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itself fixed for the election of a governor when a vacancy happened in that office in the midst of an official term. Thus the grounds of the judicial implication set up in support of the law were derived from the constitution itself. The same line of remark might be applied to most, perhaps all, of the other cases cited.

But how can it be applied to this case? In what part of the constitution does it betray the purpose, policy or desire that votes should be cast wherever qualified citizens may happen to be on election day? So far from affording any ground for judicial implications of this kind, it studiously excludes them, by prescribing the terms of suffrage with as much precision as we would look for in a treatise on mathematics. It does not deal with suffrage carelessly; it withholds it altogether from about four-fifths of the population, however much property they may have to be taxed, or however competent, in respect of prudence and patriotism, many of them may be to vote. And here let it be remarked, that all our successive constitutions have grown more and more astute on this subject. Penn's frame of government, made in April 1682, gave the right of suffrage to "every freeman of the province;" his laws agreed upon in England, in May 1682, gave it to every inhabitant of the province who should purchase a hundred acres of land, or who shall have paid his passage, and taken up a hundred acres of land at a penny an acre, and cultivated ten acres thereof; and to every person that hath been a servant or bondsman, and is free by his service, that shall have taken up fifty acres, and cultivated twenty; and to every resident of the province that pays scot and lot to the government. By the constitution of 1776, every freeman of 21 years of age, having resided in the state one year next before the election, and paid public taxes during that time, was entitled to vote; here we see the definition of a voter growing more exact; and in the constitution of 1790, still more exact; and finally, in that of 1838, there is superadded to

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the other distinguishing marks, a district residence of ten days immediately preceding the election.

Now, the labor of the constitution has not been to restrict suffrage in any spirit of distrust of popular intelligence, but it has been to define it so exactly that it might be preserved from abuse and perversion. The constitution affords ample ground for judicial implications in favor of legislation that tends to ascertain legal voters and votes with precision and exactitude, but not an atom of ground for implications in behalf of a law that opens the ballot-box anywhere and everywhere, under supervision of military officers unknown to our civil administration, and where no officer can possibly be who is specially charged with the supervision of state elections. Because judicial implications have been set up in behalf of other acts of assembly, it does not follow that judicial implications can save this one. In other instances, the implication was well grounded in the constitution; in this instance, everything in the constitution forbids the implication.

The learned judge deprecates a construction that shall disfranchise our volunteer soldiers. It strikes us that this is an inaccurate use of language; the constitution would disfranchise no qualified voter; but to secure purity of elections, it would have its voters in the place where they are best known on election day. If a voter voluntarily stays at home, or goes a journey, or joins the army of his country, can it be said, the constitution has disfranchised him? Four of the judges of this court, living in other parts of the state, find themselves, on the day of every presidential election, in the city of Pittsburgh, where their official duties take them, and where they are not permitted to vote. Have they a right to charge the constitution with disfranchising them? Is not the truth rather this that they have voluntarily assumed duties that are inconsistent with the right of suffrage for the time being? Such is our case; and such is the case of

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the volunteers in the army; the right of suffrage is carefully preserved for both them and us, to be enjoyed when we return to the places which the constitution has appointed for its exercise. It is forcing a gratuitous assumption upon the constitution, to treat it as intending that the volunteer in the public service, shall carry his elective franchise with him, wherever his duties require him to go; there is no word or syllable in the instrument to justify the assumption.

A good deal has been said about the hardship of depriving so meritorious a class of voters as our volunteer soldiers of the right of voting. As a court of justice, we cannot feel the force of any such consideration; our business is to expound the constitution and laws of the country as we find them written; we have no bounties to grant to soldiers, or anybody else. It may be said, however, in answer to this suggestion, that the hardship of missing an annual election, is one of the least the soldier is called on to endure, and this they share in common with the patriot soldiers of all the loyal states, for it is understood that no state but Pennsylvania has attempted to extend civil suffrage to an army in the field. To voluntarily surrender the comforts of home and friends and business, and to encounter the privations of the camp and the perils of war, for the purpose of vindicating the constitution and laws of the country, is indeed a signal sacrifice to make for the public good; but the men who make it most cheerfully and from the highest motives, would be the very last to insist on carrying with them the right of civil suffrage, especially when they see, what experience proves, that it cannot be exercised amidst the tumults of war, without being attended with fraudulent practices that endanger the very existence of the right. Whilst such men fight for the constitution, they do not expect judges to sap and mine it by judicial constructions.

Finally, let it be said, that we do not look upon the construction we have given the constitutional amendment,

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as stringent, harsh or technical; on the contrary, we consider it the natural and obvious reading of the instrument, such as the million would instinctively adopt. Constitu tions, above all other documents, are to be read as they are written; judicial glosses and refinements are misplaced when laid upon them. Carefully considered judicial implications may, indeed, be made upon them, in support of statutes (never to defeat statutes), when such implications are grounded in the constitution itself, and tend to accomplish its obvious purposes, as well as to promote the public welfare. But when asked to set up a construction that opposes itself both to the letter and the spirit of the instru ment, and which tends to the destruction of one of our fundamental political rights-that free and honest suffrage on which all our institutions are built-this court must say, in fidelity to the oath we swore, that it cannot be done.

THOMPSON, J., dissented.

Decree reversed.

The doctrine of Chase v. Miller, was followed in the court of quarter sessions of Philadelphia, in the case of Thompson v. Ewing, 1 Brewst. 67, 104. But the law was altered in Pennsylvania, by an amendment to the constitution, procured by the dominant political party, in 1864, which again opened wide the door for all the evils so clearly pointed out by the supreme court in the principal case. In Hulseman v. Rems, 41 Penn. St. R. 396, there was an application to the supreme court for an injunction to restrain the counting of certain returns of alleged military votes, which where shown to be barefaced forgeries, without any pretext of legality; and whilst the court were compelled reluctantly to refuse the application, it called forth from Chief Justice Lowrie these sorrowing words: "If, in this way, we suffer a gross fraud to pass through our hands without remedy, it is not because we have any mercy for the fraud, but because we cannot frustrate it by any device of ours, without an act of usurpation. Another tribunal is appointed to administer the remedy, and we believe that, on proper application, it will

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administer it rightly, according to the evidence it may have; and if we had doubts of this, we should still not be justified in interfering. Sad indeed, very sad, has been our recent experience of election frauds; but we cannot believe that our partisanship has become so reckless, and our elective franchise so carelessly exercised, and our thirst for office and power so intensely selfish, that any official body will sanction so base and frightful a fraud upon the public as this now appears, or that any man deemed worthy of an office would accept it under such circumstances." Thompson v. Ewing, 1 Brewst. 67, was another case in which certain forged military election returns (commonly known as the "Schimpfiller fraud") were attempted to be set up, for the purpose of defeating the will of the people as expressed at the polls. Weaver v. Given, 1 Brewst. 140, also exhibited a case of forged military returns, from a regiment stationed in Louisiana, in which no election whatever had been held. And the experience of the courts fully justified the remarks of the supreme court in Chase v. Miller.

In California, under a somewhat similar clause in the constitution, requiring a district residence, the supreme court fully adopted the reasoning of the Pennsylvania court in Chase v. Miller, and decided, in a lengthy argument, by Judge Shafter, that an act which provided for taking the votes of the electors in the military service, outside of the respective counties of their legal residence, was unconstitutional and void. Bourland v. Hildreth, 26 Cal. 161. In Connecticut, the judiciary came to the same conclusion; Opinion of the Judges, 30 Conn. 591: and in New Hampshire also; Opinion of Justices, 44 N. H. 633.

In Ohio, however, a similar statute was held not to be so clearly in conflict with the provisions of the constitution, as to justify the court in declaring it unconstitutional. Lehman v. McBride, 15 Ohio St. R. 573. And in Iowa, the supreme court, whilst acknowledging the force of the reasoning of Judge Woodward, in Chase v. Miller, decided that such legislation was valid, on the ground that their constitution did not require a district residence. Morrison v. Springer, 15 Iowa 304. And see Chandler v. Main, 16 Wis. 343.