Mr. EDMUNDS. We get the power to leave it to them under the same Constitution under which we get the power to create the State. We may endow them, as I said before, with precisely the faculties that it pleases our supreme will to give them, and our supreme will is only controlled by that high sense of political justice and equality which ought to be inborn in the breast of every American senator, if not every American citizen. That is where we get the power. The confusion in the mind of my friend and it is rare that there ever is any confusion in his mind grows out of his not paying attention to the distinction between the faculties and the powers which may be exercised by a political or any other corporation after we have granted them their charter, and fixed the law of their existence, and while we are in the act of fixing it. Take a bank, if you please. We incorporate a bank. We clothe it with certain functions and faculties which are contained in its charter. We may fix those faculties and functions at any point we please, as it commends itself to our prudence and policy, Once granted, unless we reserve the express right of amendment or repeal, it has passed upon our faith and by the law beyond our control, and we have then no right further to interfere with it. Therefore it is that we have no right in the State of Michigan or the State of Iowa to declare that black men shall vote against the wishes of the majority of their fellow citizens who are white. We have not the power I admit it because when we gave them their creative existence, when we breathed into them the breath of life, we left it to the white men there to say how that thing should be. But now, when the people of Nebraska, as they are called not?. $ii. people, I take it, but the people of Nebraska, as they are called come here with a constitution which excludes from the right of voting a portion of their own fellow citizens, who ‘. had no voice in the question of whether they should be excluded or not, I am not to be told that I am merely fighting a shadow because there happen to be only a few of them. There will be little value indeed in any Government if the rights of men are to depend upon how small the minority happens to be today who are to be affected by an unequal or an unjust distinction. I believe, if my memory serves me right and the Senator will correct me if I am wrong it was only one citizen of the mighty empire of Rome who defended himself by the roclamation that he was a Roman citizen. he whole power of the State in every Government that deserves the name protects the rights of the last man as well as it does, and equally with the rights of the majority; Government is not worth a straw otherwise.