the people in 1883, could only be useful in ascertaining public opinion, and the result could not bind the legislature. The exclusion of municipal elections from the scope of the Church amendment seems to give it the same practical effect as if the words "of the state" had been retained as a part of the clause.

As an additional reason for sustaining the Fulton act, the court cited § 1 of article 12, which provides for the incorporation of cities and villages, and authorizes legislation restricting the power of taxation, etc. The suffrage article was deemed by the court to have only a general application, while the other provision was deemed to be local, and to vest the legislature with ample authority to regulate all matters relating to taxation, the creation of municipal debts, and the protection of taxpayers. A village is a subordinate governmental agency, created by the legislature, and subject to destruction by the same power. The legislature may specifically designate the parts of the functions of government to be committed to the village, and may regulate the methods and details of its administration. It may not only regulate the power of taxation, as expressly authorized by the Constitution, but it may also prescribe the extent of taxation and the means by which questions relating to taxation are to be determined. It may vest in the board of trustees or other local officers the power to determine questions of taxation, or it may delegate that power to a larger body composed not only of village officers, but also of all the taxpayers. The question thus submitted to the taxpayers is not submitted to the people within the meaning of the suffrage section, but the taxpayers thus authorized to vote become, as to such questions, a part, and the controlling part, of the governing body of the village. By the Fulton act and the general village law the taxpayers control the larger questions of taxation, but all qualified electors

share in the government to the extent that they may vote for village officers. It is a mixed system of local administration; namely, by officers chosen by the vote of all the electors, whether taxpayers or not; but such officers are subject to the control of the taxpayers alone on important financial subjects.

Possibly the decision in the Spitzer Case may have a controlling influence in determining the validity of the act of 1901, conferring on women taxpayers the right to vote on tax questions in towns and villages, and several local statutes by which women have been given the right to vote on financial questions, for if the legislature is not bound to submit questions of taxation to all the people of a municipality, but may vest taxpaying men only with the right to determine these questions, it may not be easy to discover any good constitutional reason for excluding taxpaying women from the exercise of the same right. The court intimates that even as to the qualifications of voters at an election of officers, the suffrage section has only a general, and not a local, application. This question was not involved in the Fulton Case, but would be presented if the legislature should exclude electors qualified under the Constitution from the right to vote for municipal officers.

§ 2. [Exclusion from right of suffrage.]-No person who shall receive, accept, or offer to receive, or pay, offer, or promise to pay, contribute, offer, or promise to contribute to another, to be paid or used, any money or other valuable thing as compensation or reward for the giving or withholding a vote at an election, or who shall make any promise to influence the giving or withholding any such vote, or who shall make or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of any election, shall vote at such election; and upon.

challenge for such cause, the person so challenged, before the officers authorized for that purpose shall receive his vote, shall swear or affirm before such officers that he has not received or offered, does not expect to receive, has not paid, offered, or promised to pay, contributed, offered, or promised to contribute to another, to be paid or used, any money or other valuable thing as a compensation or reward for the giving or withholding a vote at such election, and has not made any promise to influence the giving or withholding of any such vote, nor made or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of such election. The legislature shall enact laws excluding from the right of suffrage all persons convicted of bribery or of any infamous crime.

[Const. 1821, art. 2, § 2; 1846, art. 2, § 2; Am. 1874]

A history of this section will be found in previous volumes.

§ 3. [Voting residence.]-For the purpose of voting, no person shall be deemed to have gained or lost a residence, by reason of his presence or absence, while employed in the service of the United States; nor while engaged in the navigation of the waters of this state, or of the United States, or of the high seas; nor while a student of any seminary of learning; nor while kept at any almshouse, or other asylum, or institution wholly or partly supported at public expense or by charity; nor while confined in any public prison.

[Const. 1846, art. 2, § 3.]

"The plain reading of the Constitution is that a sojourn in a seminary of learning has no effect whatever, one way or the other, on the question of legal residence for the purpose of voting. A person who is a legally qualified voter may leave his home in any part of the state and enter an institution of learning as a student;

by this act he does not lose his residence for the purpose of voting at the place from whence he came. The fact that he is enrolled as a student in an institution of learning has no effect whatever upon his residence for the purpose of voting; he could, if he chose, acquire a residence at the place where the seminary is located, but this would have to be established by acts entirely distinct from his residence therein. The mere intention to change his residence would not suffice." In this case, involving an application for registration by students at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, the court say that "no person is allowed to enter or remain in this seminary as a student unless he intends in good faith to become a Roman Catholic priest, and renounces all other residence or homes save that of the seminary itself, and upon his admission to the priesthood he continues in the seminary until assigned elsewhere by his ecclesiastical superiors. . . . No acts which are distinct and independent of the presence of the petitioners in St. Joseph's Seminary are disclosed," and they were held not entitled to vote in the election district in which the seminary is located. Re Barry (1900) 164 N. Y. 18, 52 L. R. A. 831, 58 N. E. 12, citing Re Goodman (1895) 146 N. Y. 284, 40 N. E. 769; Re Garvey (1895) 147 N. Y. 117, 41 N. E. 439, in which the student rule was applied under different circumstances with the same result. See also Re McCormack (1903) 86 App. Div. 362, 83 N. Y. Supp. 847.

But in Re Ward (1892) 48 N. Y. S. R. 613, 29 Abb. N. C. 197, 20 N. Y. Supp. 606, it was held that persons might change their residence, and establish a new residence in the town where an institution of learning was located, and be entitled to vote there, although they were students in the institution. If they have abandoned their former residence, and, at the time, have no other residence than the town in which the institution is located, they are entitled to vote there.

In Silvey v. Lindsay (1887) 107 N. Y. 55, 13 N. E. 444, an inmate of the Soldiers' Home in Bath was held not entitled to vote in that town. He was in the institution for temporary purposes, and apparently not with any intention to make the town his permanent residence. "His presence there was eleemosynary in its character; he was there as a dependent because he had no means of support or relatives to maintain him, and liable to be discharged whenever the board of trustees were satisfied that he was of sufficient ability or means to support himself. . . . As to the Home, he was a beneficiary, and nothing else. As to Bath, his residence was a beneficiary's residence, and no other. He could not gain

VOL. IV. CONST. HIST.-13.

a residence by being an inmate, which means nothing more than his presence in the Home." He was "kept," that is, supported, at the institution at public expense. The Home "is an asylum supported at public expense, and its members are within the mischief against which that provision is aimed, the participation of an unconcerned body of men in the control, through the ballot box, of municipal affairs in whose further conduct they have no interest, and from the mismanagement of which by the officers their ballots might elect they sustain no injury.”

The court, considering the general scope of this section, observed that it "disqualifies no one, confers no right upon any one. It simply eliminates from those circumstances the fact of presence in the institution named or included within its terms. It settles the law as to the effect of such presence, and as to which there had before been a difference of opinion, and declares that it does not constitute a test of a right to vote, and is not to be so regarded. The person offering to vote must find the requisite qualifications elsewhere."

In Re Cunningham (1904) 45 Misc. 206, 91 N. Y. Supp. 974, several soldiers, members of a regiment of the United States Army stationed at Plattsburgh, and who lived outside the military reservation, were held entitled to be registered as voters.

In Re Batterman (1895) 14 Misc. 213, 35 N. Y. Supp. 593, Justice Herrick, at chambers, held that the Home for Aged Men in the town of Colonie was an institution included in this section, at least as to inmates admitted after January 1, 1895; that the section is not retroactive; that a person who had become an inmate of the institution before the amended section took effect, and had voted in that election district, was entitled to continue to vote there. The change in the Constitution did not deprive him of that right.

A person known as an “unpaid helper” in Bellevue hospital, an institution supported at public expense, was an inmate of the hospital under a bare license,—that is, with mere permission to use it as an asylum, and he could not gain a residence there while enjoying the maintenance which it afforded him. The superintendent had no authority to employ unpaid help, and made no contract with the helper. He received "board, lodging, support, and maintenance," and to him the hospital was "an asylum at the public expense, with the usual almshouse and municipal lodging-house accompaniment of work." Peopie ex rel. McShane v. Hagen (1900) 48 App. Div. 203, 62 N. Y. Supp. 816, affirmed in 164 N. Y. 570, 58 N. E. 1091.

A person committed to the Tombs city prison in New York and