In the first place, it is a grave question whether the section of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution on which such action must be based is now valid or whether it was not repealed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits disfranchisement on account of race, color, etc. The latter view was taken and was ably argued in the recent notable address delivered in Albany in June, 1903, by Charles A. Gardiner, Esq., of New York, before the Forty-first Annual Convocation of the University of the State of New York. He maintains that “a State can discriminate against Negro suffrage only by an organic or statutory law,” and that before Congress can penalize a State such a law must be adopted and it must be a valid law. But (he argues) since the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, no law which violated its provision could be valid. It would not merely be voidable, but void _ab initio_. “And a void law is no law.”[54] But even assuming that the Congress might have the authority to cut down the representation under the present law, it is a question whether the disfranchising clauses of the New Constitution in the Southern States afford any basis for such an attempt at reduction in their representation. The qualifications for voting in the various States of the South would not seem to be in any way improper on the face of their constitutions. The impropriety charged against them is based wholly on the fact that they disfranchise more of one class of citizens than of others. According to the tabulation of the “Qualifications for Voting in each State in the Union,” published in the _World_ Almanac for 1904, and “communicated to it” and corrected to date “by the Attorneys-General of the respective States,” all the States except the two Carolinas have the “Australian Ballot Law,” or a modification of it, in force, and all the States require that the “Voters shall be citizens of the State or of the United States, or an alien who has declared intention to become naturalized”; and all the States except Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Vermont exclude from the right of suffrage those convicted of felony or infamous crime, unless pardoned. Besides these, paupers and persons _non compos mentis_ are generally excluded. These provisions are general.