After the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be for the Supreme Court to declare that the act was unconstitutional, and therefore null and void.

The essential and inestimable value of the Fourteenth Amendment still remains in the three other sections, and pre-eminently in the first section.
The contentions which have arisen between political parties as to the rights of negro suffrage in the Southern States, would scarcely be cognizable judicially under either the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Both of those Amendments operate as inhibitions upon the power of the State, and do not have reference to those irregular acts of the people which find no authorization in the public statutes.

The defect in both Amendments, in so far as their main object of securing rights to the colored race is involved, lies in the fact that they do not operate directly upon the people, and therefore Congress is not endowed with the pertinent and applicable power to give redress.

By decisions of the Supreme Court, the Fourteenth Amendment has been deprived in part of the power which Congress no doubt intended to impart to it.