance, that the subsequent ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment had so modified the Fourteenth as to take away from Congress this optional and discretionary power which had been previously conferred upon it by the Fourteenth Amendment. I tried in that letter,--and I think I succeeded,--to answer the argument on that point. It was also said that if Congress were to take such a step it would thereby give its sanction to the disfranchisement of the colored men in the States where that had been done. This I think I succeeded in proving was untrue and without foundation. The truth is that the only material difference between the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments on this particular point is that, subsequent to the ratification of the Fourteenth and prior to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, a State could legally disfranchise white or colored men on account of race or color, but, since the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, this cannot be legally done. If, then, Congress had the constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment to punish a State in the manner therein prescribed, for doing what the State then had a legal and constitutional right to do, I cannot see why Congress has not now the same power and authority to inflict the same punishment upon the State for doing or permitting to be done what it now has no legal and constitutional right to do. No State, in my opinion, should be allowed to take advantage of its own wrongs, and thus, by a wrongful act, augment its own power and influence in the government. To allow a majority of the white men in the State of Mississippi, for instance, to appropriate to themselves through questionable methods the representative strength of the colored population of that State, excluding the latter from all participation in the selection of the representatives in Congress, is a monstrous wrong, the continuance of which should not be tolerated.