Under its provisions, as construed by the Court, little, if any thing, can be done by Congress to correct the evils or avert the injurious consequences arising from such abuses of the suffrage as distinguished the vote of Louisiana in the Presidential election of 1868, and in the numerous and flagrant cases which followed that baleful precedent of unrestrained violence and unlimited wrong.

Those outrages are the deeds of individual citizens or of associated masses, acting without authority of law and in defiance of law.

Yet when a vitiated public opinion justifies their course, and when indictment and conviction are impossible, the injured citizen loses his rights as conclusively as if the law had denied them, and indeed far more cruelly.
Undoubtedly a large proportion of the members of Congress, while following the lead of those who constructed the Fourteenth Amendment, sincerely believed that it possessed a far greater scope than judicial inquiry and decision have left it.

It is hazarding little to say that if the same political bodies which submitted the Amendment to the people could have measured both the need of its application and the insufficiency of its power, it would have been seriously changed, and would have conferred upon the National Government the unquestioned authority to protect individual citizens in the right of suffrage, so far as that suffrage is used in the choice of officers of the United States.

The opportunity was neglected and may never return.