reason and experience is one thing, to deny it absolutely and forever is
another." To regulate a law is to abolish it, either relatively or
absolutely, for some, and to maintain it for others. When the State of New
York says that no alien who has not been naturalized shall vote, that no
boy under twenty-one shall vote, that no person resident in one town or
ward shall vote in another, that no criminal or pauper shall vote,--it
acts on the natural principle of self-defence, which contravenes the dogma
of a natural right of any one to the suffrage. On that principle it would
be impossible for the Congress to impeach a President; to forbid, as it
did, those who had been in rebellion from voting; or to deny the suffrage
to a child or to any human being. Government itself becomes impossible.
Judge Story, whom Suffrage writers claim as favorable to their cause on
other grounds, says that the right of voting has always been treated as a
granted and not a natural right, derived from and regulated by each
country according to its ideas of government. Both Federal and State
courts have decided again and again that there is no such thing as a
natural right to suffrage.

The "consent of the governed" certainly meant something very different to
our fathers, and to our statesmen, and to ourselves, from what it could
mean to any other government on earth. Although the phrase itself may have
been a euphemism which sprang from Jefferson's sympathy with the mighty
rumblings of feeling that preceded the French Revolution, still, it was
certainly meant that, so far as they could make it so, there should be
vastly more consenting by popular vote than had been dreamed of in the
mother country. But it did not mean that each and every individual in the
state must consent to each and every law that governed him; for not only
has no government ever been instituted which derived "just powers" in that
way, but none ever will be, for there never can be such unanimity. It did
not mean that every individual must consent to be governed somehow, by