[Footnote A:  These states are Arkansas, Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Tennessee.  Rhode Island sets a definite majority (three-fifths) of those voting at the election.  Probably Texas and North Carolina should be included but the amendment clause in their constitutions is misleading and they may be given the benefit of the doubt; their clause reads:  “An amendment shall be submitted to the voters and adopted by a majority of the votes cast.”]

This requirement by itself is regarded by one authority on state constitutions[B] as making amendment practically impossible for it means that the indifference and inertia of the mass of the voters can be a more serious enemy than active opposition; the man who does not take the trouble to vote is as much to be feared as the man who votes against.

[Footnote B:  Dodd, W.F.  Revision and Amendment of State Constitutions.]

A majority vote is required by the constitution of Indiana that is so extravagant as to have caused contradictory decisions in the courts.  The constitution reads:  “The General Assembly ... (shall) submit such amendment ... to the electors of the state, and if a majority of said electors shall ratify.”  This was interpreted in one case (156 Ind. 104) to mean a majority of all votes cast at the election, but in a later case (in re Denny) it was taken, exactly as it reads, to mean all the people in the State eligible to vote—­and this in the face of the fact that the number of people eligible to vote is unknown even to the Federal Census Department.  Indiana also requires that while one amendment is under consideration no other can be introduced.  She is, needless to say, one of the states whose constitution has never been amended.

Other states besides Indiana have time requirements to insure the immutability of their inspired state document.  Thus the Vermont Constitution can be amended only once in ten years—­it was last amended in 1913—­and five others set a term of years before the same amendment can be submitted again.  Among these are New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which having submitted the Woman Suffrage amendment in 1915 cannot do so again till 1920.[A]

[Footnote A:  The five states are Illinois (four years), Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Kentucky (five years), and Tennessee (six years).]

In no state is the Constitution so safeguarded from change as in New Mexico, whose iron-bound rules are in a class by themselves.  For the first twenty-five years of statehood a three-fourths vote of both houses of the Legislature ratified by three-fourths of the electors voting, with two-thirds at least from each county, will be required to change the suffrage clause.  After twenty-five years the majority will be reduced to two-thirds.  This is the state whose Constitution provides that illiteracy shall never be a bar to the suffrage; her democracy falls short only in the matter of women whom she makes it constitutionally impossible ever to add to her electorate.