POPULAR MISGOVERNMENT IN THE
UNITED STATES

POPULAR MISGOVERNMENT
IN THE UNITED STATES

BY
ALFRED B. CRUIKSHANK

1920
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY

CONTENTS

POPULAR MISGOVERNMENT
IN THE UNITED STATES

CHAPTER I

PAST FAILURE AND FUTURE DANGERS OF UNLIMITED SUFFRAGE

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair; the event is in the hand of God.—Washington

Great numbers of discerning Americans must by this time have been brought to realize that something practical must shortly be done in this country by the believers in private property and private property rights to safeguard the nation from its threatened invasion by Bolshevism, Socialism and other various forms of anti-individualism, or else we are in for a hard and possibly a bloody struggle to maintain the very fundamentals of our social and political systems. From time to time in this country as in every other there occur periods of extraordinary danger to the political structure. In the past we have had several such episodes, the most noted being that of the secession movement culminating in 1860 and 1861. The seriousness of the present menace of communism in its various forms is due not so much to the strength of the communist faction, considerable though it be, as to the weakness of our civic structure consequent upon the long continued and increasing general distrust and suspicion of our actual political agencies and the confirmed popular dissatisfaction with their operations. Meantime, nothing adequately effective either in the way of strengthening our institutions or of disarming opposition thereto is being done or has even been proposed. A lot of vigorous denunciation has been directed against native and foreign Bolshevism, all thoroughly deserved and not without effect on the public mind, but falling far short of positive acts of defense or protection. Bolshevism is in the field not merely as an abstract doctrine, to be answered with words, but as an active and aggressive force which must be met by measures of active resistance. Such measures to be effective must take the shape of the creation of practical means and methods of offense and defense. The case is not one which admits of trifling; the attack is fundamental, the danger is vital, and cannot be effectually met by superficial expedients.

Now there is happily one available measure of protection and defense against Bolshevism and all its assaults, one which is manifestly appropriate and will be absolutely efficacious. It is one which has long been highly desirable for other reasons hereinafter set forth, but which in view of the menace of radicalism is now imperatively demanded. It consists in such a reform of the electorate itself as will make it impassible and impervious to every influence subversive of our basic institutions. An electorate of male private property owners of twenty-five years of age and upwards would constitute an absolute barrier against all attacks on private property from any quarter; its establishment would summarily and forever terminate all hopes of Bolshevistic revolution in this country and ensure the American people freedom to enjoy the noble future which Providence has made possible to them.

The cause of private property rights is in the truest sense the American cause and that to which all other national causes political and social are subordinate. Those rights involve almost everything which is dear to the American heart. Even our governmental institutions are of secondary importance, they are the instruments merely; the means whereby we seek to obtain among other aids and aims the protection of private property, the absolute assurance to each American of the use and enjoyment of the fruits of his toil, of his self denial and of his foresight. This view is not novel in our politics. It was thoroughly familiar to our Eighteenth Century statesmen, it was part of the political faith of some of the most prominent among them, including a majority of the political leaders of the Revolutionary epoch. They endeavored to secure these ends and to ensure the future of the new nation by requiring wherever possible a property qualification for voters. Had this practise and its underlying principle been adhered to and (with proper modifications for changed conditions as they might occur) had the government been continued on the basis on which the wise and prudent men of that time endeavored to establish it, it would at this moment represent a satisfactory approximation of a true and scientific democracy able to hold in safe derision its critics and enemies. But the principle of a properly qualified electorate, so vitally essential to an efficient democracy has been repudiated and abandoned; the practise of unlimited white suffrage has been general amongst us for about ninety years, and today there can be no doubt that there is a prospect of danger to our country, not because of lack of courage and loyalty in her sons, but because of the unhealthy organism of our body politic, whose modern basic principle, unlimited suffrage, ignores property rights, and looks to control by the representatives of the inefficient and the proletariat whenever they can secure a numerical majority at the polls, thus incidentally accomplishing what Bolshevism directly aims at.

And now that private property rights heretofore considered as unquestionable are openly attacked, we must prepare for their defense, for the defense of the family, of the American social system and the free individual life, all three of which depend on private property for their existence. The time has come when the institution of private property must be formally recognized and defended as fundamental to our existence as a nation, and such recognition requires and involves the allotment to that institution of a place and influence in our electoral system. Private property cannot safely rely for its defense upon officials who are dependent upon the votes of the non-property holding populace. There is no way of final avoidance of the issue, or even of long postponing it. This nation must either declare itself definitely as adhering to the principle of private property rights or it must expect disaster. And first, the cause of private property rights needs organization and self consciousness. Property holders cannot properly defend a cause which has never declared itself and which has neither standard nor leaders, while its enemies have both, and are not only proclaiming their convictions with courage, but have enacted them into living statutes wherever they have power. If the institution of private property is to endure in this country it must be formally recognized as representing a sacred cause, to be carefully committed into the hands of its friends; the electorate must be made over into a property qualified body, and all temptation to Bolshevism must be removed from the American politician. Let this be done, let the constitution of every State be amended so that our voting mass shall be virile and substantial, and freed from the element of effeminacy and inefficiency now so controlling; give the conservative good sense of the nation a rallying point, an official standard, an authoritative creed, and it will speedily make short work of the enemies of social order and of sound political institutions.

But there is a great deal more to be said in favor of a property qualification for voters than that it will be a wall against Bolshevism. It will act on our political internal system as a tonic and a purifier. It sometimes occurs in politics and statesmanship that two mischiefs are so bound together that they can be destroyed at one blow. Such was the case in 1861-1865, when the causes of the perpetuation of the Federal Union and the emancipation of the black race became by the logic of events so involved as to be practically united, and when by the triumph of the northern armies the mischiefs of chattel slavery and disunion politics were made to perish together. And in like manner we now find not only that unqualified or manhood suffrage is the chief source of our weakness in dealing with Bolshevism, but that it has been in the past and still is the principal cause of our political corruption and governmental inefficiency. And therefore it has come about that the cause of private property and property rights is so bound up with the cause of administrative purity and efficiency in our government that by the one measure of the establishment of a property qualification for voters the perils of the menace of Bolshevism and the mischiefs of political corruption and inefficiency may be dispatched together.

It is in fact principally to the corruption and inefficiency of manhood suffrage government that we owe the popular dissatisfaction out of which the hopes of American Bolshevism are bred and nourished. The failure of democratic institutions in this country must be admitted and it is almost entirely due to the operation of manhood suffrage. We have aimed at theoretical perfection, the natural conditions have been most favorable; we have loudly called the world to witness the experiment, and the world has condemned it as a political failure. This statement will hardly be challenged, but it is well supported by available proof, and need not rest merely on the assertion or opinion of the writer. And right here the reader may as well be informed that it is the author’s intention to support his material assertions with such evidence as the nature of the subject permits. Such readers as are tolerably familiar with American political history will recognize the truth of most of the statements of fact contained in these pages; but the reasonable doubts of the politically uninstructed will be removed as far as conveniently possible by reference to records and to the testimony of reliable witnesses. Here therefore we quote on this branch of the subject from an address of Henry Jones Ford, President of The American Political Science Association, delivered at the Annual Meeting at Cleveland, December 29, 1919.

“There was at one period an enthusiastic belief that in the Constitution of the United States reflection and choice had at last superseded accident and force, and that a model of free government was now provided by which all countries and peoples might benefit. The effect upon governmental arrangements was once very marked, but complete examination of the documents shows that this influence soon spent itself, and a decided change of disposition took place. If, for instance, one shall attentively consider the constitutional documents of all the Americas, one will observe, that although in their early forms the Constitution of the United States was the model, this is no longer the case. The Constitution of the French republic now excels it in influence. The United States has lost its lead, despite the fact that never has our country bulked larger in the world than now. The present situation is indeed a striking confirmation of Hamilton’s opinion that error in our republic becomes the general misfortune of mankind, for it is a fact well known to every student of politics that a belief that our system of government is a failure on the essential point of justice is now a potent influence on the side of social revolution throughout the world....

Students of political science will generally agree that the three greatest works of this class, all displaying wide knowledge and deep thought, are De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, first published in 1885; Bryce’s American Commonwealth, 1888; and Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, 1902. These works form a crescendo of censure upon American government, each re-examination of the subject confirming previous disapproval and adding to it.”

Needless to say that the writers referred to by Ford and others hereinafter referred to fully sustain his statements above quoted. Our government has not only been a failure on the essential point of justice as President Ford points out, but a still greater failure on the equally essential points of purity and efficiency. The democratic system in actual operation among us has been productive of corruption and mismanagement to such an extent as to cause and justify the almost universal verdict that popular misgovernment rather than popular government has been the outcome. Hence general dissatisfaction and unrest; hence the danger of revolutionary movements, with which we are openly threatened.

It is often said that governments reflect the character of the people. If that were so in this country, as our people are conceded to be one of the most intelligent in the world, we would have one of its best working governments; instead of which we have one of the most wasteful, corrupt and inefficient. Our inferiority in this respect has been universally recognized both in this country and abroad for the last fifty years or more; it is a common-place of conversation; and has caused numberless Americans to feel rage and indignation at home and to suffer shame and humiliation abroad. It has been the subject of innumerable books, pamphlets, sermons and lectures; it has inspired denunciation, satire and invective in pulpit, and on platform; the press has reeked with the disgusting details of the corruption, ignorance and incompetence of our office holders. Everywhere in the United States is to be found great popular dissatisfaction with the operations of our government, profound distrust of its methods and spirit, and conviction that there has been a failure to reach the standards and to realize the hopes of the Fathers of the Republic. This dissatisfaction and distrust, this conviction of failure is not confined to any class; it pervades all classes; it is widespread; it is to be heard freely expressed day by day and hour by hour alike in the business office and in the bar-room, in the private dwelling and on the street; by the mechanic, banker, tradesman, laborer and lawyer. In short it is a matter of common knowledge that for about eighty years past the United States and each of them has been in many important respects badly, corruptly and inefficiently governed. Read for instance this statement recently published by an able American student and writer, and say whether it does not indicate a state of things fruitful with danger to the Republic, in two principal ways; one, that of its decay by corruption, the other by furnishing material for scandal and propaganda to its enemies.

“The present situation has been described over and over again. Briefly, it is constant encroachments by the legislature upon the executive; legislation under irresponsible ‘bosses’ for personal ends, blackmailing of corporations by politicians, and of society by corporations to recoup the plunder of the politician, or to accumulate ill-gotten gain, both of them very good imitations of the Spanish policy in the colonies which is terminating in the ruin of an empire; favours shown to special forms of business and industry; unjust taxation; the irresponsible conduct of our legislatures whose deliberations are the signal for alarm and confusion in the commercial world; and mass-meetings every week to frighten politicians into submission, libel, bribery, and lying in campaign work, government by perjurers, pugilists and pimps, and political leadership by men who know no arts but those of Alcibiades and Catiline—all these and a hundred other facts like them create a profound and justifiable suspicion of institutions that confer the supreme power upon those who are equally unfit to govern themselves and others.” Democracy, Hyslop, p. 294.

Now, let us more carefully examine and consider the essential character of the political system which has produced these unsatisfactory results. Its basis is unlimited or unqualified suffrage, until recently appearing and manifested as “manhood suffrage,” but now, since the so-called “enfranchisement” of women more nearly fitting the name “universal suffrage.” In any case in theory at least it is government by numbers, in contradistinction to government by intelligence, birth, wealth, experience, talent or by any combination of these or other qualities or achievements. This doctrine of unlimited or unqualified suffrage is now and has long been recognized as an established principle of government in this country by most of us; indeed we may say by all Americans with the exception of the natives or inhabitants of the Southern or former slave States. By these latter pure manhood suffrage has been tried and condemned and has been replaced by white manhood suffrage by means of certain well known and successful political devices amounting practically to a strict race qualification; though the important and suggestive fact that thereby the basic principle of manhood suffrage was expressly repudiated by the entire South has been carefully blinked by Americans generally.

In a general way we may say then that manhood suffrage is everywhere in the United States the legally recognized method of choosing all our lawmakers and many of our administrative officials; that white manhood suffrage actually obtains in the Southern States; and that in the other States constituting about three fourths of the whole, every resident male citizen, native or naturalized, and in some of them residents not naturalized, may vote. In sixteen of the forty-eight States the suffrage has within recent years been extended to women. So that at present the basis of government in the United States is manhood or male suffrage in all the States with the addition in some of them of female suffrage; or in other words, ignoring the negro situation, we have manhood suffrage in thirty-two and universal suffrage in sixteen States. In all of these States elections are frequent, in most annual, in others biennial, in a few quadrennial.

The controlling political importance of these elections is evident when we consider that thereby are chosen all the members of both houses of the various State Legislatures, of both houses of Congress, the governors of the states and the President and Vice-President of the United States, that is to say the entire body of lawmakers of the country. Also in many of the States are thus selected the Judges of the Courts higher and lower, and numerous administrative state officials, such as State Attorneys, Auditors, State Engineers, Financial Officers, etc. Besides these there are elections of almost equal practical importance of minor or local officers, such as Sheriffs, County Attorneys and Supervisors, Mayors and Aldermen of Cities, and miscellaneous officials. Beyond all this, the electorate is required from time to time, and in some States at nearly every election, to pass upon constitutions, or amendments or provisions of constitutions, state and federal, referenda and propositions of various kinds involving sometimes vast expenditures. For none of these elections is any voting qualification practically required of the resident citizen, except that of color, and that only in the South.

It is interesting and curious to note how under our system of popular elections, government as legally constituted is merely a product of a process of aggregation of numbers. In practise, this numerical system is modified by the low despotism of Boss rule, but in theory it rests on an arithmetical count of heads, many of them cracked, others of various degrees of emptiness, without taking note of merit, capacity or fitness. And right here in order to fully realize the force and sweep of the numerical system of government we should remember that the effect of the vote of the electorate is not confined to the directly elective offices; it extends to the appointive offices as well; for the appointing power, whether President, Governor, Senate or Legislature being chosen by election, is under the necessity of selecting his or its appointees from those of its supporters who control the most votes. It is not therefore surprising that the politician whom the votes of the populace have made President or Governor sometimes appoints a knave or demagogue to public office. Such appointment, however offensive to some of us, may have been in strict accordance with our political system. Under that system the ultimate appeal is never to experience, ability, capacity or character, but always to numbers; and therefore the official indebted to the power of numbers for his own high office may possibly be quite justified in continuing the process, and in bestowing his appointments on the representative or controller of numbers, no matter what his quality or theirs. To use the language of practical politics “the man with a following is entitled to recognition” be he demagogue, rogue or humbug; and the President, Governor or Boss who fails to give it to him is false to the modern American principle of “numbers win”; in a word he is un-American; and is likely to suffer politically in consequence. In fact we may say generally that government in this country is authorized by numbers, rests on numbers, and is backed and sanctified by numbers and naught else; while our governing class count numbers, live by numbers and need respect nothing but numbers if of numbers they can obtain sufficient support. The President is selected and appointed as the result of a numerical reckoning; and so with all other officials and the men who choose the officials; the laws are made either by men chosen by the addition of figures, or more directly by a similar count of voters; nearly all of whom are absolutely ignorant of the merits and scope of the projected legislation and each of them lacking other qualification than that he exists and can be counted. The candidate with the largest total gets the office; the project approved by the greatest number becomes law.

Our government is not one of talent, nor cunning, nor of money, nor birth, nor military force, but of numeral computation; our rulers are not hereditary nor called to rule for their merits nor by the grace of God; they are counted in; it is a government by calculation, an arithmetical government. Our ruling classes are not aristocrats, nor militarists, nor statesmen, nor capitalists, nor landowners; they are handshakers, mixers, they have “followings,” and their political weight in council does not depend on their wisdom, but on the numbers of the mob running at their heels. We are taught politically to think in numbers, to believe in numbers; in fact, politically we believe in nothing else.

Now it is clear that the effect of this régime is to disregard much that statesmanship should take into account in framing a nation’s polity. There are many other considerations besides mere numbers which affect men politically; other forces which far more than mere numbers operate towards the development of mankind, the shaping of human destiny, the establishment and fall of political institutions; all of which forces are by our political system completely ignored. In a free play of political life we would expect for instance to reckon with intellect, capacity, energy, industry, wisdom, knowledge, judgment, prudence, physical strength, wealth, experience, training, efficiency, and perhaps other qualities, but in our political scheme none of them is considered; everything is ascertained and decided upon and all doubts resolved by an arithmetical process; you take a count and the thing is done. Be the question, for instance, who is the properest man to fill an administrative office of trust and importance; on the one hand is A who has a good physique, is of a fine family, habits good, long training and experience, excellent education, bright past record for efficiency and honor; and on the other B who has none of these valuable qualities, is a little shady in fact; but a glib platform speaker. The number of votes is counted and B has the more and is thus positively ascertained to be the man for the place. Is not this wonderful? Tried by any other test he would have been declared unfit for the position; but the numeral system conclusively demonstrated his fitness. And indeed the writer is compelled to admit that the number system is deservedly popular with those able to profit by it, and has given promotion to thousands of nonentities who would otherwise have remained in obscurity. So of a project of law involving difficult questions of justice and expediency; students of civics and even great statesmen may be in doubt as to whether it ought not to be amended or modified; but with our system in operation there is no need for study or hesitation; you just invite every one to say “Yes” or “No.” Possibly the majority will not understand the project at all or will misunderstand it, but that makes no difference: understanding is not necessary to voting; it is numbers that count, not understanding. Possibly a conscientious or indolent third of the voters will decline to vote; that makes no difference either; possibly every one of the few who realty understand the proposition is opposed to it, but that is of little practical consequence as the knowledge or ignorance of the voters is immaterial and is never made the subject of inquiry; possibly the scheme is imperfect and to the knowledge of the well informed plainly needs amendment; it matters not, there is no provision for amendment of details in the numerical system; possibly the project has never been properly presented to the electorate and most of the votes pro or con are the result of ignorance, whim or prejudice; but this fact will not be considered in the result, for an ignorant or prejudiced vote is just as valid as a just and wise one. The system is unfailing; it will solve every difficulty; the doubts of able statesmen are answered in a moment by the vote of the female mill hands of Factoryville. You are sure to get some decision, and any decision will serve; for no matter how foolish or unreasonable it may be, no one is responsible; there is no appeal and practically no redress.

This electoral scheme would seem to imply a general belief in the capacity of the electorate. It would at first blush appear to be founded upon a theory of the superior wisdom and almost superhuman knowledge and virtue of the masses, whereby every voter is presumed to know who are best fitted to fill the offices of Mayor, Alderman, Sheriff, County and State Attorney, Judge of Courts small or large, State Assemblyman, State Senator, Congressman, State Engineer and Surveyor, Governor of the State, and President of the United States; and it would seem, besides, that every voter, male or female, is presumed to cast his or her vote with the good of the community and nation at heart. The verdict so taken would thus have something of the effect of an infallible decree; and indeed we note that people and newspapers often speak of the results of an election with a species of awe; and that in the somewhat too common event of a doubtful character or even of a noted scamp being elected to a public office the result is often spoken of as his “vindication.” These “vindications” in fact are frequently needed and demanded by political gentlemen under a cloud, and have been accorded by the electorate in a surprisingly large number of cases. Nor does the mere capacity to select the best officials measure the full quota of the wisdom and accuracy apparently required by the populace under our political system. They, every man jack, and in the “advanced” States, every woman jenny of them all is from time to time required to vote upon questions which presuppose them to be perfectly familiar with the Constitution of the United States and of his and her own State; to understand all its provisions and to be able to determine the meaning and effect of any and all amendments thereto, which are or may possibly be proposed.

Now, all this is of course absurd; no such belief in the wisdom of the electorate is entertained by the masses or by anybody, for no one in the world is such a fool as not to be aware that at every election large numbers of the voters are absolutely incapable of passing upon the merits of candidates far above them in education, station in life, and capacity to fill offices whose high duties they could not be made to understand by any amount of explanation. Few even of the most ignorant are unaware that only trained minds are capable of construing and understanding constitutional provisions and forecasting their probable effects. There must therefore exist within the manhood suffrage scheme, some principle or theory more sane than a belief in the omniscience of the rabble of ignorance, stupidity and indifference which it proudly marshals to the polls; and though this principle or theory has never been precisely or authoritatively defined, yet on examining the numerous written or spoken expressions in support of universal suffrage found in books, speeches and newspaper articles, we discover that the postulate at the bottom of the manhood suffrage proposition is this: not that the mass of voters are competent judges of conditions or policies, but that they are the natural, necessary and proper arbiters thereof; not that ignorance, stupidity and vice do not go to the polls, but that in the nature of the case they are there and have a right to be there; that it is intended and expected that they shall be actually represented and expressed in the vote; that in politics all have equal right to be heard; that government and law should be an expression of the will of all the people or at least of all of the men of this country; not merely of those having patriotism, experience, virtue, judgment, and wisdom, or any one of these qualities; but of the whole populace; including the ignorant, stupid, worthless and depraved; and that each of these latter should have an equal voice with the wise and worthy. Such is and must be the underlying theory of manhood suffrage; and as women are notoriously still more ignorant of political affairs than men, the adoption of woman suffrage is evidently a mere extension of this same theory of equality of political value to the female sex; so that under a system of universal suffrage the law and the government include the expression of the ignorance, stupidity and depravity of both sexes of the community, state or nation as well as of its education, wisdom and goodness. And this principle is in effect generally carried out at our elections; so that practically the only disfranchised classes are those of the publicly supported paupers and the negroes in the South, and the whole immense national mass of ignorance, incapacity and hostility to social wellbeing is included in our voting lists and finds expression at the polls.

From an electorate so constituted, from a system of government founded on such a perverse theory no good results are or ever were to be expected. Accordingly, we are not surprised to note that the first plain signs of a general political deterioration in American politics were about coincident with the establishment of manhood suffrage in the early part of the nineteenth century. For the first forty years of the republic politics were comparatively pure; the United States was a model among nations; then we note a fatal declension, a swift lowering of standards; we observe the close connection between the establishment of manhood suffrage and the entrance into high places of low politicians; how upon the widening of the franchise the management and control of politics in the United States began gradually to pass from the hands of the principal men of the country, the ablest, the most wealthy, the best educated, the most influential, the members of the oldest and best families, and to fall under the control of the professional politicians. This latter class originating at about that period developed into well organized bands who under the leadership of chiefs, since known as bosses, have seized, occupied and still hold and occupy the offices, the machinery of public elections, appointments, and almost the entire control of public affairs. Their management and control have been selfish, corrupt and inefficient. Their legislation has been excessive and poor in quality; their administration of governmental affairs ignorant, weak, capricious, oppressive, wasteful, careless and dishonest. During all this time the system of manhood suffrage has remained unassailed and unquestioned, and the people have listened more or less complacently to fulsome praises of their government system by a venal and superficial press and by ignorant and insincere political platform orators. These, in their speeches and platforms have been easily able to escape imputation of the mischiefs of manhood suffrage and of their own class by charging them upon the opposite party, or upon such of their political opponents as happened for the time being to hold public office. And so elections have come and gone, parties have risen and fallen, officials have been selected as popular one year and thrown aside as unsatisfactory the next, but through it all corruption and inefficiency remain constant and acknowledged features of American political life.

The time has come when a remedy for this state of things can no longer be safely postponed; the situation is serious; the democratic system is being attacked, and will continue to be attacked here and elsewhere by great numbers of the very class who have heretofore been supposed to constitute its defenders and champions. Be they Bolsheviki, Anarchists, Socialists or what you will, these assailants of our institutions are nearly all of the common people, of the very working class whom it has been and ought to be the pride and mission of America to shelter and satisfy. Many of them were brought to this attitude of revolt by evil conditions in Europe and are continuing here their hostile attitude to organized society and spreading the spirit of mischief among us because they are justly disappointed by our political conditions; finding here in a country supposed to be democratic, the rule of a corrupt oligarchy of politicians thoroughly established and apparently acquiesced in by the people at large. The seeds of discontent which they are assiduously sowing are likely to take root in the breasts of our own people, disgruntled as they are with the past and present corruption of our politics and the inefficiency of our government.

This corruption, this inefficiency, long a scandal among us, is the real cause of that popular “unrest,” that dissatisfaction the subject of so much comment, which for more than a generation just prior to the German war had been steadily increasing in this country. It was started by the degradation of politics which ensued immediately upon the establishment of manhood suffrage and the inauguration of Jackson and the Spoils Policy in 1829. It was already well under way in 1840; but was subsequently held in check by the Anti-Slavery agitation, by the Civil War and the Southern Reconstruction troubles, which ended in 1876 with the inauguration of Hayes. From that time this popular protest against our political unrighteousness has been steadily on the increase, gaining in power and bitterness with the added instances of official unfitness and maladministration of public affairs. With the disappearance of the older generations reared in a religious belief in our republican institutions and filled with memories of the honest days before Jackson, appeared the spirit of contemptuous disbelief in official capacity and honesty which has taken possession of their descendants. The vision of a government administered by statesmen and patriots of the type of Washington and the Adamses has given place in the mind of America to a picture of a sordid gang of corrupt and incapable politicians in power, and it is therefore to the credit of our people that there has been protest, dissatisfaction and “unrest.” The popular demand that this state of things be remedied is at the bottom of the so-called “unrest,” and it is not an unreasonable demand. Never in the world’s history was there a people so religious, so patriotic, so disinterested, so idealistic, so appreciative, so tolerant of mere mistakes, so easy to govern justly as the American people; but the best of them are determined that their republican government shall be the ultimate success their fathers promised to make it. They care much less about “world democracy”; they are far from being such consummate fools as to believe that our political system is fit for other and inferior races or to want to meddle with the affairs of other nations; but they want Americanism to continue here; they want honest and efficient government established in this country; and they fear the breakdown of those republican institutions to which they feel a passionate devotion.

There have indeed been no lack of efforts at reform. All sorts of expedients have been proposed and every remedy possible has been adopted and tried except the only one which could possibly be efficacious, namely, the limitation and elevation of the electorate. This and the other new idea or so-called political reform has been tried and discarded, or proved of little value; hundreds of penal statutes have been enacted, hundreds of boards, commissions and officials of various sorts have been created; there have been innumerable grand jury inquests and committees of investigations; there have been created new ballot systems, new primary laws; initiatives and referendums, besides thousands of tax-payers’ suits, injunctions, newspaper campaigns, new reform parties and fusions of old parties, not with the slightest hope of reaching perfection, but in desperate efforts on behalf of common decency. All have failed. Countless political movements have been started and political campaigns fought in the effort to cure the delinquency, to cleanse the corruption of our local and general governments, with varying temporary success, but without permanent benefit. Men have spent their lives and fortunes in the effort; each new generation hopefully undertaking the task of cleaning the stable only to abandon it in its turn; and nothing permanent or even enduring has been accomplished. Here and there, an individual or a group of political malefactors has been punished; here and there schemes for public plunder have been exposed and defeated; the particular system or legislation which permitted these specific instances has been changed or reformed; this or that particular abuse suppressed, and in the aggregate a great deal of mischief has thus been done away with or prevented. But no one pretends that the root of the evil has been removed or that the grasp of the professional politician class upon the throat of the nation has been loosened. The elections from which so much was expected, the men and movements from which so much was hoped, have come and gone without substantial results. The same class of politicians, the same methods, the same political games, the same corruption, the same boss rule, the same old rings, the same fraud, cheating, waste and general inefficiency remain the most striking features of our American public life. The same men, though not always holding the same places, remain in office year after year, and the rule of the oligarchy of professional politicians established eighty years ago goes on forever. When one of its members is turned out of one political job by a spurt of indignation of a gullible and innocent public, he quickly appears in another one just as comfortable and lucrative, and sometimes with a capacity for mischief and blundering rather increased than diminished by the change.

Seeing this, the reformers naturally ask each other in wonder and disgust what is the matter with the people? What is the cause of their failure to rid themselves of these political gangs? What is the remedy and where is it to be found? To ascertain the cause, to correctly diagnose the disease is of course the first and the main problem. Afterwards the remedy. The fact that it persists and has so long persisted in operation affords evidence that it is not superficial but represents an organic defect in our governmental system. Many political students have puzzled over it, many have given the inquiry up as hopeless. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1896, the writer, referring to our legislative bodies, notes

“a decline in the quality of the members in general respect, in education, in social position, in morality, in public spirit, in care and deliberation, and, I think, I must add in integrity also.” He finds them subservient to the Boss rather than to public opinion and adds, “To account for this or to say how it is to be mended, is, I admit, very difficult. Few subjects have done more to baffle reformers and investigators. It is the great puzzle of the heartiest friends of Democracy.”

Among people generally there is a failure to agree upon any specific cause for the sad inferiority of our political condition. Some attribute it to human frailty; some to American carelessness or good nature; some to the spirit of the age, some to the inherent weakness of democracy. In a very able and scholarly little book published as late as 1918 by Max Farrand of Yale University entitled The Development of the United States, the writer, after referring to persistent and ineffectual attempts of reformers for the past generation to cleanse politics in this country, makes this significant statement (p. 293): “It is surprising that the people still retain faith in any remedies, but hope springs eternal and every new plan was able to rally ardent supporters. To the thoughtful observer, however, it was evident that the root of the trouble had not been found and that something more radical or something entirely different was necessary.” I find no hint in Farrand’s book as to what this “something” might be. One may suspect that the worthy professor had tracked the bear to his den but did not care to start him; that he preferred to avoid making his book the subject of controversy by giving his opinion as to what is in fact “the root of the trouble.”

However, he states the problem in a nutshell. All efforts to reform and cleanse our politics have failed, something new and different is needed, some remedy that will reach the very source of the political corruption of our time and country. But after all, there need be very little difficulty in finding the “root of the trouble”; it lies exposed, plain enough for all men to see and to stumble over as they pass to and fro. Many no doubt have identified it who prefer to be silent on the subject, though a few prominent men have spoken out. President Woolsey of Yale, for example, frankly says that “universal suffrage does not secure the government of the wisest nor even secures the liberties of a country placed in such a democratic situation, much less secures its order and stability.” (Pol. Science. Vol. I, Sec. 101). In Reemelin’s American Politics (1881) the author says in his chapter on the ballot box that “thickly strewn around us lie the evidences, that governing by the ballot box, based on universal suffrage and universal qualification for office is a failure; but why this is so, and what remedy we should apply is not so intelligible.” (P. 168.) In 1871 the Westminster Review, a British radical magazine, published an article on The American Republic, its Strength and Weakness in which the dangers of manhood suffrage were plainly pointed out, and its institution attributed to the efforts of demagogues, and to a mistaken conception of suffrage as a right instead of as a privilege to be conferred upon those capable of exercising it. The writer sums up the topic by saying that:

“The elevation of the government, laws and institutions of a republic must necessarily depend upon the average intelligence and virtue of its voting population. Hence it is a most dangerous experiment for America to reduce the qualifications of its voters to the level of the lowest, instead of raising the latter to a certain definite standard at which the right of suffrage might with comparative safety be placed in their hands.”

Another writer thus expresses himself:

“It is perfectly idle to attempt to give political power to persons who have no political capacity, who are not intellectual enough to form opinions or who are not high minded enough to act on those opinions.... Lastly the events of the earlier part of the last century show us—demonstrate we may say, to us,—the necessity of retaining a very great share of power in the hands of the wealthier and more instructed classes, of the real rulers of public opinion.” (Bagehot, Parliamentary Reform, p. 316.)

And Lecky predicts that the day will come when the adoption of the theory that the best way to improve the world and secure national progress is to place the government under the control of the least enlightened classes will be regarded as one of the strangest facts in the history of human folly.

Indeed, but little political discernment is required to enable one to realize the fatal mischiefs attendant upon the plan of according a place in the electorate to females generally and to the ignorant, idle, unthrifty, purchasable, vicious and anti-social males. It is not difficult to see that such a scheme is erroneous in principle, antagonistic to civilization, and to society as the agent of civilization. History informs us that manhood suffrage is contrary to our best traditions; that it has been mischievous and unclean in practise; that it has filled the body politic with the foulest corruption; that it is largely responsible for the Civil War and other serious blunders and mischiefs; that it has cost thousands of millions to the American people in money stolen and squandered. Reason plainly teaches us that the suffrage is not a natural right, but a function in the social system belonging only to those who by the process of natural selection are qualified as men of education and property to take a part in government; that unlimited universal or manhood suffrage is dangerous for the future and if not overthrown may ultimately cause our national destruction. There is not therefore after all any real difficulty in determining that universal suffrage is the political disease under which America is suffering. Its specific cause is the virus of the rabble vote; men without character and destitute of achievement should be excluded from the suffrage; they are by nature political nonentities, and were they content to mark zero on their ballots thus indicating the real extent of their political value and sagacity they would be harmless; but they are too often the willing tools of scamps and demagogues, and though individually zeros they attach themselves to real figures to give them a fictitious and in this case a maleficent influence. Nor is the remedy far to seek, though so many political writers have been rather shy in hinting it. It is possible by very simple means, by a mere return to the original American principle and American practice of a property qualification for voters to so reform our entire governmental system from the foundation upwards that it will become efficient and enduring and capable of defying all the political madness of the times. The democratic theory would thus be retained, but it would be purified and strengthened by a return to the principles of the fathers of the republic. We have failed because we have attempted in defiance of those principles to create a democracy founded on numbers and on nothing but numbers. The resulting product has not been a true democracy; it has not properly represented and does not properly represent the American nation, which consists not merely of population but of American intelligence and industry. The manhood suffrage democracy of numbers merely is too narrow; it does not afford a broad enough foundation for the national superstructure; and that foundation should he widened to include the American character and American achievement.

The real difficulty in the case lies then not in ascertaining the source of American political ills, nor in prescribing the remedy; the difficulty lies in obtaining leadership or even advocacy of a movement which to most men appears to promise little in the way of personal advancement and much in the way of hostile criticism. As to the masses in private life, most are indifferent and the remainder voiceless. All the organs of public opinion are muzzled, controlled or terrified into silence by the politicians; and but few in public life whether newspaper men, clergymen, judges, politicians, teachers or public servants or officials; but few of those merely dependent upon or connected with politics or government, whether bankers, lawyers, physicians in hospitals, officers of public utilities or the like, have heretofore dared more than whisper to their closest friends their real hatred of the political despotism under which we are living today in the United States. Now, however, the present menace of the political madness known as Bolshevism affords a new and compelling motive to every true American to arouse himself, and there is a hope that in the presence of a new peril, good citizens may be moved to realize the inherent weakness and danger of our present political system, and to undertake the establishment of a suffrage based upon such qualifications as will insure the creation and continuance of a government in this country so strong, determined, intelligent and devoted to the interests of civilization that under it our whole political life may be purified and made efficient; one which may be relied upon not merely to crush Bolshevism in the United States but to extirpate it from this country forever.

The proposal to establish a property qualification for voters throughout the United States may seem novel and even startling to many Americans, but there is no other way out of the political mess in which we find ourselves. As will be shown in detail in subsequent pages the corrupt rule of the low professional politicians of this country is made secure by the vote of the thriftless and controllable class; until that vote is expurgated there can be no purification of the body politic; without purification there can be no efficiency; and unless the administration of our public affairs is purified and made efficient we cannot either answer the charges of the enemies of our institutions or repel their attacks. We cannot depend upon the electorate as at present made up; it has already shown its capacity to breed and encourage bad government; the thriftless classes are all ready to accept Bolshevism or any other economical and political absurdity; they are no more able to understand the scheme of civilization and the value and importance of accumulations of earnings and creation of property in furtherance of that scheme than they are able to understand a musical symphony or a problem in the higher mathematics. And after all there is nothing sacred about the doctrine of unlimited suffrage; it is only a political experiment like another; and the well known record of its complete and dismal failure is summarized in these pages where it is shown that it has not been an instrument of progress nor a means of freedom, but that its tendency has been and is towards reaction and despotism; that it is anti-social and hostile to civilization. The proposal to make property accumulations the basis of government, though it is sanctioned by ancient practise, is not reactionary; it is progressive, as every return to old and sound principles is progressive. Nor will it create or tend to create a narrow or exclusive electorate; it will on the contrary have a broadening effect and will tend to furnish a truly popular government, one resting directly on the consent and the votes of most of the population, and utilizing qualities of virtue and manhood now denied their proper effect in politics. It will represent directly or indirectly every element of value in the nation; everything on which a democratic government depends for its best support; namely, the industry, thrift, wealth, intelligence, character and honest independence of its people. The change will appear in the overthrow of the rule of brute force and the curbing of the present despotism of numbers. Do what we will, the passions and prejudices of the unthinking and uninstructed will always affect political action; but if our democracy is to survive their power must be checked and modified by associating with the sway of numbers the powers of intelligence, of character, and of industry which working together constitute efficiency.

Every generation has its problems which it must solve at its peril. Ours is before us and must shortly be met if the signs tell true. Like Edipus we must answer correctly or perish. And the question is, how to abolish the weak and corrupt rule of the politicians and re-establish a pure, firm, intelligent and truly republican government in the United States. The true answer must be by the reform and elevation of the electorate. Purify the source and the stream will be pure and sweet.

This object is of such consequence that every American ought to be willing to devote strong efforts to its accomplishment. And first, the intelligent and patriotic people of the country need to be aroused to a sense of its importance and instructed in the merits of the case. They must be made not merely to know but to realize vividly the main features of the argument for a property qualification, which may be summarized in ten points, namely: (1) That this government was not originally founded on the principle of universal suffrage but on that of a propertied electorate. (2) That the permanency of the corrupt and inefficient rule of the political oligarchy in the United States is due to the operation of universal suffrage. (3) That there is no natural right to vote; but that voting is a function of government to be exercised only for the benefit of society and never merely for that of the individual. (4) That government in our day is a highly specialized business institution requiring from its members expert knowledge rather than oratorical gifts. (5) That good government in a democracy requires a worthy and intelligent electorate. (6) That the franchise laws must deal with classes, not with individuals. (7) That the franchise should be confined to those who are socially qualified, as proven by lives of successful social endeavor, resulting in the solid acquisition of substantial property. (8) That book or school education is insufficient to constitute by itself a franchise qualification. (9) That the body or mass of men are better fitted than that of women to exercise all political functions, voting included, and that therefore women should be denied the suffrage. (10) That the elevation of the franchise is absolutely necessary to purify our politics, strengthen our government and protect property and civilization from threatened anarchy.

It is with the hope of assisting in this work that this book has been written and published. It is not within its plan and scope to propose and discuss in minute detail the exact qualifications of voters and suffrage restrictions under the proposed new system. The basic principles herein advocated once recognized, the detailed regulations for their enforcement may properly be left to such state legislatures or conventions as may undertake to deal with the matter. They would obviously differ in different states and possibly in different communities. They should be such as would tend to insure a contribution by the voter of such a quota of intelligence, independence and good judgment in casting his vote as will greatly decrease bribery in elections; as will raise the standard of candidates for office, reduce the influence of demagogues and “yellow” journals, elevate the tone of public service, and incidentally encourage good citizenship by making the voting power a badge of honor and manhood and a privilege to be sought after and valued. There is no place in this scheme for an educational qualification; such a requirement would be inconsistent with the theory of this book which is that the school of business life is the appropriate preparation for the voting booth. The class of men of good education who are unable to acquire a modest competence in this country are obviously so lacking in either interest in, or judgment of, practical affairs as to be unfit to pass upon those business questions which form the main part of the problems of government. The world of books on the one hand is a totally different realm from the world of business and of politics on the other hand. Further, an educational qualification for voters is absolutely impracticable; it could not possibly be enforced. But this subject will be discussed more at length in the twenty-ninth chapter. Meanwhile let us briefly examine the history and operations of the voting system in the United States.

CHAPTER II

THE OLDEST AND BEST AMERICAN TRADITIONS FAVOR A RESTRICTED SUFFRAGE

Many of us have been accustomed to regard the principle of manhood suffrage as a part of the original American ideal. The contrary is the fact. The doctrine that voters should be qualified for their duties is not novel in America. It came to the country with its first settlers; the colonists believed in it and retained it; it was part of the settled policy of all the colonies for over one hundred and fifty progressive and flourishing years; under that policy they built up the country; raised the finest crop of statesmen and patriots it has ever produced; fought the war of Independence; wrote the Constitution; established the Union and created the United States of America.

The species of a democracy which we now have, where capacity is unrecognized and unrepresented, and where the votes of men without standing in the community may and do offset and defeat the votes of men of property, of business experience and sagacity was not the creation of the Fathers of the American Republic and was not tolerated by them. In no sense is manhood suffrage or a democracy of numbers an integration of their spirit. They sought rather to establish a system of government by capacity and intelligence, and desired that the measures thereby enacted from time to time should be the result not of an appeal to numerical superiority but of wise and careful discussion and deliberation by bodies containing the most capable and disinterested men in the community. Most of them no doubt expected a property qualification for voters materially to contribute to this result and they saw no injustice or tyranny in demanding a qualification which any man might acquire by industry and thrift. It was not the men of 1776 who established the doctrine of manhood suffrage in the United States; and though in some of the more sparsely settled or mountainous states, such as Vermont, Kentucky and New Hampshire, the population was so small and conditions were so primitive that suffrage qualifications seemed superfluous and were never adopted, yet the country as a whole, including the great states of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Virginia, stood for the principle of a properly qualified electorate long after American independence.

It was not till the period of a generation after the death of George Washington, when the most prominent of those who stood for pure conservative government were no more, and Washington, himself the greatest single obstacle to political humbug in the country, was but a memory, that the barriers were finally removed so that the army of professional politicians were enabled to get possession of every government in the United States. Commencing with that time the political control which the fathers had endeavored to place permanently in the hands of the best, most enlightened and most efficient was gradually transferred to the hands of some of the worst, most ignorant and incompetent. This mischievous transfer was due mostly to the operation of manhood suffrage. It is by the admission to the electorate of the poorest quality of material that politics has been degraded to its present low level; that it has become a business to be conducted for profit; that professional politicians have obtained and retained power; that the intelligence and manhood of the nation have been deprived of their rightful control over its destiny; and that the country has been handed over to gangs of sordid rascals to be plundered. That it has been plundered cannot be denied. The plundering has been conducted so openly, scandalously and notoriously that there is hardly a reader of this book who is not more or less familiar with some of the details, though its extent is so great that no one not a student of the subject can be familiar with it all.

One may naturally ask how comes it that the American people not only submit to such a vile despotism, but never seem seriously to question its right to exist. The answer is that the case is similar to that of the recent German militarist domination; the country is in the clutches of a political oligarchy which controls a large organized body of those who live by the operation of universal suffrage; the masses are taught to believe in it, and the most of those who are sufficiently instructed to fully understand its stupidity and villainy are silent in public because of fear, indifference or self-interest. The newspapers have not cloaked the rascalities of the politicians, except those of their own party, because political sensations help to sustain their circulation; but they have not undertaken to attack the political system which is responsible for those rascalities; they have neither opposed manhood suffrage nor exposed its sinister operations; they have never published one-fourth of the available details of the rogueries and stupidities of our political masters, and indeed, why should they publish more? The actually published scandals are quite sufficient to condemn any system yet the public makes no sign of revolt. Ephraim is wedded to his idols; let him alone. The newspapers cannot afford to attack popular abuses. They depend for their circulation on the favor of the same populace which yearly goes like silly sheep to the polling place bleating its pride at being driven there by its bosses, and their advertising in turn depends on their circulation. No single newspaper can afford to antagonize at once the uninstructed populace and the powerful class of politicians, office holders and political leaders who not only control a very valuable advertising patronage but include among themselves nearly all the public speakers in the country and thus possess the ear of the masses.

Nor can private individuals, however wise and patriotic, be expected in the present state of public opinion to assail a system so powerful and well established. It is in fact generally assumed that manhood suffrage is a necessary part of the American policy, that its overthrow is hopeless; that to denounce it would be to court unpopularity; and in a country at once democratic and commercial, the number of those who dare to be unpopular is extremely few, and find it difficult to obtain even a hearing. And though in private conversation people frequently criticise governmental incapacity, and say that politics is rotten, and that politicians and office holders are corrupt, they seldom or never go as far as to question the principle of manhood suffrage, but seem to think that political corruption and incapacity are necessary incidents of all government, or at least of all democratic government.

Strange as it may seem, the doctrine of manhood suffrage has never been established in the minds of the American people by argument or discussion; originally adopted without serious reflection, it has since been largely taken for granted. It is curious to see how the most important measures may be adopted in a democratic community without even an approach to thorough consideration on the part of the majority. Take the case of woman suffrage adopted by the State of New York in 1917; only a small proportion of the men of the State had ever seriously considered the subject, and of the several millions of women of the State, probably not more than ten thousand really concerned themselves about it. National prohibition of the use of alcoholic beverages, which seemed impossible in 1908, was enacted in 1918 without real discussion by the electorate. The prohibition vote for President in 1916 was about 200,000 out of 18,000,000, or a little more than one per cent. But the prohibitionists were in bitter earnest; the others were careless or indifferent, a moment favorable to prohibition came, and the thing was done. Something like this is the story of the adoption of manhood suffrage in New York and the other large States; while it was being adopted the majority scarcely realized what was going on; after it was done they were indifferent to the change because it did not affect their daily lives. Since its adoption its theory has been very little discussed by the American people; it has not been openly attacked or questioned by newspaper or political orator for over two generations; its validity is usually taken as a matter of course; the masses are not even aware that there is anything questionable about it; and but one American writer, Prof. Hyslop of New York, has had the vision to see its enormity and the courage and patriotism to describe it in print. (Democracy.) His powerful book was never replied to and it is significant that not a well considered argument in favor of manhood or universal suffrage can be found in our libraries. Most of what has been printed on the subject is mere twaddle; a few authors lacking practical experience in active life, such as teachers or sociologists, have alluded to it in their class books or political treatises, but the little they say on the subject is usually confined to commonplace laudation of political liberty or other weak sentimentalism or else to the routine conventional assumption that manhood suffrage is what they call in their pretentious slang part of the “advance movement” of the nineteenth century.

A very short sketch of the history of manhood suffrage in this country may be useful here as a preliminary to a brief review of its actual operations. Though some traces of a belief in the abstract right of all men to vote may be found in the England of the middle ages, yet our English ancestors prior to the Protestant Reformation had, generally speaking, no idea of a vote not founded on property or on such a recognized business standing as might give an assurance of stability of character or of a substantial interest in the affairs of the community or nation. The first English public utterance in favor of manhood suffrage that has come to the writer’s attention was made in 1647 by some of the sect of Congregationalists or Independents. That body was divided in opinion on the subject. Those who favored it were called “Levellers,” and in so doing were opposed by the other Independents as well as by the Presbyterians, Catholics and Episcopalians. The Levellers claimed that the right to vote was conferred by natural law upon all freemen. Cromwell and Ireton of the Puritan leaders opposed them, and insisted that no man had a right to vote on the affairs of the country or the choice of lawmakers who had not a property or a business interest; saying that those who have “noe interest butt the interest of breathing” should have no voice in elections.

The establishment of qualifications for voters in the American Colonies during the Colonial period was left entirely in the hands of the Colonies themselves; Great Britain not interfering. The first colonists were without any settled policy on the subject. Massachusetts had a religious qualification and some of the Puritans who wished to establish a theocracy or a church government in New England on the basis of the Independent or Congregational polity were in favor of making church membership the only qualification. The first settlers being without holdings in the colony, probably dispensed with a property qualification at first or waived it as impracticable. But very soon it was decided that only those having an interest in the colony should have a voice in its affairs; and the rule of a property qualification for voters was speedily established in all the colonies; in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut in 1630; in Rhode Island in 1658; in New Jersey in 1665 and North Carolina in 1663; in Maryland and in Virginia in 1670; in Pennsylvania in 1682; in South Carolina in 1692; in New York about 1701; in Delaware 1734; and in Georgia in 1761. In five colonies, namely, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania, the property held might be either real or personal; in all the others it was required to be land. Some American theorists at the time of the Revolution held a belief or a half belief in manhood suffrage but they were few in number. In certain political declarations published not long prior to 1776 we find propositions that all men are naturally entitled to vote, while in others a suffrage qualification is suggested. But by the time the Revolution arrived the doctrine of manhood suffrage had practically disappeared from the colonies; and the practice of putting in office only the most prominent and best equipped was universal and apparently universally accepted.

The success of the Revolution in no way affected the suffrage. It had not been a democratic movement nor intended as such. At first it was designed to merely curtail without actually terminating British interference in American affairs; later as the estrangement increased it was determined to entirely get rid of British rule. But the Revolution was in spirit a conservative movement, whereby it was not intended to interfere with existing colonial laws relating to suffrage nor to alter the political or social structure of society nor to materially change aught in government beyond terminating the British connection. In this respect it materially differed from the French Revolution which developed into an attempt to completely reorganize the social and political fabrics. The American revolutionists were well satisfied with their local laws and customs, and the separation from Great Britain once accomplished, the conservative policy adopted at the beginning of the struggle still continued till the generation which had carried through the Revolution had finally passed away.

The Declaration of Independence has nothing to say about the right of suffrage. Although composed by Jefferson, who was influenced by the sentimentalities of the French theorists of the time it contains only two brief statements which can possibly be quoted as favoring the principle of manhood suffrage. One is “that all men are created equal.” This statement could not have been intended to be understood without qualification because it is notoriously false. Men are not created equal either in size, health, affections, virtues, social station, capacity, prospects in life, opportunities, nor in anything else. In his own country thousands were then held in bondage, some by Jefferson himself, and a considerable part of the colonial population were without political rights. He could not therefore have even meant that all men were entitled to be considered as politically equal unless he intended merely to express a private opinion of his own. Public opinion as expressed in the laws and customs of the time was exactly to the contrary. The other statement of the Declaration that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” is equally absurd, if applied to individuals. It may be that a government is a usurper if it exists in defiance of society at large, but it may properly dispense with the consent of an unlimited number of the individuals whom it governs. It cannot be supposed that Jefferson and his associates intended to imply that none of the governmental powers on the earth including those of the colonies themselves were just; yet none of them derived their powers from the consent of all those under their authority. Most of the colonies were founded on charters granted by the British crown. The consent of the native Indians, of aliens, women, minors, negroes and the unpropertied class had not been given to any government in this country, nor was it proposed at that time that any such consent should be asked for. More than this, neither Jefferson nor any one else proposed that the consent of the minority at any election, even were it forty-nine per cent of the whole, should be required to establish the new government. The most that Jefferson pretended to mean by these fine phrases was to claim that a majority of the qualified voters of the colonies should govern the country through their representatives duly elected. But in practice even this was a sham; the Revolutionists were probably in a minority of from one-fifth to a third of the whole people; they never troubled themselves to obtain the consent of the Tories or the indifferent; and what Jefferson really intended was to get his faction together on the basis of that Declaration as a party platform, to fight for the result and to beat or intimidate the majority into subjection or acquiescence. This is what was actually done; both sides resorted to force, the neutrals were silenced, and the Americans of tory principles were soon taught to their sorrow that Jefferson and his associates intended to govern them with or without their consent and pretty harshly at that. No vote was ever taken on the question of separation from Great Britain, and the consent of the objectors to what was done was rendered unnecessary by the efficient process of killing them or driving them into exile and confiscating their property.

The Revolution therefore was not the establishment of the rule of the majority in numbers, but of the sway of those qualified to govern, because the strongest, the most daring and the most fortunate. And the property qualification principle also assuring the rule of those believed to be the best qualified to govern was in force in every one of the thirteen states at and immediately after the Revolution by the will of the colonists themselves. Voters’ qualifications varied in different States, but in all there was some kind of a property qualification. In some the actual ownership of real property was required; in others a voter was required either to pay a property tax, to lease real property or to have a substantial yearly income. The payment of direct taxes in some form or other was in the minds of the founders of the American republic an essential qualification of the voter. The revolt against Great Britain had been generally and publicly defended on the theory of no taxation without representation; and the converse of this principle was popularly assumed, namely, that there should be no representation without taxation; in other words, that no man should be permitted to aid in shaping the policy of the country who did not directly contribute to the expense of its government, or, in the language of the time, “who had not a stake in the country.” For example, Virginia from 1670 restricted the suffrage “to such as by their estates, real or personal, have interest enough to tye them to the endeavor of the public good,” and later excluded all but freeholders. In the Virginia Bill of Rights of June 12, 1776, the statement is “That all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to the community have the right of suffrage.” In New Haven in 1784, out of about 600 adult males, only 343 were qualified to be freemen and vote for the mayor, who being once elected held his office during the pleasure of the General Assembly which usually meant for life. (Levermore, New Haven.) The payment of taxes and the right to representation were so much united in the public mind at that time that in some states, for instance in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the number of senators was apportioned among the counties according to the amount of taxation paid and not according to the population. Within the State of New York, representation was granted not according to the number of inhabitants, but to that of actual voters; in other words, of propertied citizens. When the word “people” was used in public documents what was really meant was the citizens or voters of the State.

In those days the obscure and ignorant political adventurers who now adorn our legislative halls, had no chance of getting themselves into the seats of the mighty, or their ravenous fingers into the public purse. As for judicial and administrative officers their selection was entirely withdrawn from the electorate. Our colonial and revolutionary ancestors believed that the members of the State Legislature who were personally acquainted with the candidates for high office were better able to select them than the mass of voters who only knew them by sight or reputation. The electorate might only choose the legislature, and that body usually elected the governor and appointed and removed judges, justices of the peace, sheriffs, and other administrative officers. The voters chose the men who made the laws, but not the officials charged with their interpretation and execution; and the actual administration of government was so arranged for that honest, competent and responsible agents might be employed therein and was as far removed from the people as was conveniently possible.

Therefore the popular belief that the founders of our government believed in a democracy of numbers is a mistaken one. They maintained that both official and voter should be qualified men and they saw to it that they were such. And look at the result; the ablest and best men were put forward. Every nation has superior, mediocre, and inferior men; the latter being often the most greedy for office. One of the tests of a system of government is which of these classes it brings to the political front. Judged by this, the old colonial and revolutionary system was far superior to the present one. It put in power and kept there, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, the Adamses, Jefferson, and a number of their subordinates of great superiority to men in corresponding places in the present days of manhood and female suffrage. By their fruits you may know them. It is probable that the female suffragists firmly believe that their shallow platform ranters are superior to anything that earth can show; but with that exception no one will pretend that the present day methods have produced or can produce for the public service the equal of that revolutionary stock. Indeed we have more reason than some of us fully realize to be thankful that the governing class of that time in this country were men of substance; for the opposition to the proposed Federal Constitution in 1788 was very strong among the poorer classes; and it is considered certain by those who have looked carefully into the matter that had that instrument been at that time submitted to a vote based on manhood suffrage it would have been overwhelmingly defeated. This is not to be wondered at, since lack of experience in dealing with any but the simplest matters left those people incapable of understanding the provisions of the constitution or of realizing its beneficent import. One can hardly imagine what that defeat would have cost to mankind; the deplorable results of the indefinite postponement of the American Union with all its blessings of peace and prosperity, and the perpetuation here on this continent of the tariffs, strifes, petty wars and tyrannies of Europe and South America. When one tries to imagine the world without the United States of America as a beneficent enlightening force, one is appalled at the bare possibility that such a calamity might have been allowed to fall upon the world; and yet it was possible had it not been that Hamilton, Washington and the other leaders in that business were eighteenth century statesmen, staunch, efficient and determined, and not a bunch of twentieth century cowardly, spineless, brainless, heartless politicians, the product of machine and boss rule, such as would probably be in charge of any similar movement in the present year of grace, 1920.

CHAPTER III

THE SUFFRAGE IS NOT A NATURAL RIGHT BUT A FUNCTION OF GOVERNMENT AND MAY THEREFORE PROPERLY BE RESTRICTED TO THOSE COMPETENT TO EXERCISE IT.

Those citizens who think that they have or anybody has or can have a natural right to vote are absolutely mistaken. There is a general impression that such a right exists, created partly by the twaddlers who write on politics for schools and colleges; but it is a false one, and it is seriously misleading, because it negatives in advance all effort to elevate the standard of the electorate by excluding the notoriously unfit from its membership. The citizen votes not in the exercise of a right or a privilege, but in performance of a governmental function, involving the execution of a trust which should be confined to those competent to exercise it.

Political voting for candidates for office is part of the process of the creation of a governing power, and it is itself an act, part and function of government; by it the voter declares his judgment as well as proposes agents or representatives to enact and to execute the law. Society therefore has a right to regulate its exercise, and to see that it is entrusted into proper and competent hands. This theory of the right of Society or the State to control and limit the suffrage has been adopted not only by European nations in dealing with inferior races but also by ourselves at home. We do not for instance permit the Chinese to vote; we exclude from the suffrage youths under twenty-one years of age and unnaturalized aliens, notwithstanding that they may pay large amounts in taxes and be perfectly honorable and well meaning members of the community; also tramps, paupers and the insane. So the policy of excluding the colored race from full participation in the government of the country is thoroughly established in the United States. Negroes are not actually allowed to vote except where they are in a safe minority. In the States of California, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington and Wyoming there is a nominal educational qualification by which at least a pretence has been made of excluding ignorant whites from the franchise, and which has been effectively used in some of these States to exclude thousands of colored voters. The suffrage has been denied to non-taxpaying Indians in all parts of the United States, notwithstanding that many of them may be decent and intelligent people. One Northern State, New Hampshire, and eleven Southern States make payment of a poll tax a necessary prerequisite to voting. A certain period of preliminary residence is prescribed in all the States. In thirty-eight states a previous registration is required; and this provision every year disfranchises thousands of travelling salesmen and others. Thirty-two States exclude women from all or specified elections, and though the expediency of this exclusion has been seriously challenged, the right to enact it is unquestioned by most people.

Thus it will be seen that in the American polity the principle is practically well recognized that voting is not a natural right but a function of government which may properly be restricted, either to property holders as in fact it was by our ancestors restricted, or to any other class as the State may ordain. There is however, reason to believe that the general public has not reflected enough on the subject to assimilate or even to accept this proposition. The American masses take most of their so-called opinions ready made, and as far as any popular theory upon the subject or conception thereof is to be found among them, it is apparently a vague loose notion of a natural equality among men; an understanding that it is part of the original American tradition that every man has an equal natural right to take part in government or at least to “express himself” by his vote. We have seen in the last chapter that the original American tradition is just to the contrary, and demands a substantial property qualification for all voters. In a subsequent chapter it will appear how that original American tradition was foolishly and thoughtlessly abandoned, when manhood suffrage and the spoils system were together foisted upon us in the time of Andrew Jackson.

As already stated, an examination of the libraries does not disclose any strong authority or well reasoned argument in favor of the practice of giving a vote to every adult man or woman. The doctrine of the natural right to vote which was first practised by the French radicals of the eighteenth century appears to have been accepted as a piece of popular sentimentality; apparently it has not been adopted by any great thinker or writer. Those writers who favor it are generally superficialists, and are content to refer to it vaguely as a step in the progress of the age without any close examination of its merits. As for the theories of natural equality between men, and of the right to vote as a means of self expression neither of them will stand a moment’s serious reflection. No equality of any kind whatsoever exists or ever can exist between men. It is impossible even to imagine a tolerable existence under the crushing weight of the monotony of equality. Along with variety would perish love, hope and joy; ambition, the great source of initiative and the most powerful stimulus to effort would be destroyed; life would lose its picturesqueness, and instead of a bright running stream it would become a stagnant pool. Equality means death; its domain is the cemetery. The champions of manhood suffrage therefore will have to look elsewhere for its justification than in an assertion of an equality which cannot exist.

But we will be told that there is an “equality of rights.” Here is another absurd phrase, which as generally applied is false or meaningless. By equality of rights people generally refer to personal rights such as the right to life, to personal liberty, etc. But there is no point of resemblance, no analogy even, between the character of such a right and of the asserted right to suffrage. The latter is a claim to share with others, and therefore acquired and artificial. The right of a man to his life, however, is not one in which others can share; and all natural rights are of the same general character, absolute, strictly personal and exclusive. The claim to vote rests on an entirely different basis from such; it is social, and involves others and the rights of others, it is a claim to govern; it vitally affects every one else and therefore no man can assert it without the others being consulted, since to do so would infringe upon their social rights. No such right can possibly be an original or natural right; for natural rights are of course common to all men; and the absurdity of every man having the natural right to impose his will upon another man is manifest. To say that there exists a natural right common to all men involving power over others, or that one man has a natural right to interfere with the actions of others, or of a society formed of others, or a natural right whose exercise by some would deprive other men of their own similar rights is nonsense; since these last would have the same power over the first and the result would be chaos. Such a proposition involves a complete contradiction of itself, and an impossibility.

Society and political organizations are artificially created, and all rights under them are artificially acquired. The result of the exercise of some power, or founded upon an agreement of some kind, express or implied, they are in the nature of gifts or functions conferred by society upon the individual. Of this character is the voting franchise. There can be no natural right to the control of society or even to take part in society against its will, both of which as social and legal, not natural rights, are asserted and employed by every voter. The only natural right that a man can have towards society is to escape from it altogether to a place not occupied by other men.

These considerations dispose of the sentimental twaddle uttered sometimes by shallow magazine writers and unsophisticated college professors that every man has a natural right to what they call “political self expression.” Self expression by political voting always involves in some way the exercise of power over others; and no one can have a natural right to such power.

The above reasoning applies of course to the exercise of the voting power where it affects the property of others as well as where it directly affects only the person. No man can have a natural right to dispose of another’s property or any part of it by voting or otherwise. To talk of a natural right to vote away another man’s property is downright nonsense. Imagine a small independent island inhabited by one hundred families each with property honestly acquired. Would an immigrant body of five hundred have a natural right by a vote to confiscate this property? The proposition is monstrous, yet it is all implied in the theory of a natural right to vote.

Our Courts and Judges have never held suffrage to be a natural right, and it has never been treated as such in our legislation. Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States, says: “The granting of the franchise has always been regarded in the practice of nations as a matter of expediency and not as an inherent right.” And Judge Cooley: “Suffrage cannot be the natural right of the individual because it does not exist for the benefit of the individual but for the benefit of the State itself.” (Principles of Constitutional Law, p. 249.) So on our statute books voting is not treated as a natural right, nor is the citizen mass considered as the supreme power in the state; but the constitution and functions of the electorate are created and determined by the legislative body, or under its direction, and its capacity is fixed by law and derived from the law just as truly as that of any other body exercising political powers in the government.

If suffrage were a natural right, the voter might exercise it to please himself or solely for his own interest. But nobody pretends that this is the case. It is conceded that the function of the voter is not to gratify himself nor to practise experiments, nor to express his own personal ideas, nor primarily nor mainly to foster his own interests or those of his class, but to propose the best men and measures for the country at large. He is not to seek direct personal benefit or gain by his vote but is expected thereby to contribute his opinion, his wisdom, his experience, to the promotion of the general welfare. He is not to vote for a judge because he expects him to decide a lawsuit in his favor; nor for a congressman because he hopes that he will help to secure him a contract or a pension or a tariff rate favorable to his business; but it is his duty to vote for judges and congressmen who will decide and legislate justly, that is, with due regard for all. This makes it clear that the franchise is not a gift of nature, but a trust or function created by society for its own high purposes; that the voter comes to the polls to take part in that function not as a master but as a servant of the State in obedience to her mandate; and must be clad with such qualifications as she prescribes. The voters are not masters or rulers as is so often erroneously said, they are merely called upon to designate the real rulers and masters of the land. When the citizen approaches the polls on election day he there finds in operation a formidable electoral machine which he is sometimes told is a contrivance whose object is to establish the rule of the people. But this is a superficial understanding of the matter; the people cannot possibly rule themselves; the existence of any rule whatever implies rulers as well as those ruled over; to talk of the people ruling is nonsense, or at best a mere figure of speech to indicate that they have a choice of rulers. Here as elsewhere there is and must be a government ruling by force; here as elsewhere that government is a human machine wielding or intended to wield irresistible power over its subjects, and constantly menacing the disobedient with deprivation of property, liberty and life. Our elective system is really a means for sustaining this tremendous apparatus and of keeping it in operation and effective. It is that all powerful governmental organism and not the people which rules the country. Every American is just as much under the control of the authority thus created as the subject of any ruler whatever. Freedom in the sense of liberty to the individual to thwart or neglect governmental authority is not within the American scheme. This is why resident foreigners, deceived by the silly newspaper cant about the “people” ruling are frequently surprised to find themselves more restricted in some respects than they were in their own native monarchical countries.

This view of the matter whereby it appears that an election is the first step in the process of the creation of a government requires the manhood suffrage question to be presented in a different form from the usual one which is, “Has a man as such a right to vote?” He has no such inherent or natural right, and the real question is whether he is of the proper material for use in the first process of democratic government making. It follows too that the burden is on the would-be voter to show that he is fit for that purpose. The mere fact that he is a dweller in the land cannot possibly confer upon him the right to inject poor material into the government-making process, any more than one of a number interested in a cider press would have the right to insist on putting decayed apples into the hopper.

But even if there was a natural right to vote Society would still have the power to regulate its exercise and to establish conditions thereof. Certainly Society would have the right to prohibit that exercise and it would be its duty to do so when the same would operate against the welfare of the community at large; or against the welfare of every other person in it except the voter himself; or even against the welfare of the majority of the citizens of the community. A man can no more have a natural right to injure his neighbor by his vote than by any other means; and just as he is free to use his personal liberty only to the extent to which his actions are harmless or beneficial to the community, so as a matter of natural right he should be only free to vote or legislate and take part in government affairs, great or small, to the extent to which his acts in that capacity are harmless or beneficial. In any aspect of the matter therefore Society has the right to limit the suffrage to such as are likely to exercise it for the benefit of the commonwealth.

Thus by disposing of the vague idea of a natural right to vote, the way is cleared for a consideration of the proper qualifications which Society should require from voters. That there are men and classes of men naturally incapable of exercising the judgment necessary to cast a ballot helpful to the community is known to all of us. Says Amiel in his Journal:

“The pretension that every man has the necessary qualities of a citizen simply because he was born twenty-one years ago, is as much as to say that labor, merit, virtue, character and experience are to count for nothing.”

Not only has the country the right to exclude incapables from the suffrage, but it is the patriotic duty of the good citizen to place a voluntary limitation on himself, and to refrain altogether from voting where through ignorance of the candidates or subject matter his vote cannot be intelligently cast. For, just as the voter is peremptorily called upon in casting his vote to disregard entirely his own interest and pleasure, and even to vote contrary to his interests and prejudices for the benefit of his country, so surely he can also be required in the public interest to surrender his privilege of voting, to remain altogether silent, and to allow the choice of men and measures to be made by his more intelligent neighbors. And it further follows, that where the ignorant voter knowingly and wilfully insists upon expressing his own opinion or prejudice at the polls in opposition to the judgment of another better qualified than he, his act is immoral and unpatriotic; and equally immoral and unpatriotic is the conduct of the legislator, writer or voter who knowingly countenances or assists in the enfranchisement of a class of people who are incompetent to vote on the questions to be presented to them, or to select the proper candidates for public offices.

Voting at a political election being an act of government, the proper test of the voter is that of capacity to govern. As Bagehot puts it:—

“Fitness to govern must depend on the community to be governed and on the merits of other persons who may be capable of governing that community. A savage chief may be capable of governing a savage tribe. He may have the right of governing it, for he may be the sole person capable of so doing: but he would have no right to govern England. Whatever may be your capacity for rule, you have no right to obtain the opportunity of exercising it by dethroning a person who is more capable; you are wronging the community if you do, if you are depriving it of a better government than that which you can give to it.... The true principle is, that every person has a right to so much political power as he can exercise, without impeding any other person who would more fitly exercise such power.... Any such measure for enfranchising the lower orders as would overpower and consequently disfranchise the higher should be resisted on the ground of abstract right; you are proposing to take power from those who have the superior capacity, and to rest it in those who have but an inferior capacity or in many cases no capacity at all.” (Parliamentary Reform, 1859.)

In calling to its counsels at the polls such citizens as the State may deem competent for that purpose, it is practically impossible to select individuals; but it is quite possible to designate certain classes to whom suffrage may or may not be permitted; and when these classes are open to receive accessions indefinitely upon conditions useful to the State and attainable by all, there is nothing in the whole transaction inimical to the best democracy, or of which complaint can be made on the ground of monopoly or injustice. The acquisition and judicious management of a reasonable amount of property are terms and conditions of just this character and experience has amply shown the necessity for their imposition in the interests of society.

To summarize this branch of the subject. The primary object of an ideal election is not to ascertain where lies the interest or to gratify the caprices or whims of individuals, but to continue and sustain, and if necessary to create the government of the country. The exercise of this function is in itself an act of government or in aid of government, and the privilege of participation therein is an acquired, a conferred authority or function, not a natural right, and should be bestowed solely for merit or capacity to be exercised in trust for the common benefit. It is the patriotic duty of all incapable, unprepared or unqualified citizens voluntarily to refrain from taking part in this function; and it is the right and duty of the State by appropriate legislation to exclude peremptorily therefrom all classes of men incapable of its proper exercise, and for this purpose to establish racial, property, educational, or other appropriate qualifications.

On the theory that the State itself may be supposed to have been originally inaugurated and its operations originally sanctioned by the suffrages of all its citizens as their creature and agent, a curious question has been raised by some writers, namely, on what ground the State can exclude from the constituent franchise a part, though ever so small, of its original creators or principals. Such writers have, however, overlooked the existence of a power higher and mightier than that of the State or of its inhabitants at any particular period; a power which is the real source of the authority of the State. This power is “Society,” and its relation to the subject of the franchise will be dealt with in the next chapter.

CHAPTER IV

THE STATE AS THE DEPUTY OF SOCIETY POSSESSES THE JUST POWER OF ORDAINING FRANCHISE QUALIFICATIONS

Yes, for it was not Zeus who gave them forth,
Nor Justice, dwelling with the gods below,
Who traced these laws for all the sons of men;
The unwritten laws of God that know no change,
They are not of today nor yesterday,
But live forever, nor can man assign,
When first they sprang to being.
(Sophocles: “Antigone”)

At the end of the last chapter was suggested a question which troubles many superficial but honest and sympathetic thinkers. How, say they, can a democratic State justly refuse the suffrage to any citizen? They see plainly the policy of such refusal in many cases; they realize the mischief of permitting discordant voices to mar the democracy of the cultivated choir of good citizenship, the danger of allowing rotten timbers in the structure of the ship of State; they wish for some superior power to silence the one or remove the other; but they cannot see that such a power exists. Can a man or any group of men in a democracy justly assume such superiority of judgment as the exercise of this power would imply? If the State be as democracy asserts, the creature, the agent of the people, how can it by refusing the franchise to any of its citizens rightfully deprive them of a voice in its deliberations? Is not such refusal in its essence a tyranny and a negation of democracy? No doubt some such feeling as above expressed, though perhaps more vaguely formulated, actuated many who, with more or less reluctance made the blunder of acquiescing in the establishment of white manhood suffrage in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and also many of those who forty years later made the still greater blunder of accepting negro suffrage.

An answer to all these scruples familiar to all sound lawyers and quite sufficient for most intelligent men, is found in the law of self preservation. Before any law or rule of a state or community can be enacted, the state or community must have existence, and the enactment implies that the state’s continuance is to be secured. The original law of its being must first be satisfied, and must ever remain superior to all other of its enactments. It is sufficient reason therefore for the suppression of the votes of the unworthy that they are prejudicial to the State, and the State in its struggle for existence may rightfully suppress them.

But there is still another complete answer to the questions above propounded, and one perhaps still more satisfying to some minds than that of the primal right of self preservation; and that is, that there does exist a higher warrant for the disfranchisement of unworthy voters, and for all suffrage regulations, conditions and qualifications than the mere precept of the State. This higher sanction is that which authorized men in the beginning to found the commonwealth in which we live. What was that authority? Imagine if you please the foundation of a state. By what rightful authority did the first white settlers in Virginia or Massachusetts establish a government and proceed by its agency to deal with the property, lives and liberty of the members of their little company and of all new comers? By what rightful authority did they for instance execute the first malefactor? The answer is, by the mandate of Society. For even if it be true, as many insist, that the State has no original power, but is a mere created agency of limited authority, it yet does not follow that that authority has no basis but the fiat of the electorate and no justification beyond certain election certificates and its own statutes. There is a mighty mundane power in constant operation amongst men, one far superior and anterior to the State; a part indeed or manifestation of that almighty persistent and mysterious force which maketh for righteousness in this world; a potentate with whose operations we are all perfectly familiar and whom we may here, for want of a better word, designate by the name “Society.” The idea intended here to be represented by that word is somewhat difficult of definition. We may approximately indicate our meaning by defining “Society” as Humanity self organized for the promotion of civilization; but we can best identify her by noting some of her operations and attributes. She finds her original source as all true authority must in the Eternal Verities, and her sovereignty is mysterious in its deepest origin as is everything vital in the universe. Her forms and methods are fine and subtle beyond description. She is not the State; she antedates the State; she was the source of the authority of our first American ancestors to establish governments and to execute justice, and was the founder and is the mistress and director of all states and governments that ever were or ever will be. Nor can she be identified with the population or body of citizenship of the nation or community; she is something which remains outside and independent of all these; possessing a separate organism, life and growth of her own. Society is the Overlord, the vital essence of which the State is the manifestation; she is to the State what the spirit is to the human body; and for her the State exists and was created. Her membership is not confined to any class, but includes all those who voluntarily submit to her decrees. These she organizes in a way peculiar to herself, assigning to them rights, obligations, influence and power without regard to laws or statutes except those of her own original promulgation, disregarding entirely the shallow and false modern notion of equality between men. For just as no two individuals have exactly the same appearance or physical power, so in the whole social domain there are no two members who are in every respect or indeed in any respect the social equals of each other. Her membership has its own traditions, rules and standards which she promulgates by silent and subtle methods, often finally compelling their formal adoption by the State. Her mandates are more powerful than those of governments; and all political decrees are subordinate to the constitutions of civilized society. Her honors and powers are often more valued than those of the State, and are conferred not as in our politics at the command of mere numbers, as prizes for oratory or rewards for intrigue, but in consideration of social aptitudes and energies; so that in any given community you will find the social development of each individual to correspond with his or her compliance with the rules and mandates of Society.

Thus is constituted what may be called the Social Commonwealth, imperium in imperio, composed of all those who take up the cause of civilization; a number which does not necessarily represent a majority or any definite proportion of the people of the community, but does represent and include the community’s mental and moral force and civilizing influence. Its leaders or captains are comparatively few; they are readily distinguishable as active champions of social progress; spending time and effort for the cause; zealous in the establishment of public order; in advancing public health, in creating and maintaining beauty in public and private life; in forwarding enterprises of religion, art, education, science and benevolence; in promoting civilizing institutions, such as libraries, hospitals, churches; also operas, music, dancing and all the refinements of life; in creating parks and flower gardens, in beautifying cities and villages; in elevating the standards of dress, manners and private living, and in furthering all civilizing and humanizing influences. Following these leaders at greater or less social distance are the great body of the membership of the Social Commonwealth composed of all classes of rich and poor and between, the great mass of the socially loyal, themselves originating and initiating nothing of social importance, but faithfully keeping up year by year with the steadily advancing procession; directing their children in the way of sweetness and light, that so they may reach the places where the social leaders stood a generation before. So that a basis for the establishment of a qualified electorate and for the exclusion therefrom of the disqualified is found in the primary fact of the existence of two classes of humanity, the one including the socially fit, the socially organized, the members of the Social Commonwealth; and the others the non-members of that organization. As already stated, not all the inhabitants of our borders are the lieges of Society; there is the considerable body of the unsocial; comprising those cold and indifferent to the social cause, the socially worthless, the nondescript and the rabble; also the anti-social; the openly hostile, the criminals and malefactors of the community. The existence of these two divisions of men, the social and the unsocial, justifies and requires the State to distinguish between them in granting the voting franchise. The primary test of voting capacity is and must be allegiance to the social commonwealth.

Society was born when humanity emerged from savagery, and will endure while civilization continues in the world. The Jacobins of France of 1790, like the present Bolsheviki of Russia, got possession of the State machinery and turning it against Society swore to destroy her forever; after a dozen years of strife she emerged from the conflict stronger than before. She accompanied the first immigrants to Massachusetts Bay, to Jamestown and to every other American settlement. There she was on the very first day and ever after with her customs, traditions, beliefs, classes, prejudices, dress, manners and standards of conduct, ready to enforce them in America with the same despotic authority exercised long before in the England of the Plantagenets, Normans, Saxons and Romans. And then and there in the fields and forests of the new world, Society established governments as her agents to enforce her mandates, imposing her will upon the States which she thus created. Since then, by Society has the onward course of the nation at all times been directed. Governments may change; peace may follow war; the monarchy may give way to a republic or dictatorship and that to a democracy, or vice versa; laws may be enacted and repealed, constitutions established and abolished, but the rule of the Social Commonwealth goes on forever.

It is to Society, the champion of civilization, that the enlightened civilized man considers his allegiance is ultimately due, and only to the State as the agent of Society. A law to be valid and enforceable must conform to social mandates. The late James C. Carter, a noted New York lawyer, is the author of a philosophical treatise on Law in which he clearly establishes this principle. He says (p. 120); “That to which we give the name of Law always has been, still is, and will forever continue to be Custom.” But customs are merely the ordinances of Society. When the State forgets its duty to Society it does so at its peril; let it enact for example, a Fugitive Slave Law and the Emersons, Thoreaus, Beechers and other social leaders refuse obedience and defy the State. In like manner, wars are justified when decreed by Society against unsocial sovereign states in the interests of civilization, as for instance, some of the modern wars of civilized powers against Turkey. Consider the actual political power and operations of Society. Compare the statute books of today with those of fifty or a hundred years ago and note the changes she has dictated in that period. History is sad and bloody with the story of the efforts of the State to modify the religious practices of men; they have all failed; but Society does not fail to change these practices year by year. Commerce, manufactures, transportation, the arts, education, customs, manners, all human institutions are in turn created and destroyed by Society, and law and the State are powerless to defeat permanently her decrees, while their own are only valid when stamped with her approval.

Here then we find in the inherent powers of Society, in powers which are God-given or Nature-given if you prefer, an answer to the scruples of those who seek a source of authority in the State to protect its life by preserving its own machinery. It is this supreme potentate acting by and through the State that we invoke to settle the structure of the State on the foundations of capacity and intelligence.

Consider now the interest of Society in the proper regulation of the suffrage as the source and foundation of the State. Not alone is she vitally interested in the maintenance of the present civilizing forces which are sending us forward day by day on the march to higher planes of life; but also in preserving the material and intellectual inheritance of all the ages. This inheritance includes all the accumulated acquisitions of the civilized human race; its property, treasures, achievements and traditions; all the products of its mental and physical endeavor, the fruits of its art, literature, science and industry. These constitute the body of civilization in which its soul and mind are preserved, nourished and kept alive; they form a social trust for ourselves and for posterity. “Civilization,” said Burke, is “a triple contract between the noble dead, the “living and the unborn.” And by that contract we are forbidden to live or to legislate so as to cheat those who come after.

Society’s process for the preservation of our intellectual inheritance is called education; her method for the preservation of our material inheritance is the institution of private property rights. Humanity, property and education combined, constitute the material endowment of society, wherewith she works for the advancement of the human race, or as otherwise expressed for the promotion of civilization. Obviously she is justified in adopting all possible precautions to guard and preserve this precious deposit committed to her charge, nor can it be doubted that she should carefully select its custodians and overseers. Equally plain is it that since the civilization of the nation is and has been produced entirely by the thrifty members of the Social Commonwealth and remains in their guardianship, they and they alone, as constituting the class who have produced and cared for the same should be continued in its care as the representatives of Society and in her behalf; and should be authorized to formulate the laws and measures which make for its protection and advancement. To this end and purpose Society is constantly endeavoring. A volume could be written illustrating the exercise of her steady and mighty influence in placing the scepter in the hands of her chosen ones. Rome was the ancient conservator of civilization, and to her was given sway for centuries; England of all modern nations has been most devoted to preserving the best of the product of the generations as they pass on, and she and her race were made foremost among nations and peoples. Look at the community where you live and you will easily note how Society bestows influence, authority, distinction and esteem upon her own workers, the builders and creators of civilization and upon their children, and passes contemptuously by the unsocial and anti-social. You cannot fail to observe her disdain of the mere talkers and wasters and how she brings to naught the works and cheap distinctions of a manhood suffrage constituency. To the silly French Jacobin scheme of ascertaining the best by counting noses, Society opposes her own never failing system of continuous study, training and selection. She does not favor, on the contrary, she discourages the absurd and impossible purpose of modern liberalism of giving expression to ignorant individual wills with all their clashing selfishness and brutality. She does not favor the politician’s purpose of perpetuating moral feebleness and incapacity, nor of forwarding the foolish aims and ideas of the weak and the worthless. She is far from giving office or power to such or from even hearkening to their prattle and humbug. She has much to overcome. The power that makes for righteousness is not permitted to operate without the opposition of fools and charlatans; and it is within Society’s function to master this opposition, which she invariably does in the end. She constantly refuses to descend as manhood suffrage does to the level of the ignoble; on the contrary when they presume to oppose her in her momentous business she undertakes either to conquer them by reclamation or to see that they are hanged or otherwise removed out of her implacable path.

It is the crime of manhood suffrage that it constantly endeavors to oppose and thwart this all beneficent social tendency; that it pushes to the front and seeks to give power in civic affairs to the non-social and anti-social classes, consisting of men devoid of the instinct for the creation and preservation of the useful and the beautiful, and who cannot safely be trusted as their guardians. In so doing it perverts the State from its proper functions. The State has no rightful authority over men’s lives except as the deputy of Society, and its every legitimate act should and must be for the promotion of beneficial social objects. It is its clear duty as such deputy to place political control in the hands of those gifted with distinguished social attributes; and an essential and the first step in that direction is the discarding of manhood suffrage and all similar unnatural political stupidities which inevitably lead to Jacobinism, Bolshevism, anarchy, ruin and death.

CHAPTER V

THE CAPACITY TO CREATE AND PRESERVE PRIVATE PROPERTY IS THE PROPER TEST AND PROOF OF QUALIFICATION FOR ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP IN AN ADVANCED DEMOCRACY.

There are two principal arguments in favor of a property qualification for voters; one the argument of fitness, that the propertied class are the most capable of passing upon affairs of state; the other the argument of justice, that the business of government principally concerns property, namely, the belongings and the productions of propertied people. Both these arguments assume that what is wanted is an honest and efficient government, not a corrupt and inefficient one.

The demand for a property qualification for voters is predicated upon the theory that there is an obligation on the part of the citizens of a state to contribute towards its material prosperity; a duty of such importance that the state cannot flourish in the face of its neglect; that the class of men who are incapable of creating and preserving property is unfitted to form part of the electorate; and that neither native birth nor the taking of a naturalization oath is sufficient qualification for the duties and function of active citizenship in a genuine democracy. There may be valid excuses such as ill health, ignorance, etc., for the individual’s failure to perform his part in the work of civilization, but such excuses do not disprove the existence of the obligation in others, but rather emphasize it. It is not well fulfilled when the citizen only produces enough from day to day for his immediate support, or wastes the surplus, leaving the burden upon others to provide for the time of old age, sickness and incapacity. Its proper performance therefore involves the exercise of the virtue known as prudence, a systematic saving or accumulation of property for the joint benefit of the individual and the State. The practice of this virtue is incumbent not merely upon good citizens but upon every citizen and tends to qualify for active citizenship. Like cleanliness, it is not a superfluous but an essential virtue. The neglect of home cleanliness may breed a pestilence; the neglect of home prudence may unfairly burden the community; such neglect is an act of disloyalty to Society and to the State, and is a proof of such civic incapacity and indifference as to require in any well regulated political community, the placing of the offender in the class of passive citizens who are not entitled to the suffrage. His country’s protection is a sufficient reward for one of that class for merely taking the trouble to be born in her domain. Let him be content to be what Sieyes called a passive citizen till he has proved his qualification to be an active one. If there be, which is doubtful, exceptional cases of men such that neither they nor their forefathers were actually able to earn more than enough to support them, or having earned it to take care of it, and yet are capable of directing affairs of state they are so few as to be negligible. Such men need the spur of disfranchisement to make them go ahead, and meantime the thrifty can legislate for them. Constitutional legislation can only deal with groups, or classes, and cannot properly attempt to provide for such extraordinary exceptions.

Democracy is an ideal form of government for none but a highly capable people; a representative government of a worthless or a politically indifferent constituency will be a worthless government, the more representative the more worthless. Witness Hayti, San Domingo, Mexico, and certain Central American or South American democracies. These are totally incapable because their electorates are totally incapable, and in this country the democracy, though not a complete failure, is a partial failure, namely, to the extent that its life is vitiated by an inferior constituency. There are thousands of men, not to speak of women, on our voting list who are as incompetent to exercise the functions of voters as the inferior orders of Mexico or Hayti. Many of the improvident classes have minds absolutely childish and utterly incapable of foresight or serious reflection. At an election held in Ashton in England under the recently extended suffrage system, a theatrical man named de Freece was elected to Parliament not because of his political views, but because of the amusing performances of his wife, a noted vaudeville actress. We quote from a newspaper:

“Vesta Tilley, the most popular male impersonator London has known in decades, took a prominent part in the campaign. Her ‘Picadilly Johnnie with the little glass eye’ and other popular songs, it was admitted played a far greater part in the election than her husband’s political views.” We may be sure it was the unpropertied and non-tax-paying rabble whose vote went in favor of “Picadilly Johnnie.” Lord Bryce’s description of the indifferent or incompetent British voters applies well enough to our own:

“Though they possess political power, and are better pleased to have it, they do not really care about it—that is to say, politics occupy no appreciable space in their thoughts and interests. Some of them vote at elections because they consider themselves to belong to a party, or fancy that on a given occasion they have more to expect from the one party than from the other; or because they are brought up on election day by some one who can influence them.... Others will not take the trouble to go to the polls.... Many have not even political prepossessions, and will stare or smile when asked to which party they belong. They count for little except at elections, and then chiefly as instruments to be used by others. So far as the formation or exercise of opinion goes, they may be left out of sight.” (American Commonwealth, Vol. II, pp. 319-20.)

It is impossible to weigh merits so nicely as to exclude all of this class; it is impracticable to disfranchise a man for frivolity even though he be so frivolous that his vote depends on the song of an actress, but when that frivolity gives itself concrete expression such as incapacity to acquire or retain property, it may and should be excluded from our political life.

In considering the proposition that the creation and preservation of property is a primary duty of citizenship, we must realize the absolute essentiality of accumulated property in the scheme of civilization. We all know the value of money, but we are generally loath to formally acknowledge its importance. There is a prevalent affectation of indifference towards it, assumed by vain fools as a mark of superiority, and by spendthrift fools to excuse their stupid poverty. This affectation is encouraged by the writers of the popular magazines and newspapers and other cheap literature which is published for the masses, who are supposed to be poor and to like to be flattered by being told that their poverty, instead of being a mark of inferiority as it really is, is a sign of superior goodness. This sort of writing misleads many thoughtless people to their detriment. Civilization can only be expressed in terms of property; and property is its token, its manifestation, its note, its unfailing indication, its hall mark. There is not a quality, a circumstance, a feature of civilization which is not represented in some way by property, either by being due to property, derived from property, originating in property, or sustained by property. The desire for property is an attribute of man; denied to the lower animals and dormant in savages, such as the North American Indians who when discovered, had no permanent property, not even a year’s provisions to live on in times of scarcity, and had created nothing for posterity. A pauperized people is on the direct road to barbarism. On the other hand, the higher the grade of civilization the greater the wealth of the country; so that to attain the very highest grade we must pass far beyond the period of aggregation of merely useful things and reach a point of great luxury, where men can spend lives and millions in the service of the high arts and refinements of life, and where in an atmosphere enriched by the artistic emanations of centuries, are produced operas costing $10,000 a day, and palaces and cathedrals at an expenditure of the time of generations of men and of hundreds of millions of dollars in money.

It is often said that the main object of our government should be to preserve our political institutions. This is too short-sighted a view. These institutions are not an ultimate object; they are only the means of promoting and protecting civilization, the which ought to be the principal and ultimate object of the State. This object is to be accomplished by encouraging the citizens in the voluntary production of life’s primal material necessities: food, clothing, and shelter; in the conservation of the accumulated treasures of the past, and by favoring the addition thereto of new contributions by this generation, so that the total may be passed on intact to posterity. Any government is a failure which neglects that duty; which if accomplished, and a proper attention given to education, virtue and morality will take care of themselves. In the play of “Major Barbara,” one of Bernard Shaw’s best and most instructive comedies, the distinguished author shows the difficulty, the almost impossibility of the reclamation by mere admonition of a man degraded by pauperism; but that good wages regularly paid will do the job. Now, our present voting system not only fails to encourage thrift, saving or accumulation of wealth, or to promote civilization, but has a contrary tendency, because it grants equality and power in government to the non-producer, to the shiftless, lazy and vicious consumers and wasters of property.

In order to fairly realize the gross injustice of granting governmental powers to the thriftless classes, we must clearly visualize and properly estimate the results of the lives and labors of the thrifty and industrious. We must not fail to fully understand that frugality is the creator and preserver of the State. We have recently heard frequent appeals to save and help win the German war; because to save is to contribute to a fund out of which can be paid the expenses of the government. But the common fund of the nation’s wealth in peace as well as in war exists and is drawn upon by every member of the community, and it is just as true in peace as in war that the citizen who saves money is thus contributing to that common fund and thereby to the strength and well-being of the commonwealth, and this, whether he deposit his savings in a bank where it is loaned out to aid industry and create employment, or whether he invests it in commerce or manufactures, directly or indirectly, by the purchase of stocks or securities in industrial or commercial concerns. The mere fact of saving, that is to say of producing more than he consumes makes him at once a contributor to this general fund; and therefore any man who leaves behind him upon his death money or property which he accumulated in his lifetime has been a benefactor to the community, in the same sense as if he had contributed a great book or a valuable invention to the world, or had spent his life in benevolent work. To save or to make money and then to usefully spend it in one’s lifetime, reaping the tribute of the world’s appreciation is well enough; but to frugally save for a long lifetime in order to do good or give pleasure to others after one’s eyes are closed in death is surely nobler still. All the useful productions of man in the United States, the dwellings, stores, shops, ships, roads, railroads, telegraphs and telephones; the schools, colleges, hospitals and church edifices; all the accumulated fuel and stores of manufactured and other goods, are the fruits of individual saving. The greatness and power of the United States depend upon the collected savings of generations gone by, and evidence their industry, prudence and self-denial. The class of Americans who have wasted their surplus or who have produced no more than they earned; those devil-may-care fellows so admired by sentimentalists, have been of no permanent material value to the country; they are of the parasite class; they have no part in the creation of its civilization which is represented by its acquisitions and depends upon them for its continuance. Many of these people give themselves airs of virtue and generosity because they are not “mean” as they say; they even brag that they spend as they go, and for that attitude toward life expect and sometimes receive applause from others as great fools as themselves. Their ignorance prevents their perceiving their own selfishness; and their vanity hides from them a suspicion of their worthlessness. The late Andrew Carnegie is credited with many sayings wise and foolish; of the latter one of the oftenest quoted is that it is a disgrace to die rich. No proverb more mistaken and mischievous was ever uttered. For since no man, however much he made but might have squandered it all, therefore to die rich implies some prudence and self denial, and usually means that the departed left the world better off than he found it. The only anti-social rich are the land grabbers. All who have become capitalists by trade, production or invention, or by efforts in aid thereof, are public benefactors.

Here let us stop to pay a well-earned tribute to the past and present rank and file of the hard-working money savers of our country, above all to those of the past; to such of the departed ones and of the old superannuated fathers and mothers still feebly lingering among us, as have lovingly toiled and scraped and saved to leave something to their children and their descendants. They are and have been among the best the world produces, those honest, prudent, thrifty, self-denying Americans, those brave old progenitors of ours, whose honest toil and stinting and close bargaining for generations past built up the wealth which makes so many of us comfortable and which enabled America to give Germany her solar plexus blow. May their memories be dear to their descendants and be honored by all of us forever.

We hear much these days of “class consciousness”; of that feeling of solidarity among the working classes which inclines the mechanic or operative to feel the needs of his fellow workers and to act with a view to their benefit, and this is well; but a little guiding thought is never amiss in such matters, and will surely lead to a conclusion favorable to a property qualification for voters. First, the workers should remember that all good workmen are interested in the creation and preservation of capital. Their class consciousness should align them on this question with those who produce and save. They should realize that immense numbers of workingmen have savings bank accounts and other property and are therefore in the capitalistic class. Most of them have hopes and aspirations for still greater wealth, for in the United States and in other civilized countries where the ancient struggle for personal and religious liberty is over, the chief modern aspiration of all workers is to create and preserve property, and thus to enjoy to the utmost the security and happiness which come with civilization and are expressed in terms of property. They should also understand that all capital is in a fund which is accessible to all, and that their best contribution to the welfare of their brothers would be the increase of this fund by their own wise thrift and saving. The savings bank is a great creator and preserver of property, and operates by a process which is vital to the existence of the unpropertied working man to an extent which he often fails to realize till the destruction of stored up capital by Bolsheviki methods brings him to starvation’s verge. And while the property actually owned by the working man is usually much less in dollar value than that of almost any single capitalistic employer of labor, or business men generally, yet its actual importance to him is as great or greater; and then the use by the working man of property not his own but accumulated by society, and its necessity to his existence is usually almost as great and may be practically greater than that of the rich man. The latter for instance may be an invalid or of sedentary habits, making but little direct use of mechanical forces; while the working man in question may be constantly and necessarily using machinery, railroads, and other transportation facilities, etc., in his daily employment to such a degree as to be absolutely dependent on them for his existence. In the case of another worker his direct personal use of food, clothing, furniture, household goods, books, etc., may be actually greater than that of his wealthy but more secluded or abstemious neighbor. Such a one whether or not he realizes it, is vitally interested in the preservation and maintenance of the property of others through the use of which he obtains his livelihood, or on which his comfort and happiness depend, and therefore that government should be so organized as to protect that property.

As the thrift of the worker is the root of our material prosperity, so is the thrift of the rich its flower and choicest fruit. What would America be, what would Europe be without the savings of the well-to-do, accumulated from generation to generation, and here now at our command and for our use manifested not only in railroads, ships, canals, banks and all the buildings and equipments of commerce and industry, but also in fine mansions, in elegant furniture, in beautiful lawns and gardens, in churches, cathedrals, hospitals, universities and museums? From out the ranks of the opulent and thrifty classes, and especially of those of them who have scorned waste, extravagance, dissipation and vulgar display, came the leaders in the social army, the noble pioneers of taste and beauty. We hear much canting laudation of the frontier pioneers, a rough and coarse set mostly, of whom such as did their part deserve the credit. But far more excellent and admirable are those to whose zeal, enthusiastic taste and noble self-denial we owe most of the preserved and accumulated treasures of the earth in architecture, painting, sculpture and ornamentation. In every age, in every generation they appear on the scene, little bands of modest amateurs, devoting time, patience and money to rescuing these treasures from destruction, and to fostering, instructing and creating public taste for created beauty. They seek and teach the best in life, leisure, refinement and loveliness; they introduce noble and graceful fashions in dress, manners and deportment and set fine examples to the world. The public museums and opera are endowed by their benefactions; they are the patrons of the best music, the purest drama, and the most inspiring architecture. And not merely to the cultivated very rich who are able to do so much, but also to the refined of the more modest middle class is our gratitude due for their leadership in this same direction. We see their tasteful comfortable houses dotting the landscape; their good sidewalks, shady street trees, gardens and orchards delight the wayfarer. In improving the public taste in the choice of furniture, or book bindings, of music and other things they are constantly helping along our civilization and forwarding the interests of the Social Commonwealth. They train their children so that they often become still more tasteful than their parents; they set an example of decent living to the poorer classes; they beautify the land; they give the rest of us something to aspire to. As we pass through a handsome well-kept American village let us give a thought of gratitude to the folk of all degrees of well-to-do, most of them now dead and gone, who planted and built well, who dressed, talked and lived like gentlemen and ladies; who improved the life and manners of their time and left the world better housed, better mannered and better looking than they found it. Of such is the history of the nation’s progress. Like the great artists and authors, they each contributed an offering to civilization; they left something of value behind them to make them remembered, were it only a little well-built and well-designed house for someone to occupy after their departure. Though their names are never in the mouths of platform ranters, they are among the true patriots of America.

The manhood suffrage doctrine fails to recognize the vital political difference heretofore referred to, originally pointed out by Sieyes, that exists between the two classes of citizens; the one the faithful members of the social commonwealth; the progressive workers, loyal and active in the promotion of civilization and in sustaining the state; and who because of such civic activity, are accounted worthy of the suffrage; the other the non-socials; the drones; the neutrals or disloyal and therefore ineligible for political functions of any sort; non-producers, shirkers, wasters, and destroyers. Sieyes, who was a statesman, publicist and member of the French National Assembly in 1792, recognized the existence of these two clearly separated classes of citizens, and, by a statute proposed by him and subsequently enacted, all Frenchmen were divided accordingly into active citizens (citoyens actifs), having the right to vote and hold office, and passive citizens (citoyens passifs), who are excluded from both these privileges. It is not just or fair that these latter, who are always behind the chariot of progress, pulling backward and being carried or dragged along, impeding the march of the race, should compel the progressive workers, the real active citizens of the country, to expend a large part of their efforts in overcoming their resistance.

Consider also the gross injustice and folly of inviting a large class who have contributed nothing to the treasury of civilization to share in its management and control, even permitting them to mismanage, misuse and waste it. “That the tax eaters should not have absolute control over the taxes to be expended by the tax payers would appear to be entirely axiomatic truth in political philosophy.... That this suffrage is a spear as well as a shield is a fact which many writers on suffrage leave out of sight.” (Sterne, Const. History, p. 270.) Those who made this country what it is are the thrifty workers, the successful business men. Now, is it asking too much to demand that the destiny of the country should be placed in their hands? Is it fair that government should be put under the control of the wasteful and the foolish, that they may burden it with debt, and bond their thrifty fellow citizens and all future generations to pay off the obligations thus imposed upon the nation?

A purely sentimental and therefore very popular argument against property qualification is that the rights and claims of humanity are separate from and superior to those of property. This statement has really nothing to do with the case, since it is not proposed to exclude humanity from the polls, but merely to select for admission thereto a superior and more representative class. It is said by these sentimentalists that the rights of man are absolute and transcendent and must first be satisfied, while those of property are inferior and may be disregarded. This is on the absurd assumption that civilized man and his property are separable and distinct forces; and that a conception of civilized man without property is possible. And so we are assailed with the catch phrase, popular with penny papers and platform ranters: “Man is superior to property.” This, like most catch phrases, is found, when examined, to be rather empty. Man is superior to property just as the head is superior to the stomach, as the fruit of the tree is superior to the roots. But when the stomach is neglected the head dies; when the root is not nourished the fruit perishes; the only way to preserve the head is to feed the stomach; the only way to produce the fruit is to fertilize the roots. Man in a state of civilization cannot exist without property; if you sacrifice his property you sacrifice him. The imagined comparison of the value of human life in its entirety with human property in the aggregate is absurd, it presents an impossible choice. How, for instance, can you balance the value of human life against that of the New York Croton Aqueduct system which conserves the life of millions? Carry out the notion that all property should be sacrificed rather than that one man should perish, and you have the spectacle of a people without food, fire, clothes, shelter or medicines, whereof not merely the one sacred man, but the whole lot would perish forthwith. On the other hand, a comparison of the value of individual life with that of individual property depends on the character of the life and of the property referred to. Whatever we may pretend we do not practically treat the life of a human being as such, say for instance, that of a savage, as equivalent in value to the highest forms of property such as our great works of art, our great public works, or the material equipment necessary to our subsistence. It is probable that the aggregate of the accumulated treasures of wealth and art which existed in Europe at the time of the discovery of America was worth to civilization and to the moral and religious universe a million times more than all the savage human life on the North American continent at that time. To the existence of this accumulation of property and this organized society not only the well-to-do, but the most ignorant man, be he ever so poor, owes whatever enjoyment he has in his daily life. The little naked child is brought into the world by the aid of physicians and nurses who have been trained in great institutions established and sustained by organized civilized society through the medium of property accumulated by the men of years and generations past; and from his birth on, the child, whatever be his station, is clothed, fed, sheltered and nourished in sickness and in health; trained, educated, watched over and preserved as long as he lives, by the aid of institutions which were created and are maintained by Society through the accumulation, the use and the application of property. The poorest individual is more indebted to property accumulations and is more dependent upon them in time of need than the richest, because it is only from them that charities and benevolences of all kinds, outdoor relief, free hospitals, dispensaries, schools, colleges and churches can be maintained. Even Robinson Crusoe on his island would have perished had it not been for the use of such products of high civilization as he was able to save from the wreck.

Following the argument founded on the justice of the case comes that based upon the superior fitness of members of the propertied class for the function of voters. This fitness is derived from the training which is incidental to the acquisition and care of property in the struggle for life. The property qualification for voters is in effect an educational test, and far more effective than that of mere book learning, which so often turns out to be quite insufficient as a preparation for the conduct of human affairs, and is equally insufficient for the understanding of politics. There is an education in life as well as in books and the education in life is the more valuable of the two. To have acquired and preserved property implies not only ordinary school or theoretical education, but business training as well, and as government is mostly a business affair a property qualification presupposes a special preparatory course of training of the kind which is the best of all for the voter, and in addition such civic and political virtues as are necessary to success in business. “In politics, as elsewhere, only that which costs is valued. The industrial virtues imply self-denial, which prepares their possessors to wield political power; but pauperism raises a presumption of unfitness to share in political power. The person who cannot support himself has no moral claim to rule one who can.” (Lalor’s Cyclopedia; Suffrage.)

It is the actual contact with, and the masterful control of the things of life that fits a man to give judgment on their force and value; and his success therein is the test of his own capacity. In a very able and instructive article on “The Basic Problem of Democracy” in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1919, written by Walter Lipman, he dwells upon the proposition heretofore generally overlooked that what is most needed in our political system is some means of giving the electorate true information as to facts. He says:

“The cardinal fact always is the loss of contact with objective information. Public as well as private reason depends upon it. Not what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is so beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our existence. And a society which lives at secondhand will commit incredible follies and countenance inconceivable brutalities if that contact is intermittent and untrustworthy. Demagoguery is a parasite that flourishes where discrimination fails, and only those who are at grips with things themselves are impervious to it. For, in the last analysis, the demagogue, whether of the Right or the Left, is, consciously or unconsciously, an undetected liar.”

For the purposes of this argument the point here is that not only the mere rabble but the unpropertied and impecunious from any cause, either from lack of interest or of capacity, live at secondhand in their relations to politics and are not themselves at “grips with things” and therefore easily become the prey of the demagogue, the undetected liar.

The practical value of the property qualification test though not properly appreciated has not been entirely overlooked by previous writers. For example, Bagehot:

“Property indeed is a very imperfect test of intelligence; but it is some test. If it has been inherited it guarantees education; if acquired it guarantees ability; either way it assures us of something. In all countries where anything has prevailed short of manhood suffrage, the principal limitation has been founded on criteria derived from property. And it is very important to observe that there is a special appropriateness in this selection; property has not only a certain connection with general intelligence, but it has a peculiar connection with political intelligence. It is a great guide to a good judgment to have much to lose by a bad judgment; generally speaking, the welfare of the country will be most dear to those who are well off there.” (Parliamentary Reform, p. 320.)

Bagehot, like most political writers and speakers, while recognizing the educative value to the voter of property ownership and management, fails to give sufficient importance to the effect of a business training. He elsewhere dwells upon the beneficial influence upon the voter of leisure, of education, of lofty pursuits, of cultivated society; but he overlooks the obvious fact that all good government is a business enterprise, and that a business training is essential to the instruction of the electorate. This oversight was perhaps natural for two reasons: one the traditionary contempt in which all business was formerly held in England, and by the literary class everywhere. Dickens, for example, had not the least idea of business capacity or of the intelligent life of the business world of London, and Thackeray very little. Their business men are of varying degrees of stupidity. The fact is that the world of art and letters has always been over conceited and inclined on insufficient evidence to believe itself superior in intelligence to the world of work and business. The other reason for the oversight referred to is that in former days business training was far less thorough and extended than it has since become and is today.

Whatever may have been the case in days gone by, in our own time a business training is necessary to enable a voter to make a proper choice of candidates for public office. The only way to secure competent officials is through the demand of the electorate for capable men and by close and intelligent scrutiny of the candidates. But this implies capacity on the part of the voters to pass on the candidates’ qualifications and to make a proper choice; in other words an electorate of trained minds, good judgment and knowledge of men. The voter needs not only understanding of the merits of public controversies and knowledge of the published records of candidates for office but also judgment to weigh their qualities. And just as some knowledge of music is necessary to enable a listener to judge of the ability of a musician, so the voter who is to choose men for office having proper business qualifications should himself have had fundamental business training and experience, and an educated sense of honesty and justice in such matters.

From all which it appears that business and the professions furnish a school of which all voters should be graduates. In this institution established by natural processes and everywhere in operation, citizens are being daily trained in prudence, foresight, self-denial, temperance, industry, frugality, and the capacity to reason. There is a continuous and automatic exclusion of the unfit. First the worthless, very stupid, defective, dishonest and lazy are eliminated. Either they refuse to enter, or from time to time as boys or young men they are rejected and discharged as incompetent; weeded out, and their places taken by the more competent. As years go on the more industrious, clear-headed, honest and frugal of these surpass the others and achieve success in proportion as they display those qualities, together with good judgment and farsightedness; while meantime they establish and maintain families, raise children and acquire more or less property, all the while gaining in training and experience in the affairs of life. They become members of business firms, employers, superintendents, business managers, etc. In agriculture they become successful farmers. In the professions they become known and established as reliable, and acquire and accumulate clients and patients, regular offices, books, equipment, furniture, together with some money or other property. In literature they write successful books. In teaching they become principals and college professors. There you have them, trained and graduated in the school of life’s affairs, the academy of evolution; a class of the fittest armed with Nature’s own credentials, certifying them to be of proper stuff from which to build a safe foundation for the democratic State, and thus has nature herself done the preparatory work of selecting material for an electorate by sifting out the inefficient, the non-social, the passive citizens; by separating and putting in plain sight the efficient members of the Social Commonwealth and stamping them with the seal of competency for active citizenship. So that a property qualification for voters appears upon a proper consideration to be fit, appropriate, practical, effective and in accordance with natural law.

Exceptions there probably are, instances of men of good parts and judgment who through misadventure have been reduced to such poverty that they would be debarred from voting under any fair property qualification rule. But the law cannot provide for such misfortunes any more than for unavoidable absence from the polls on election day. Such minor defaults will not affect the desired result, which is the production of a class of reliable voters, and not merely a few exceptional ones.

Not only property but the honest and intelligent desire for property should be represented in the councils of the State. This aspiration has been stigmatized by twaddlers as an “appetite”; but an appetite is a good thing; and essential to life. The desire for wealth is one of nature’s constructive forces and should be availed of by wise statesmen for the purpose of nation building. Nothing is more offensive to the intelligent thinking man than to hear hypocritical demagogic ranters denounce as “greed” the honest efforts of thrift to collect together a competence for old age, a provision for helpless children, or capital for a business enterprise. Politicians and the impudent followers of politicians, vile parasites on the body politic, scurvy knaves who have never earned an honest hundred dollars in their lives, make a trade of this kind of talk; preferring the business of flattering and cozening a constituency of wooden heads and uncontrolled emotions to earning a living honestly. The wish for property is a primal impulse like the love of life, the appetite for food and drink, and the desire for procreation; it is in the nature of every healthy man; the want of it is abnormal and detracts from capacity for constructive state work. Those who really lack it become in politics as dangerous as lunatics; they are dreamers, enthusiasts who ruin everything they control, such as were Robespierre and thousands of his followers. One would not trust one of these crackbrains to build a house, let alone a nation. In private life they are shiftless and burdensome on their friends and the public; in the lower classes they are often known as loafers or deadbeats; some of them become the “floaters” of politics, the cheap material for bandit political organizations. On the other hand this desire to create, to save, to preserve and to perpetuate useful and beautiful things, is a natural force which wise statesmen employ to the utmost in the service of the State; whose development they encourage in civics, in private life, in politics and in government, and which found in the character of the individual should be accorded its proper and legitimate, sane and steadying influence.

The possession of property is also a necessary qualification of a voter because it renders him pecuniarily independent. The voter in a democracy should be so situated as to be free from the need of yielding to the temptation of a bribe, either in the shape of cash or the salary attached to a small office. We pay judges large salaries, to lift them above the atmosphere of temptation. The voter is a judge, called upon to pass judgment upon the candidates whose names are on the ballot. That the verdict of the polls upon these candidates for office should be rendered by paupers, by men whose means do not enable them to vote with independence, is monstrous. The shelter of secrecy afforded by the Australian ballot is no answer to this objection. The purchased voter is corrupted before he enters the booth; his soul is degraded as soon as he resolves to take the bribe. Why should he be false to his bargain? Surely not for patriotism or virtue, for the act of betraying his purchaser would not cleanse him; it would only prove him doubly recreant. To say that the elector besides being venal will perhaps become a perjured traitor is a poor plea for his admission to the suffrage. And yet, the tendency of manhood suffrage being forever downward is towards pauper voting. A New York newspaper of March 5, 1919, recorded that Lady Astor, a candidate for Parliament in Plymouth, England, had just visited the almshouses there in making her canvass for votes. In the short time England has been afflicted with an approximation to universal suffrage, this much has been accomplished. If it be right, it should go on, and great England’s Parliament, renowned for six centuries as the mother of all free representative assemblies, should become a club of chattering women, sent there by paupers and vagabonds. America should face the other way. In its political life it has no need for women nor for flabby and inefficient men; it needs honesty, frugality, virile force, courage and efficiency; it needs a constructive and conservative spirit to replace the reckless and wasteful temper now so prevalent. The electorate should include only active citizens, only those who have made good; the governmental state should correspond to the social state, representing not only the working and thrifty people, but their works, their homes, their property and their civilization.

The democratic advance thus proposed is a movement onward and upward to better things. The manhood suffrage movement was downward. In the next and succeeding chapters the reader will find briefly sketched some account of that descending progress into and through the muck of ignorance and corruption for the past one hundred years.

CHAPTER VI

ORIGIN AND FIRST APPEARANCE OF MANHOOD SUFFRAGE AS PART OF THE FRENCH TERRORIST MACHINERY

The first national legislature to be elected by manhood suffrage without distinctions or qualifications was the notorious red radical French Convention which met at Paris, September 20th, 1792. It is that body which has the infamous celebrity of establishing and prosecuting the bloody tyranny known as the Terror, under which tens of thousands of innocent men and women of France were put to death because of their supposed political opinions. Though manhood suffrage may not be entirely and solely responsible for the excesses of the convention, yet it is safe to say that it helped create the machinery for the perpetration of the crimes and follies of the Terror; and that none of these excesses would have been committed by a body selected by a fairly qualified electorate. All that was good in the French Revolution was accomplished through a propertied electorate; and all that was worst was done under a manhood suffrage régime.

The French Revolution began in 1789 as a peaceable and rational reform movement. None of the writings of Rousseau which did so much to prepare the way for the great change had directly discussed the suffrage question. The French National Assembly which met in May, 1789, at Versailles, was a sane and dignified body, chosen by a qualified electorate, and there was in its deliberations no mention and in its membership probably no thought of universal suffrage.

There was never any necessity for physical violence or revolution in order to secure the attainment of all such political reforms as even from the most liberal standpoint were needed by France at that time. The government like all other governments of that day was ignorant of economic laws, and the people had suffered under inequalities in rank and privilege, and an antiquated and inadequate financial system; but the king and the nobility were pacifist, and in the main humanitarian and inclined to liberal measures. Within three months after the Assembly convened, the nobility in open meeting voluntarily surrendered their historic privileges. At that same session of 1789 the Assembly undertook a number of reforms and the re-establishment of France upon a firm constitutional and conservative basis with proper security for all classes. Had the revolutionary movement stopped there, and the better classes been permitted to carry out their intelligent schemes, France, under a constitutional monarchy, would have embarked upon a new career of prosperity, and the wars which have since devastated her would probably have been avoided. But the Radicals got the upper hand; on pretence of remedying the embarrassments arising from poor harvests and bad financiering they established universal suffrage and the rule of the rabble, which increased the miseries of the French people five fold, and speedily evolved the Terror and precipitated the ruin of the nation. A great many, perhaps most, of these radicals were men of little experience, governed by mere sentiment and passion; others, who ultimately became the working majority were men of low moral character and defective reasoning powers; lacking in principle; demagogues and adventurers; cranks and scoundrels, who, claiming to be the champions of an ideal democracy, found it to their advantage to spout balderdash with which to gain the applause of the ignorant and emotional masses. Their stupidities, antics, vagaries, thefts, and other minor rascalities and follies; their guillotinings, drownings, arsons, street slaughters and other butcheries and outrages; their confiscations and banishments are matters of history, and have to some extent been duplicated by the Bolsheviki rabble in Russia in our own day. To the tune of crazy cries for liberty and more liberty, they attacked property, vested rights, commerce, business, the church and the Christian religion, and plunged France into chaos. They murdered and outlawed her nobility and her priests, besides tens of thousands of innocent people who were neither priests nor nobles, including farmers, artisans, tradesmen, poets, artists and professional men, the best of the land. Under the first Republic, it is computed that a million French died of famine and hardship, the direct result of Radical legislation and Radical tyranny, and chargeable to a great extent to the operation of manhood suffrage. Nor is this the total record of their mischief. Their misdeeds produced a violent reaction which resulted in the placing on the French throne of Bonaparte, whose ambitions deluged Europe with blood. A generation later he was followed by another Bonaparte, equally a result (though less directly) of the Revolution; and he plunged France into a war with Germany, which in 1871 cost her the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and out of which the recent great war of 1914 was born.

France therefore has never yet recovered from the injuries she suffered at the hands of the red radicals in the first Revolution. She may thank universal suffrage and the extremists of that time not only for the depopulation and misery inflicted upon her by the so-called republic from 1789 to 1798, and by the Napoleonic wars from 1798 to 1815, but also for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, for four invasions of her soil, for her recent sufferings from 1914 to 1918 and her reduction from the first rank to the third among the powers of Europe. In short, she has paid one hundred and thirty years of torment for the privilege of listening to the rhodomontade and vaporings of crackbrains and demagogues. Let America take warning.

Right here seems to be a good place to make a cheerful contrast to the foregoing by comparing the radical French convention of 1792 with the conservative French Assembly of 1871. It was after Germany had triumphed over Napoleon III, that clay idol of the French populace; he was in exile, the empire was at an end, the army was destroyed, and France was without resources, credit, friends or prestige. She had to form a new government and try to re-establish herself as a nation, to raise five thousand millions of francs and to get the invader from her soil. The elections were had for a new National Assembly; the manhood of France went to the polls, but with sad and serious faces. All the frivolity and humbug of politics had disappeared. The masses were poor and hungry; the Germans were at Paris; the Commune was threatening the national existence. It was a time for the people to turn to the genuine patriots, the real leaders of men, the competent, the capable, the reliable. Did they go to the demagogues, the orators, the enthusiastic ranters, the ultra-radicals, the theorists, the politicians, the inspired blatherskites whose froth and flattery are so much to the taste of the populace? No, indeed. The fear of death being upon them, the masses bethought them seriously, and for once refrained from making fools of themselves at an election. The poorer classes, the peasants, the workingmen, turned eagerly and fearfully to the solid men among their neighbors for counsel and advice and followed it. Needless to say, the new Assembly was the most able, intelligent, honest and conservative legislature poor France had seen for many a day. It was composed of men of experience, property, education, integrity and reputation; men who were noted champions of society and of civilization. As soon as the world heard what France had done at her elections, the joyful word was passed along, “France is saved,” and saved she was from that day. Confidence was restored, the Commune was suppressed with a strong and vigorous hand; public and private credit was re-established; the Prussian enemy was paid off and his troops withdrawn; industry revived, plenty came again, and France once more took her place among the nations. It would be an insult to the reader’s intelligence to proceed to point the moral of this notable incident in the political history of the world.

The red radicals of the French revolution claimed to believe, and as they were a shallow lot, some of them probably did believe as the masses here believe today, that pure manhood suffrage is a development of the principle of equality. But they were fundamentally wrong, they were in conflict with nature’s laws, which cannot be trifled with. As equality of power or capacity does not exist in nature, all that can rightly be claimed in that direction is equality of opportunity, which includes recognition of the superior claims of merit and capacity, and therefore involves the divine principle of inequality of achievement. This the French radical revolutionary leaders failed to perceive. For instance, they objected to the old aristocratic régime because it was not founded on merit, and because its offices were allotted to influence without reference to qualifications; they wanted as they said “La carriere ouverte aux talents”; a career for talent, a very commendable object. But the operation of manhood suffrage is just the reverse of this; it denies the opportunity and the reward due to merit, to talent, to study, to diligence, to education. As far as possible it gives to ignorance and negligence the same weight and power as to intelligence and assiduity. To give power to electors unqualified by education or experience to overrule the wishes of the educated and experienced on political questions is to ignore merit and qualification, and that at the very foundation of government. But while the best thinkers of the French reform party at that time saw this plainly, the radical leaders overruled them, because what they wanted was a rabble constituency, since none other would give power to such a gang of fools and ruffians as they.

The world has made great progress in well-being in the last one hundred and thirty years, a progress due almost entirely to its inventors and discoverers and to the industry and frugality of its workers; and France has shared in that prosperity; but her miseries and misfortunes have also been great, and these were nearly all political, and due to one cause, the operation of manhood suffrage.

CHAPTER VII

IMPORTANT INFLUENCE OF FRENCH RED RADICALISM IN PROPAGATING THE MANHOOD SUFFRAGE DOCTRINE IN THE UNITED STATES.

The doctrine of manhood suffrage was imported to America from France in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and began to infect American politics some twenty years after the Independence, though its final triumph was delayed another score of years. To some of us it seems almost incredible that any honest man could avoid being strongly prejudiced against a political institution which had produced such horrible results as manhood suffrage in France, and it would probably today be but a poor recommendation of any political scheme to an intelligent man that it was adopted by the French Revolutionary Convention of 1792. But a century ago the masses in the United States were not thinkers, and were even more inclined to be carried away by emotional crazes than they are at present; no doubt the success of the American Revolution had turned many heads. It was a time when young gentlemen were much afflicted by morbid sentimentality; when ladies did not fail to faint on proper occasion; when American gentlemen fought duels because of sham sentiment or to sustain a sham honor; when blood-curdling novels were devoured with gusto; when Byron’s all-defying pirate heroes were the rage; when young clerks went about gloomily brooding in turned-down collars and imagining that the whole world consisted of oppressors and the oppressed. To such a romantic and superficial young America the platitudes and empty sentimentalities of the French Radicals made a stronger appeal than the plain common sense talk of the British Tories. Besides all this a large part of the American people at the close of the American Revolution in 1783 were deeply grateful to the French nation for its timely and effective assistance in the war for Independence. Without French aid, it was thought that the revolt might have failed, and of course they did not stop to reflect that Lafayette and Rochambeau were noblemen; that it was a French monarchy and not a republic which had been so helpful to America. And so when a few years later France became a Republic, largely owing, it was thought, to American influence and example, there was great enthusiasm in many American hearts for France and everything French, including the new political theories of the Rights of Man, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Even the Terrorists for a time had their sympathizers here, some of whom probably were unaware of the facts as the newspaper accounts of doings abroad were meagre and distorted. The French partisans here even believed and circulated slanders against the noble and spotless Washington. It is easy to believe interesting lies. Did not our fellow Americans in the South work themselves up in 1860 to a silly belief that they were or were about to be plundered and oppressed by the perfectly harmless rest of us? Did not the English and French make themselves believe and declare in January, 1865, that the Southern States were on the eve of final victory when they were obviously tottering to a final fall? Have not we Americans to the last deluded man of us gone about for the past century believing and swearing that we won a signal triumph in the war of 1812 and refusing to credit our own officers and historians to the contrary? How many Americans failed to go wrong in their sympathies at the beginning of the last Russian revolution? The American radicals therefore probably chose to believe that Marat, Robespierre, Danton and Co., instead of being humbugs, blackguards and miscreants, were wise and honest republicans, whose massacres of harmless prisoners and other similar performances were excusable ebullitions of patriotic zeal. When for instance the news of the defeat of Brunswick by Dumouriez came to America in December, 1792, there were great rejoicings among them. There were dinners, suppers, speeches, cannon firing and processions in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities. The inns and taverns were filled with those whose heads were turned by liquor and enthusiasm; some wearing liberty caps and cockades; all singing, shouting and drinking toasts. On December 27th in New York City the whole day was given up to public rejoicing, including a celebration by the Tammany Society.

The instinct of imitation is strong, especially among children, savages and the lower classes. We had been imitating the British; we now took to imitating the French. Everything French was popular; became the rage. When the French Minister Genet, representing the Terrorist government, arrived here in April, 1793, he landed at Charleston, whence he proceeded to Philadelphia, the seat of the Federal Government. He really represented a band of blood-stained scoundrels who had usurped power in France, who had just guillotined the king and most of whom were for sale, yet he was hailed by a faction here as a hero and the emissary of sages and patriots. There were receptions, escorts, processions and banquets, where “Citizen” Genet was glorified, our own government was denounced, and an American reign of terror threatened. At some of the banquets a red liberty cap was displayed; half drunken young American radicals danced about the table; the guillotine was toasted, and capitalists were threatened with death. At that time England, outraged and disgusted by the insults and bloody rapine of the French Terrorist government, had gone to war with France; our howling mobs therefore yelled for war with England, and mouthing politicians who had never smelt gunpowder pretended to be eager to fight Great Britain, although we had neither army, navy, transports nor money. Two American privateers were actually fitted out to sail under French colors and prey on English commerce in defiance of the law and of the Federal Government.

Meantime the American friends and enemies of the French Revolution taunted and vilified each other in newspapers, pamphlets, and otherwise publicly and privately. Some of the American featherheads, in imitation of the antics of the French Republicans, addressed each other as “citizen” and “citess,” instead of Mr. and Mrs. this and that. Serious and sensible folk, including President Washington, looked askance at these follies, and by many they were treated with the ridicule they deserved. The rabble thereupon after their nature and in further imitation of the French democracy which they so admired, revenged themselves by flinging coarse insults at their unsympathetic fellow citizens, including Washington himself. In about three years’ time this wild craze passed away; but French influence continued. French dancing schools, fencing schools, dishes, names, expressions, customs, dress, music, and books were popular; French newspapers were published in all important cities, and some permanent progress was made by French Revolutionary influence and ideas.

We may here note that after the death of Robespierre and the overthrow of the Terror and on September 23rd, 1795, after a test of over three years, manhood suffrage was abolished in France almost without a protest. It was unanimously recognized that it was responsible for the Terror, for the disorder and insecurity of life and property which had prevailed since its adoption and for the complete financial and economic prostration of France, whose people were starving by thousands for need of that social order and confidence without which modern civilization is impossible. In the official report on the subject presented to the National Convention in 1795, and which was adopted after full discussion, we read these words: “We ought to be governed by the best; the best are the most highly educated, and those most interested in the maintenance of the laws. Now with very few exceptions you will only find such men among those who, possessing a freehold, are attached to the country which contains it, the laws which protect it, and the tranquillity which preserves it, and who owe to their property and their affluence the education which has fitted them to discuss with justice and understanding the advantages and disadvantages of the laws which determine the fate of their country.... A country governed by freeholders is in a social condition; a country in which the non-proprietors govern is in a state of nature.” Unfortunately the mischief that had been already done by the radicals has never been quite cured, and France has suffered many things since then; but that is another story. The extreme French Radicals did not for all this abandon their attachment to their revolutionary ideas; their influence in the United States continued to be very considerable, and the rapid spread of the new-fangled doctrine of manhood suffrage in the young American states after the death of Washington had removed his conservative influence was no doubt largely due to the effect of the plausible ranting and twaddle of the French Revolutionists and their followers.

Everything has to be paid for in this world, and for the help of France in the fight for independence, the United States had something to pay in the corruption, waste and deterioration caused by the adoption of the silly theory of the French radicals that in governmental matters one man’s judgment and intent are as good as another’s, those of the ignorant and thriftless equal to those of the frugal, industrious and well-informed.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SAFEGUARD OF A PROPERTY QUALIFICATION FOR VOTERS WAS DISCARDED BY A GENERATION OF AMERICANS WHO DID NOT REALIZE ITS VALUE OR THE DANGERS ATTENDANT UPON UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE

The circumstances of the adoption of the system of manhood suffrage by state after state a century ago are not such as to justify us of today in according much authority to their determination. The movement was one of weakness, ignorance and degeneracy, not part of an effort to further achieve the highest ideals of republican theories, but a reactionary yielding to cheap, selfish and opportunist politics. It was successful because the mass of the American people lacked both the experience and the foresight necessary to enable them to realize the probably fatal result of the proposed change.

We have already noted that following the establishment of the Federal Government in 1789, though the upper and educated classes, especially in the older American states, did not display much enthusiasm for French radical political ideas, and though Washington and the propertied class were openly hostile to them, they were acclaimed by the working classes, the poor farmers, the immigrants, and many of the romantic youths of the country; and were partly adopted by Jefferson and such others as like him were somewhat under French influence. We may add to the influences favoring manhood suffrage in the old and populous states that of the resident foreigners, which was considerable. It would be a mistake to suppose that at this early period there had been little immigration to this country. The fact is that the proportion of immigrants to the whole population was then probably greater than at any subsequent time; the foreign element at the time of the independence, including British and Irish, Germans, Dutch, Swedes and French, probably amounting to about one-third of the entire population. Another class of people who unquestioningly accepted the doctrine of manhood suffrage was that of the frontiersmen or pioneer western settlers. It is the fashion in these days to hail every political novelty as an “advance,” and accordingly the twaddlers, including writers of that ilk, tell us unctuously that the adoption of manhood suffrage was part of the “advance” of civilization. The truth is, however, that it was not the fruit of an improved civilization, but was first adopted when and where the population was coarse, rough and unlettered. In the new and sparsely settled states, New Hampshire, Vermont, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio, the principle of manhood suffrage was accepted almost as a matter of course and without any serious discussion. In those states there was at that time an approximation to practical equality among the inhabitants both in property and intelligence, the standard of both being low; political problems were simple and primitive; and an equal share in government to all men seemed natural and reasonable. There was but little property except land which was plenty and cheap; farming was the principal occupation; and the farmer was confined to the home market there being no railroads to carry his produce to distant places. The great differences between rich and poor existing in older communities were not present; none of the conditions which render manhood suffrage so objectionable in large cities were found in these new states. When Georgia adopted a low qualification in 1789 her population was less than two to the square mile; when Vermont entered the Union she had less than ten to the square mile; Kentucky had two; Ohio one; Tennessee two. There must have seemed little reason in attempting to create distinctions in rude and primitive communities where none actually existed.

Another consideration operating to lower the suffrage was the competition among the new states to get settlers on any terms. Nearly all of those who had land in the newer states had more than they could use and were not only very anxious to sell some of it, but to get new neighbors on any terms, since each new arrival measurably increased the value of their holdings. One of the baits to induce immigration was the right to vote and hold office offered to all new comers. Even in our own day a number of western states permit aliens to vote as an inducement to settle in their limits, and we have had in the last few years the curious spectacle of unnaturalized and presumably hostile Germans voting at elections. The right to vote was highly valued in those early communities, where fortunes were not easily made, and where political preferment was much sought after as the most available road to distinction. To close that avenue to ambition was to discourage new settlers. It was therefore inevitable that such of the original thirteen as were sparsely settled states with populations composed partly of frontiersmen, and also all the new states as they came in one by one, should be willing to waive property qualifications for voters. And thus it was that in 1789 Georgia reduced her suffrage qualification to a small annual tax requirement; that in 1791 Vermont and in 1792 Kentucky came into the Union under manhood suffrage constitutions; that in 1792 New Hampshire adopted manhood suffrage; that in 1803 Ohio entered with a minimum tax qualification and that Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818 and Missouri in 1820 were admitted as manhood suffrage states, while some of the others, such as Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, merely prescribed tax qualifications which were far from onerous.

In the older states the advance of the manhood suffrage movement was aided by the influences already referred to; by the French Revolutionary party, including many foreigners; the city laboring classes, the thriftless and discontented, and the restless horde of theorists, dreamers, penny-a-liners, political adventurers, demagogues, agitators, radicals of every stripe, and many of that numerous class who had more facility in talking than in thinking. There is even yet among people of small intelligence a widespread belief in the miraculous efficiency of voting; and that belief is no doubt accountable for some of the eagerness with which the suffrage was demanded by superficial men who thought to better their condition by politics, and who, though plainly lacking in efficiency, unable even to get together a few hundred dollars in property to qualify them as voters, nevertheless rated high their own capacity to decide problems of state. We may add to this as helping the movement the plausibility to shallow minds of the assertion that all men are equal; and the prestige given it by its being quite unnecessarily put by Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence. Another cause which has been said to have contributed, was the severe financial panic of 1819 which brought widespread distress and consequent discontent with things as they were. Why not try a change? is an argument which has more or less success at every election. Then too the American easy good nature and hospitality of character must have helped along; that softness which makes many dislike to refuse a boon which will not cost anything in cash or its equivalent. It must have seemed to many men easy and pleasant to vote to allow their neighbors to vote, especially when to a dull man the reasons to the contrary were not altogether obvious.

Nor is it altogether strange that even in New York and Massachusetts few except the best trained minds had any real understanding of the dangers of letting in the ignorant and the thriftless classes to a voice in government. The American people had no experience of a political machine or of demagogues in power, and to most of them the operation of government seemed comparatively simple and within easy comprehension. Even in the old states the population was mostly rural; there were no railroads or telegraphs, comparatively little machinery, and none operated by steam. The property of the country consisted of houses, lands, farms, cattle and sheep; living was very plain, and the expenses of government comparatively small. Life was not then the complicated affair that it is at present, specialization was rare, efficiency in any branch of business was not near so difficult to achieve as it has since become. Under the election system then in practice, and following the old colonial traditions then still extant, the candidates for office had usually been men of distinction whose reputations were well known in the community, and who were personally known at least by sight and speech to most of the voters. The people had had no real experience of government by election in large constituencies. There were few large cities, the largest in 1820 being New York, with a population of 125,000, while Philadelphia had but 65,000 and Boston 45,000 population. Probably it was comparatively safe in most urban communities to leave the street door unguarded at night, a practice scarcely recommendable in New York or Chicago in these times. Their governors had previously either been sent from England or chosen by their state legislatures, and their high state officials had been appointed by the crown, the governor, the proprietor or the legislature. Their only real experience with the suffrage had been in small local elections, parishes, boroughs and towns, where the prizes of office were small and everyone knew his neighbor. Most of the voters were substantial American farmers and tradesmen, who anticipated as the result of the granting of manhood suffrage nothing worse than that the roll of new voters would include their own sons, the village schoolmaster, together with a few poor artisans and farm hands who had no class prejudices, who could be depended upon to vote with their well-to-do neighbors, and whose numbers were not sufficient to seriously affect election results.

To the extent to which the manhood suffrage movement was conscious of its own tendencies, it was a revolt led by political adventurers against government by the intelligence of the country, and above all and beyond all the forces operating in furtherance of the movement for manhood suffrage in the older states was the new influence of the politicians and political office seekers, who by 1820 began, though in a comparatively small way, to appear as a real political power in the land. Though many of our ancestors early distrusted and later learned to hate and despise the politicians, the people have never organized to oppose them and in the beginning failed to realize the insidious growth of their sway. The politicians then as now clamored for an extended electorate, the more ignorant, simple, emotional and easily influenced the better. They welcomed the uninstructed male vote of that day for the same reason that they welcome the still more ignorant female vote of this day. The ears of the masses were open to them because they could talk and bellow the political cant and jargon in which the rabble delight. Then as now they wanted all the offices made elective; suffrage for everybody, even aliens, and especially the ignorant and shiftless; and they kept up their efforts in the old states until the bars were let down, and every man had a vote.

Most of the old populous states began the change by lowering the qualification, changing it from the actual ownership of property to the payment of a tax, usually a small one, sometimes merely nominal. Pennsylvania, a state tainted with French radical sympathies, had already reduced the qualification to the payment of a state or county tax; this standard was adopted by Delaware in 1792. In 1809 Maryland adopted manhood suffrage. In 1810 South Carolina and in 1819 Connecticut reduced the qualification to an almost nominal tax rate. In 1829 Virginia reduced the property requirement and finally abolished it in 1850. New Jersey held out till 1844.

The great battles, however, and those which finally decided the controversy in the United States were fought in Massachusetts and in New York in 1820 and 1821, though in both states the success of the manhood suffrage party was a foregone conclusion before the final test was made. The situation was much the same as it has since been in relation to woman suffrage. As long as woman suffrage partisans had no votes anywhere the politicians gave them but scant courtesy. Even after they gained one or two states they were not much considered. But as soon as they had four or five states to their credit the politicians began to flock to their standard; the weaker and more unscrupulous going over first. The reason is plain. Every politician of note has his eye on the presidency either for himself or for his leader and his party. Under our system where the presidential vote is by states a single state may turn the election, and a woman suffrage state as well as another. Mr. Wilson for instance and Mr. Roosevelt, though on opposite sides on everything else, were united in patriotism, in burning desire for office and in devotion to democracy. Of course they both became champions of woman suffrage just as soon as a few states had been captured by the women and also of course their party followers took their cue accordingly. So it undoubtedly was in 1820. By that time there were nine new states west of the Alleghany Mountains. When it was seen that in all these new states manhood suffrage was in vogue, no presidential possibility dared oppose manhood suffrage anywhere, nor dared his followers differ from him on this point. It was a rush to get on the band wagon. And why should the professional politicians oppose a measure so obviously in their interest as a degradation of the ballot? Naturally therefore, in the New York Constitutional Convention of 1821 we had Martin Van Buren, a Jackson politician, leading the battle for extension of the suffrage and carrying all before him.

One naturally turns for enlightenment on the merits of the question to the records giving the arguments used pro and con in the discussions on the suffrage extension propositions of that time, but they are more interesting than important, because the debaters lacked the light of modern experience. Our political bosses and machines had not yet arrived, and America had then no immense populations of millions accustomed to live on daily wages, lacking the slightest knowledge of the principles or practical operation of finance, banking, trade and commerce; ignorant of the very elements of political economy, and yet ready to vote on all these matters under the direction of demagogues, themselves in the employ of bosses and machines. There were then no such divisions of classes as now; no large criminal and pauper population; no masses of foreigners herded together in tenement house life and ignorant of our problems and conditions. Our ancestors of a century ago were not gifted with imagination or prevision sufficient to enable them to foresee the enormous future immigration from Europe; the factory and tenement house systems; the vote market; the absolute and corrupt oligarchy of politicians, the political ring, machine and boss. Had they been gifted with this foresight it is safe to say that instead of lowering the suffrage qualifications they would have put the bars up so high that the disgraceful record of American politics for the last eighty years would never have been made.

In Massachusetts the Convention included as members, John Adams, Webster, Judge Joseph Story of the United States Supreme Court, Samuel Hoar and Josiah Quincy. The importance of protecting property interests had been recognized in that state ever since long prior to the Revolution, both by a suffrage qualification and in a provision whereby membership in the State Senate was apportioned according to the total taxes paid in each senatorial district. This system was continued by the Convention of 1820 but was subsequently abolished. Its sole importance was in its recognition of a principle; as a barrier against the rising tide of suffrage extension it was useless. The suffrage previously limited to owners of a moderate amount of property, real or personal, was by this Convention extended to all male citizens having paid any state or county tax. Adams, Webster and Story voted and spoke against the extension, but the writer has not seen a report of their arguments. Such of the speeches on the subject as are reported are not illuminative. They do not go deeply into the matter; those in favor of an extension have the tone of the perfunctory advocacy of a majority assured of success, those in opposition that of a hopeless protest. In favor of the extension it was argued that there was a popular demand for it; that it had been enacted in other states; that the existing Massachusetts qualification was in practice merely nominal; that it was easily evaded by perjury and sham transfers; that the sentiment of patriotism does not depend upon the possession of property; that the right to vote goes with the levy of a tax and that on principle all subject to even a poll tax were entitled to vote, and were unjustly degraded when the right was denied them. In opposition it was argued that property is the foundation of the social state; that there is no natural right to vote, and that the question is one of expediency; that the property qualification was necessary as a moral force and a check on demagoguery; that it encouraged industry, prudence and economy, was a protection against waste, elevated the standard of civil institutions and gave dignity and character to voter and candidate; that very few beside vagabonds were actually excluded from the polls, and while the qualification required was attainable by every efficient man, yet the principle was an important one and should be retained in the Constitution even though its enforcement had been somewhat lax and ineffective. The majority both in the Convention and at the polls in Massachusetts was decisive in favor of the proposed extension.

In New York the Convention was practically committed to the new measure before it met. The State Assembly had previously reported in its favor solely on the ground that the property qualification excluded many of the militia; referring probably to that large body of young militiamen who were too young to have acquired property. The report said, “On that part of our Constitution which relates to the qualification of voters at election, your committee have to remark that although its provisions when applied to the State of New York may be salutary and necessary it excludes from a participation in the choice of the principal officers of our government, that part of the population on which in case of war you are dependent for protection, viz., the most efficient part of the militia of our state.” This meaningless “straddle” is very suggestive of Van Buren. As an argument for manhood suffrage it is worthless. It is of course absurd to say that because a man has served or may serve in the militia he should therefore be intrusted with any part of the functions of government irrespective of his lack of other qualifications. Were the argument good it would require the extension of the vote to boys of eighteen and upwards, and would call in question the right to vote of any man incompetent to bear arms because of age or infirmity. The business of government is one thing, and the business of fighting in the field is another and very different thing. But this flimsy argument was capable of being used in an emotional manner and no doubt was so employed in the Convention with considerable effect; and though some of the militia had certainly failed to cover themselves with glory in the war of 1812, and many commands had done nothing but parade, no politician cared to offend them or even to appear to have done so. Another so-called argument was that of the Convention Committee on the Elective Franchise which handed in a report in favor of the change, containing the meaningless assertion that property distinctions were of British origin, but that here all interests are identical. The true theory that voting is the exercise of a governmental function was not suggested by the Committee.

Manhood suffrage was opposed in the New York Convention by three of our ablest jurists, Judges Spencer and Platt of the Supreme Court and Chancellor Kent, the learned author of the Commentaries on American Law and one of the most eminent lawyers of the world. Judge Platt truly said that the “elective privilege is neither a right nor a franchise, but is more properly speaking an office. A citizen has no more right to claim the privilege of voting than of being elected. The office of voting must be considered in the light of a public trust, and the electors are public functionaries, who have certain duties to perform for the benefit of the whole community.” Chancellor Kent strongly and forcibly said “I cannot but think that considerate men who have studied the history of republics or are read in lessons of experience, must look with concern upon our apparent disposition to vibrate from a well balanced government to the extremes of the democratic doctrines.” Of the principle of universal suffrage he said that it “has been regarded with terror by the wise men of every age, because in every European republic, ancient and modern, in which it has been tried, it has terminated disastrously and been productive of corruption, injustice, violence and tyranny.... The tendency of universal suffrage is to jeopardize the rights of property and the principle of liberty.”

The vote in the convention in favor of the extension was 100 to 19. The people of the State subsequently approved it by a substantial vote. The majority in New York City favoring it was 4608. On March 4th, 1822, the Legislature took the oath under the revised Constitution. Flags were displayed, church bells rung, there were salutes of cannon and an illumination in New York City. Some slight vestiges of the property qualification still remained after the adoption of the Constitution of 1822 but they were abolished in New York State in 1826 by a vote of 104,900 to 3901.

Although the action of New York in 1821 following Massachusetts in 1820 practically insured the triumph of manhood suffrage in the United States, yet the most interesting and ablest discussion upon the subject was yet to take place at Richmond, Virginia, in the State Convention of 1829. The State of Virginia had still clung to the old freehold suffrage qualification; in that Commonwealth prior to 1829 it was not enough that a voter should have property or business experience; he must be the owner of land or a freehold interest therein. The standard was not high, from $25 to $50 according to circumstances, but it established the principle and excluded the most degraded. Unfortunately, it also excluded many thrifty and intelligent citizens whose holdings did not happen to be in the form of real estate. On the demand then made for extension of the franchise, an opportunity to consider and discuss the theory of suffrage was naturally presented to the Constitutional Convention. That body was composed of about one hundred members, including the ablest political thinkers and most skilful and aggressive debaters of Virginia. In point of statesmanship and forensic ability its membership has probably never been surpassed in the history of the United States. It included ex-Presidents Madison and Monroe, Chief Justice John Marshall, John Tyler, John Randolph, William Giles and Alexander Campbell. The convention sat for over three months and in the course of the discussion on matters connected with the suffrage dozens of speeches were made, the perusal whereof is very interesting to the political student. Unfortunately, it so happened that though the debates were able, the consideration of the whole matter was biased by local rivalries and by the slavery question, then beginning to confuse and prejudice the Southern mind, and the most distinguished of the delegates took only a minor part in the proceedings. Between the Blue Ridge and the sea was Eastern Virginia, the Old Dominion, where tobacco raising flourished, white labor was scarce and all influential white men were freeholders. West of the Blue Ridge lay a new region, where the industrial situation was similar to that of the free states, and where there was a large body of non-freeholding white working men of the borderland type, who for years had been agitating for the abolition of the old freehold qualification. It was a clash between the Old East and the New West; between free labor and slave proprietorship. The Convention not only undertook the individual suffrage controversy, but entered into the question which also divided the two sections of the State, whether the basis of county representation in the legislature or in either branch thereof should continue as heretofore to be property values rather than population; thus bringing up the fundamental question of whether numbers only should govern without regard to intelligence, creative power or value to civilization. In this controversy Eastern Virginia, having the greater share of wealth and of conservative ideas, stood for property rights, and the West stood for what it dubbed “progress” and the “rights of man.” The dispute threatened the disruption of the Commonwealth, which actually came to pass a generation later in 1863. The final action of the Convention was satisfactory to neither section. The question of county representation was finally settled by an elaborate compromise by which each county and region was given an arbitrary proportion. The champions of an extension of the suffrage were victorious by a vote of 51 to 37, Madison and Marshall voting with the majority and Monroe with the minority; and thus the suffrage which had theretofore been confined to owners of land was extended to such heads of families as were housekeepers and paid taxes. While the only immediate effect was to let in a class of owners of personal property, yet it was generally realized at the time that the new measure would practically open the door to all heads of families however limited their means, and that universal suffrage was but a short step further off.

One interested in Virginia history can hardly help wishing that he might have witnessed the Convention in session. Some of those present had taken part in the American Revolution; all had breathed the Revolutionary atmosphere. Monroe, old and feeble, presided as long as he could hold the gavel, but finally was compelled by weakness to retire. He was able to tell the Convention of a visit to another Convention in Paris over thirty years before, and of witnessing (an ominous spectacle) the murder of one of its members in the convention hall. Madison, another ex-President, was seventy-eight years of age; he spoke two or three times during the session, but his voice was so low that he could not be heard beyond a distance of a few feet. When he arose to speak the members left their seats and grouped themselves respectfully about him. Randolph, who bitterly opposed the suffrage extension scheme, had been the most popular speaker in the state; he was at that time stricken and shriveled by disease, but the older delegates remembered him as one who in his youth had been described as beautiful, fascinating, and even as lovely. Alexander Campbell was there, a young man destined in later years to be the founder of a great religious denomination.

These Virginia Convention debates were the last, the ablest, and the most exhaustive public discussions of the suffrage question in the United States and must be considered as having included all the arguments on either side which were strongly present to the minds of American politicians and publicists of the time. They were opened with great ability by Judge Upshur in a very forcible argument lasting several days in favor of property representation. Many of the superficial minded among the delegates favoring extension had come to Richmond relying upon the proposition that suffrage is a natural right. Upshur shattered this notion right at the beginning, and it was but little heard of in the Convention afterwards. The absurdity of a savage being born with a natural right to participate in a government which was not even imagined until thousands of years afterwards was easily made apparent. “Is it not a solecism” (said Barbour) “to say that rights which have their very being only as a consequence of government, are to be controlled by principles applying exclusively to a state of things when there was no government?” Some of the delegates were evidently familiar with Rousseau, and with his theory of a social compact. They discussed at length, but without result, the question whether suffrage is or is not a right derived from this supposed agreement; and if so, whether it was strictly personal or individual, or whether property rights were also included within the contract, and might therefore properly be considered in allotting suffrage privileges. This naturally raised the question also inconclusively debated whether property as such is a constituent element of society; or whether it is not rather a result of society action, and its acquisition one of the principal inducements to enter social bonds.

Although the doctrine that governments were instituted and maintained for the protection of private property as well as life and limb was prominent in the minds of all the conservatives and was acknowledged by nearly every delegate in the Virginia Convention, yet the undoubted fact that the act of political voting is a responsible public function needing special preparation and qualification was not in Richmond any more than previously in Boston realized by the body of delegates; nor was the fact that government is a business organization, needing the services of expert business men, suggested among them; nor the manifest expediency of using the practice of business as a school for the voter. The philosophy of the delegates did not go beyond the theory of government as an agency for the protection of private property rights and the kindred belief that a permanent and tangible interest in the State was a necessary requirement of a voter. We have seen that in the Virginia Bill of Rights, adopted in 1776, the right of suffrage was expressly limited to men having “sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with and attachment to the community.” In 1829 the principal, and with most of the Virginia delegates the only objects aimed at in imposing a qualification upon the voters were the protection of property and the creation of an electorate interested in the prosperity of the state; the right of society to demand that the voter bring to the polls a trained and disciplined mind was lost sight of altogether.

The narrowing effect of sectionalism and prejudice on the human mind is curiously illustrated by the remarkable fact that in the Convention debates it was assumed on both sides that the entire benefit of the protection of private property by the Commonwealth inured to its individual owners. West Virginia delegates, therefore, insisted that the rich automatically received a preponderant share in the blessings of government; for example, said they, ten Virginians each owning $20,000 of property receive in all $200,000 of protection, which is double the total benefit received by one hundred citizens owning $1,000 each; thus one group of ten men get twice as much aggregate benefit from the state as another group of a hundred men. Over and over again it was urged that government protection of property was principally for the benefit of the rich minority. According to this absurd theory, the State of Virginia had no interest in the preservation of the accumulated private property within its borders; and would not be damaged if its dwellings, furniture, barns, stock, crops, vehicles and vessels of every description were destroyed. The Virginia clerks, laborers and hired workers of every description would not suffer in such case by being deprived of employment; possibly they could subsist on air, ruins or radical doctrines. The lack of business training and of business conceptions among the exceptionally able men of that Convention, and the need of such training for the membership of similar bodies today is strongly brought to our attention by the circumstance that such foolish reasoning passed unchallenged. The fact that all property is of common utility; that it constitutes a vast store from which all, rich, poor and middling are alike supported; that the workman needs the factory at least as much as the proprietor, was not in the mind of the Convention; the probability that the destruction of the entire property of the ten rich men above referred to would injure the community at large even more than the owners was apparently not appreciated by the Virginia delegates in 1829 any more than it would be by the members of one of our aldermanic boards today.

The principal arguments urged in the Virginia Convention in favor of manhood suffrage were, (1) the difficulty of applying any standard of property qualification; (2) that in the ship of state all are passengers, and the poor among them have the same interest in protection from the elements as the rich; (3) that gratitude requires that old soldiers, though poor, should be given a vote by the country they have served; (4) that manhood suffrage had worked well in other communities; (5) that men are naturally not robbers of each other but are inclined to be affectionate, social, patriotic, conscientious and religious; (6) that all men either have or desire property and are, therefore, natural supporters of property rights. The answer to these propositions is obvious, (1) the difficulty of making the standard of qualifications for any employment or function an absolutely perfect one is never considered a sufficient reason for failing to establish any standard whatever. Witness the arbitrary standards of age and residence for voters and office holders, the qualifications of teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc.; (2) in no ship is the management, whether in fair weather or foul, left to the untrained or those without pecuniary interest in the voyage; (3) suffrage should never be given or accepted by the unqualified as an expression of gratitude; the veterans might as well demand to be licensed as dentists as to be allowed to meddle with state affairs; (4) experience shows that manhood suffrage has not worked well but evil all over the world; (5) some men are robbers and still others lack capacity to select agents or rulers who are honest. The main question is one of capacity to exercise the voting function to the advantage of the state. (6) That all men do not sufficiently desire property to enable them to act prudently and justly in their property dealings is shown by the immense number of spendthrifts, wasters, idlers, cheats, rogues, gamblers and vagabonds in the world.

Some of those who then and there favored the extension would probably oppose it today in our thickly populated communities. Eugenius Wilson, for instance, an advocate of extension, admitted that suffrage should be restricted in an inferior, corrupt or uninstructed constituency.

The convention was, of course, regaled by the radicals with the usual popular sing-song cant. It was told that the suffrage was “an inestimable privilege of the individual citizen,” a proposition which is in flat contradiction to the experience of every voter and to the plain facts. This proposition Leigh had the courage to deny, saying that good government for all and not a mere right to individuals to vote is the real desideratum. The majority leaders talked of the “original principles” of government, among them being that each citizen may vote, etc. Upshur denied that there were any original principles of government, because he said “political principles do not precede, they spring out of government.” He further said that property as well as persons is a constituent element of Society; that the very idea of Society carries with it that of property as its necessary and inseparable attendant, and that when man entered Society it was to procure protection for his property; take away all protection to property and our next business is to cut each other’s throats; the great bulk of legislation affects property rather than persons, and without property government cannot move an inch. Leigh uttered some things worth quoting, among them these true and forcible words: “Power and property” (said he) “may be separated for a time by force or fraud but divorced never. For so soon as the pang of separation is felt, if there be truth in history, if there be any certainty in the experience of ages, if all pretensions to knowledge of the human heart be not vanity and folly, property will purchase power, or power will take property. And either way, there must be an end of free government. If property buy power, the very process is corruption. If power ravish property the sword must be drawn, so essential is property to the very being of civilized society, and so certain that civilized man will never consent to return to a savage state.”

The proposal to continue the freehold basis of suffrage was defeated by a vote of 37 to 51, Monroe voting yea and Madison and Marshall voting nay, and by a similar vote the right of suffrage was extended to housekeepers, being heads of families and paying any tax whatever. The reader may be curious to know how the people of Virginia themselves stood on the question, but it is impossible to say. The vote on the adoption of the constitution was 26,055 in favor, to 15,563 opposed; but this vote was not a measure of Virginia popular opinion in regard to a property qualification. The election went off on a different question and curiously enough, the new constitution which extended the suffrage was adopted by the votes of those opposed to the extension. The western counties though favoring, were disappointed because they were not given the legislative representation they claimed; in that respect the new constitution was considered favorable to the east, which though opposed to suffrage extension, voted for ratification, while West Virginia voted to defeat it. Of the total vote in opposition, 13,337, or over five-sixths, came from the region west of the Blue Ridge.

Thus the Virginia discussion of the suffrage question, which engaged the ablest public men of the state for a generation and which ought to have produced a valuable result, came after all to nothing but compromise forced by clamor. Though property qualifications were reduced by the convention, the true principle involved was not presented or passed upon. The champions of good government unfortunately took their stand, not on the broad ground of property rights and political efficiency, but on the narrow claim of landholders and slave owners to control the legislature of the state; they permitted themselves to be placed in the false position of attempting to deny to the most enterprising and successful business man the vote which they offered to the shiftless proprietor of a log cabin in the backwoods. They stood on no sound principle and they were defeated.

And now, looking back after a century and considering the immense importance of the subject, one cannot help regretting that the fruits of the convention labors were merely local and temporary; that it met after suffrage extension had been practically allowed to go by default throughout the Union, and that the Virginia delegates came to Richmond pledged each to one side of a sectional dispute, instead of prepared to take part in a philosophical or statesmanlike search for political truth. Very different might have been the result had the Virginia political mind taken up this question freed from local and slavery prejudice, and had the political talent wasted in a struggle for sectional control been employed in the useful work of studying the real foundation principles of suffrage in a democracy and presenting the conclusions to the Virginia electorate and to the world. In such case it might have reached such a result and brought out such a declaration of principles as would have saved the country and the world centuries of wallowing in the slough of political corruption and despond.

To complete the record it may be added, that in 1850, by a vote of 75 to 33, another Virginia convention further extended the suffrage to all male adult residents. As before, the question was confused with the old dispute over the apportionment of the respective claims of the east and west to representation in the legislature; this was again settled by a compromise after a prolonged deadlock and the settlement was approved by a popular vote of 75,748 to 11,060. This may be said to be the final close of the property qualification controversy in Virginia and in the Union, though it had been substantially decided a generation before; and since 1850 there has been nowhere any serious discussion of the question of the right of property to direct representation in government and it has been generally regarded since that time as forever disposed of. But nothing is finally settled till it is settled right.

And so, after a survey of the entire history of the establishment of manhood suffrage in the United States, we see that this great experiment was originally undertaken by the American people, with but little realization of its importance and almost no foresight of its calamitous results. We have here another of the numerous instances of the truth of the dictum that “Often the greatest changes are those introduced with the least notion of their consequence, and the most fatal are those which encountered least resistance.”

The majorities in favor of manhood suffrage, wherever the question was tested, were overwhelming, but they prove nothing; they merely illustrate once more the well known human lack of vision. Many other equally foolish measures have been adopted by similar majorities and attended by similar popular manifestations of satisfaction. The vote in South Carolina for secession was unanimous and the popular rejoicing thereat was unbounded. Yet we all now see that that secession vote was a stupendous blunder made without moral or political justification or ground for hope of success. Many of the French Revolutionary lunatic performances were almost unanimously decreed and approved by popular vote. In like manner the American people in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were blinded into the acceptance of manhood suffrage or into comparative indifference concerning it, little realizing that in place of thereby securing as they were told for themselves and their descendants a greater measure of political liberty, they were thereby fast riveting upon them the chains of political bondage.

CHAPTER IX

FIRST EFFECTS AND SUBSEQUENT RESULTS OF MANHOOD SUFFRAGE; SPOILS SYSTEM; TRAFFIC IN VOTES; ORGANIZED CORRUPTION; THE BOSS; THE MACHINE; RULE OF POLITICAL OLIGARCHY.

Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabas. Now Barabas was a robber. (John: Chap. xviii, 40.)

On March 4th, 1829, the old Federal régime died with the departure of John Quincy Adams from the White House. The year 1828 is generally taken as the last full year of the old honorable and high-toned political system inaugurated by Washington; the last year at the Federal capitol of real statesmanship, of high ideals and of strict and uncompromising devotion to duty. Manhood suffrage had by this time become established and in operation in almost every state in the Union, and it had succeeded in electing as president of the United States a spoilsman, Andrew Jackson, the apostle of extreme democracy, by whom the former rule of appointments to public office for merit only, and the old doctrine of the continuance of faithful officials in their places were flung to the winds.

The change in the electorate effected by manhood suffrage was not merely superficial, it was radical; what then appeared to many a mere liberalizing of the franchise was in reality a breaking down of the guard wall which had hitherto kept the country from slipping down into the slough. It degraded the practice of American politics from an honorable exercise of patriotism to a sordid business employment; it created a class of professional politicians, self-seeking traffickers in office and the spoils of office; and transferred to them the political control which had theretofore rested in the hands of the gentlemen of the country. This unexpected result of manhood suffrage was due to the fact not sufficiently realized at the time, that it brought into American politics the important element of the controllable vote, to which was speedily applied by the politicians methods of organization, crude and makeshift at first, and afterwards thorough and scientific. The American people did not then foresee the existence of a proletariat city vote, nor the immense possibilities in the organization of floaters. The local politicians of the day, however, saw their chance and seized it; from amateurs they developed into professionals, and they speedily made these floaters the nucleus of a small well-disciplined regular army, by means whereof they seized the machinery of elections and of government, which they have ever since retained.

Let us here stop for a moment to consider and realize what the country lost at one stroke by manhood suffrage in its swift descent from the high character and traditions of that Federal government, the presidency of which, much against his will, John Quincy Adams transferred on March 4th, 1829, to Andrew Jackson. The administrations of Washington and the older Adams had been of rigid integrity; Jefferson, Madison and Monroe had followed in their footsteps. At the time therefore of the election of the second Adams in 1824, the nation had already acquired an established tradition of about as pure an administration of government as was humanly possible. The most valuable political asset of a people consists of its high political standards and traditions; established slowly and imperceptibly and by forces of subtle operation they are elements of the highest importance to its well being. They afford the explanation of many instances of the superior success of one country over another in operating the same political machinery. Already in the United States of 1824 there existed traditions and standards of this high character; among them a belief that men should enter politics if not solely from patriotic motives, then at least from a worthy ambition for honor and power, and in order to further ideas of public policy. This was undoubtedly the doctrine extant at that time; and men could not then as now live and flourish in political life under the scarce denied imputation of being in politics in order to gather political spoils, or for the mere sake of salary or from other sordid motives.

The high national traditions were well maintained and strengthened by John Quincy Adams during his four years’ term from 1825 to 1829. He represented the opposite of the manhood suffrage ideal, he was unflinchingly opposed to government by numbers; to the spoils system, to machine political methods and objects; he was a statesman rather than a politician, and an honest gentleman first of all. His lineage was of the best, his public experience great; his learning deep; his reputation unsullied; he was austere, just and high-minded; his public record was pure and honorable. He was the only president except Washington who obtained the office entirely on his merits, without having done anything to court political support. While president he made appointments to office solely on fitness, applying that test even to his political and personal opponents, keeping them in office provided they were qualified for its duties, and absolutely refusing to use in the slightest degree his executive power so as to procure his renomination. In 1868 a congressional committee reported that having consulted all accessible means of information, they had not learned of a single removal of a subordinate officer except for cause from the beginning of Washington’s administration to the close of that of John Quincy Adams. Under such management and prior to 1829 the average of office holders was generally fair; most of them were men who had led approved lives, had inherited or acquired a good standing in society, and had achieved a certain prominence by a combination of social and political qualities, and through the operation of a kind of civic evolution which had brought them forward in their respective localities. The effect of the property qualification laws, and of the traditionary respect for ability, property and social standing of which those laws were at once a cause and a symptom, was to tend to push such men to the front, and to make it a matter of course that they should be selected as members of Congress, judges, representatives in the legislature, and for similar high offices. They were not required to resort to trickery and intrigue to keep their places. It was by men of that type that the Revolution had been led to success. It was a fatal mistake of a later generation to suppose that a like class of men could be selected by a general vote, and that the good results of what had practically been a system of natural evolution and selection would be attained by an appeal to the suffrages of the unlettered and the unwise.

No doubt there were instances of corruption in American public life long before manhood suffrage was established; bank scandals for instance. Banks are now chartered under a general act. A century ago, however, they were created by special acts of the legislature, and the granting of their charters was sometimes attended with charges of legislative corruption. As early as 1805 at the passage of the New York Merchants Bank charter, in 1812 at the granting of the charter of the New York Bank of America, and again in 1824 when the New York Chemical Bank was organized, such charges were made. Such disclosures were plain warnings of the dangers of laxity in public affairs.

Population and wealth were increasing and so was governmental expenditure. Even as early as 1820 there began to appear in the larger cities a class of idle, vicious, ignorant and therefore purchasable men. The possible means of political corruption and the temptations thereto were therefore all in plain sight; and wisdom would have suggested, especially in view of the continued flood of immigration, that the greatest care be taken to make the source of government in the electorate as pure and efficient as possible. The electorate is the foundation of a free republic, whose political destiny clearly depends on laying well that foundation. Instead of leaving the choice of its materials to hazard and caprice it should have been the subject of conferences of the very wisest among the American statesmen of those days; the silly twaddle of the extremists of the French Revolution about a natural right to vote should have been publicly and systematically discredited; the doctrine that suffrage is not a right but a function should have been formally stated and promulgated with all the authority and prestige of our ablest and most prominent men. The people of the older states should have been warned and warned again by assiduous propaganda against the danger of permitting ignorance and incapacity to lodge at the very bottom of the structure of our government. The people of the newer states should also have been instructed that however permissible as a temporary measure designed to attract settlers to their vacant lands, the practice of universal suffrage is dangerous and should be abolished as soon as society was settled down upon a permanent foundation. Nothing of the kind was done; on the contrary, it was at this critical time, just when in view of the changing conditions active means should have been taken to preserve the purity of politics, that the very opposite course was taken, and the scheme of suffrage extension was put into effect by a heedless majority led by politicians who overruled the wise and disinterested counsels of such able, experienced and far-seeing men as the venerable John Adams of Massachusetts and Chancellor Kent of New York.

The really important result of manhood suffrage and one which was entirely unforeseen and unexpected by most people of the time was the introduction into American politics of the purchasable or controllable element as a permanent feature of the electorate, and the tremendous power thereby acquired by the politicians; and the great defect in the manhood suffrage doctrine lay in its completely ignoring the sinister possibilities of suffrage extension in this direction. The floater or controllable vote speedily became and still is the main reliance of the political oligarchy. Prior to 1828 the activities of politicians had been mostly local. In every village and small town where offices are filled by election there is a field for the political activity of small men of a well known and inferior type, lazy, vociferous and more or less unscrupulous. Under the system of property qualification their activities were much restrained; most of the rabble whom they were able to influence had no votes. With the subsequent growth of the country in wealth and population, the creation of cities of say over thirty thousand inhabitants, and the increasing devotion of industrious citizens to their own affairs, the field for the labors of these political gentry perceptibly widened; but it was manhood suffrage and the election of Jackson which gave them their final triumph and placed them in power all over the land. The secret of this power lies in the organization of this floater vote into small local political societies which combined form at least the nucleus of a species of political army ready to do the bidding of its officers. It consists principally of that considerable body of men who have no political principles and no appreciable pecuniary interest in the community. As they pay no taxes they are quite willing that the government outlay be increased provided that they get a share of the plunder. They include the worthless classes, the very ignorant, the needy and shiftless, drunkards, petty criminals, fools, and loafers. Men with small political ambitions, men who are business failures, men too lazy to work, are attracted to these organizations by hopes of political office or other sinecure employment. In this way, a fairly sufficient nucleus of controllables is obtained. To these may be joined a class of thriftless partisans or followers of the bosses; frequenters of saloons and small local political clubrooms; such men as seek political advantage by cheap means or have a taste for low politics. Bribes are distributed, sometimes in the shape of small loans, sometimes as small jobs or employments for themselves, their relatives, or friends. Their careless habits and want of principle and of fixed belief in anything, their small cynicism and their ignorance of public affairs, make such men easily manageable by certain politicians who are not above dealings of that character. The vote of every man jack of them is as effective as that of a bishop or publicist, and any score of them are much more easily managed and reliable than twenty bishops and publicists would be. The local organization thus formed lives off a traffic in votes and offices; it buys votes, works them up into elective offices and resells them with its trade mark to the highest bidder.

It was the chiefs of such an organized rabble who seizing the electoral machinery rejected Adams in 1828, crying “Away with him, give us Barabas!” and made Jackson, the illiterate spoilsman, President of the United States. Adams’ defeat ended the epoch of high-minded, disinterested statesmanship in the White House. “His retirement” (says Morse) “brought to a close a list of Presidents who deserved to be called statesmen in the highest sense of that term, honorable men, pure patriots, and with perhaps one exception all of the first order of ability in public affairs.” (Life of Adams, p. 214.) But manhood suffrage did more by that stroke than oust Adams; it destroyed the pure political system which he represented, the noble traditions of forty years, and deprived the nation of all future hope of seeing as long as manhood suffrage endures a Washington, a Hamilton or an Adams in high office in this country. “It was” (says Merriam) “by far the most important change made during the Jackson epoch, for it radically altered the foundation of the Republic.” (American Political Theories, p. 193.)

Some of the mischief attendant upon the institution of manhood suffrage must have been apparent to the discerning eye wherever and as soon as it was adopted, but not its full extent. Time was required to get rid of competent and honorable leaders, traditions and standards, to replace them by new ones, and to invent catch words and war cries. But as time went on this downward movement became accelerated. Facilis descensus Averno. At first, little by little, afterwards more rapidly, the ambitions and creeds of the early Republic were everywhere replaced by the sordid cravings and sham sentimentalities of the rabble. In a surprisingly short time we got down into the political mire, where we now miserably splash about making a stench with every effort to escape.

The inauguration of Jackson brought the new maleficent forces into full play. Jackson was the embodiment of the manhood suffrage ideal, and of the growing revolt against the government of intelligence. Lecky says that he “deserves to be remembered as the founder of the most stupendous system of political corruption in modern history.” The following, from the pen of Roosevelt, throws light on the situation:

“Until 1828 all the presidents, and indeed almost all the men who took the lead in public life, alike in national and in state affairs, had been drawn from what in Europe would have been called the ‘upper classes.’ They were mainly college-bred men of high social standing, as well educated as any in the community, usually rich or at least well-to-do. Their subordinates in office were of much the same material. It was believed, and the belief was acted upon, that public life needed an apprenticeship of training and experience. Many of our public men had been able; almost all had been honorable and upright. The change of parties in 1800, when the Jeffersonian Democracy came in, altered the policy of the government, but not the character of the officials. In that movement, though Jefferson had behind him the mass of the people as the rank and file of his party, yet all his captains were still drawn from among the men in the same social position as himself. The Revolutionary War had been fought under the leadership of the colonial gentry; and for years after it was over the people, as a whole, felt that their interests could be safely intrusted to and were identical with those of the descendants of their revolutionary leaders. The classes in which were to be found almost all the learning, the talent, the business activity, and the inherited wealth and refinement of the country, had also hitherto contributed much to the body of its rulers.

“The Jacksonian Democracy stood for the revolt against these rulers; its leaders, as well as their followers, all came from the mass of the people. The majority of the voters supported Jackson because they felt he was one of themselves, and because they understood that his selection would mean the complete overthrow of the classes in power and their retirement from the control of the government. There was nothing to be said against the rulers of the day; they had served the country and all its citizens well, and they were dismissed, not because the voters could truthfully allege any wrong-doing whatsoever against them, but solely because, in their purely private and personal feelings and habits of life, they were supposed to differ from the mass of the people.” (Life of Benton, pp. 70, 71, 72.)

President Jackson’s administration speedily gave discerning men an opportunity to measure the standards and ideals of the newly enfranchised voters. He and they considered the public offices as loot to be distributed among party workers. With the cry of “To the victors belong the spoils” the beneficiaries of universal suffrage began the work of plunder and misrule which they have ever since continued. Jackson and Van Buren—a slick politician—became the leaders of the mobocratic movement, which they called “democratic,” and the demand for offices became its war cry. In his first presidential message Jackson proclaimed “that every citizen has a right to share in the emoluments of the public service,” an ardent bid for the support of the worthless class of men recently granted the vote. We can easily imagine what creatures they were. In that early time in a new country, with opportunity knocking at every man’s door, work to be had for the asking, large farms given by the government free to settlers, with every inducement to an honest man to follow an industrious calling, they preferred to loaf around corners, to infest barrooms, to become members of gangs of political rowdies, to beg, bully and coax for petty offices. Too lazy or incompetent, or both, to accumulate or even to retain the small amount of property needed to qualify them as voters, their only ambition was by fair or foul means to live off the community with the least possible exertion. After Jackson’s inauguration in March 1829, as we are told by Ostrogorski:

“The vast popular army which marched triumphantly through the streets of Washington dispersed to their homes, but one of its divisions remained, the corps of marauders which followed it. This was composed of the politicians. They wanted their spoils. The victory was due to their efforts and as the laborer is worthy of his hire, they deserved a reward. By way of remuneration for their services, they demanded places in the administration. They filled the air of Washington like locusts, they swarmed in the halls and lobbies of the public buildings, in the adjoining streets they besieged the residences of Jackson and his ministers.” (Democracy and the Party System in the United States., p. 21.)

“It was” (says Schurz) “as if a victorious army had come to take possession of a conquered country, expecting their general to distribute among them the spoil of the land. A spectacle was enacted never before known in the capital of the Republic.” (Life of Clay, Vol. I, p. 334.)

“A new force, compounded in about equal proportions of corruption and savagery, was soon made potential, alike in the battle fields of politics, in the methods of election and in the processes of administration.” (Lalor’s Cyclopedia; Spoils System.)

Prior to Jackson’s time only seventy-four Federal officials had been removed from office in the entire history of the government. In the first year of his administration he dismissed or caused to be dismissed more than two thousand, and all for political reasons. The number of persons employed by the Federal Government in the first year of John Quincy Adams’ administration was about 55,000; under Jackson it was increased to over 100,000. In his eight-year term he no doubt doubled the number of Federal officials.

“A perfect reign of terror ensued among the officeholders. In the first month of the new administration more removals took place than during all the previous administrations put together. Appointments were made with little or no attention to fitness, or even honesty, but solely because of personal or political services. Removals were not made in accordance with any known rule at all; the most frivolous pretexts were sufficient, if advanced by useful politicians who needed places already held by capable incumbents. Spying and tale-bearing became prominent features of official life, the meaner office-holders trying to save their own heads by denouncing others. The very best men were unceremoniously and causelessly dismissed; gray-headed clerks, who had been appointed by the earlier presidents—by Washington, the elder Adams, and Jefferson—being turned off at an hour’s notice, although a quarter of a century’s faithful work in the public service had unfitted them to earn their living elsewhere. Indeed, it was upon the best and most efficient men that the blow fell heaviest; the spies, tale-bearers and tricksters often retained their positions. In 1829 the public service was, as it always had been, administered purely in the interest of the people; and the man who was styled the especial champion of the people dealt that service the heaviest blow it has ever received.” (Roosevelt; Life of Benton, pp. 82, 83.)

In a speech in the House of Representatives in 1834 Henry Clay referred to “the ravenous pursuit after public situations not for the sake of the honors and the performance of their public duties but as a means of private subsistence.” He said that the office hunters were so greedy that they watched with eagerness the dying bed of an actual incumbent. Daniel Webster, about the time of Jackson’s election said: “As far as I know there is no civilized country on earth in which, under change of rulers, there is such an inquisition of spoils as we have witnessed in this free republic.” From this time forward this degenerate type of office seekers became an important factor in every American election. The victory of Jackson, says Farrand,

“Was a victory of the South and West, especially by the latter; it was a victory for democracy; but it was also a victory of organized politics ... it seems to mark the rise of a class of professional politicians. These men were not like the old ruling class whose members were in politics largely from a sense of duty and public service, or for the honor of it, or even for the sake of power; but they were in politics as a business, not for the irregular profits to be derived therefrom but to make a living.” (Development of the United States, pp. 156, 157.)

It is really astonishing to note how speedily manhood suffrage developed its appropriate mischiefs. Soon, with the increase of a purchasable constituency the traffic in votes became more easy and common, and the struggle for the spoils grew rapidly in intensity. The policy then put into play of making the offices the spoils of politics produced in a comparatively few years the beginnings of the political machine.

“General Jackson, the candidate of the populace, and the representative hero of the ignorant masses, instituted a new system of administering the government, in which the personal interests became the most important element, and that organization and strategy were developed which have since become known and infamous under the name of the political machine.” (Life of J. Q. Adams by Morse, p. 214.)

About 1830 a new flood of immigration set in and the politicians made it their business to win the favor of the immigrants and to organize the great foreign vote and especially the Irish vote in New York City and elsewhere. This was not difficult as there was neither opposition nor competition. In New York they seized Tammany Hall, and perfected and employed its organization and similar organizations elsewhere; they developed and enthroned political bosses, and established and operated political machines. The growth of this class is thus described by Ostrogorski:

“But in proportion as the old generation which had founded the republic disappeared, as the development of the country entailed that of the public service, and the political contingents increased through extension of the suffrage, the scramble for the loaves and fishes became closer and keener. There arose a whole class of men of low degree who applied all their energies in this direction, and who sought their means of subsistence in politics, and especially in its troubled waters.” (Democracy and the Party System in the United States, p. 19.)

And further:

“The old political supremacy wielded by the élite of the nation, ... passed to an innumerable crowd of petty local leaders who stood nearer to the masses but who too often were only needy adventurers.” (P. 23.)

Jackson was followed in 1837 by his lieutenant, Van Buren, who was the first machine-made President, and the situation is thus described by Roosevelt:

“During Van Buren’s administration the standard of public honesty, which had been lowering with frightful rapidity ever since, with Adams, the men of high moral tone had gone out of power, went almost as far down as it could go; although things certainly did not change for the better under Tyler and Polk. Not only was there the most impudent and unblushing rascality among the public servants of the nation, but the people themselves, through their representatives in the state legislatures, went to work to swindle their honest creditors. Many states, in the rage for public improvements, had contracted debts which they now refused to pay; in many cases they were unable, or at least so professed themselves, even to pay the annual interest. The debts of the states were largely held abroad; they had been converted into stock and held in shares, which had gone into a great number of hands, and now, of course, became greatly depreciated in value. It is a painful and shameful page in our history; and every man connected with the repudiation of the states’ debts ought, if remembered at all, to be remembered only with scorn and contempt.”

Towards the close of Van Buren’s administration, complaint was made of waste of public money.

“There was good ground for their complaint, as the waste and peculation in some of the departments had been very great.... While they had been in power the character of the public service had deteriorated frightfully, both as regarded its efficiency and infinitely more as regarded its honesty; and under Van Buren the amount of money stolen by the public officers, compared to the amount handed in to the treasury, was greater than ever before or since. For this the Jacksonians were solely and absolutely responsible; they drove out the merit system of making appointments, and introduced the ‘spoils’ system in its place; and under the latter they chose a peculiarly dishonest and incapable set of officers, whose sole recommendation was to be found in knavish trickery and low cunning that enabled them to manage the ignorant voters who formed the backbone of Jackson’s party.” (Life of Benton, pp. 219, 230, 231.)

In 1841 Harrison succeeded Van Buren; there was a change of parties; the Democrats went out, and the Whigs, who had inveighed against the spoils system, took their places. But the expected reform did not come off; it was no longer a question of parties or policies; the electorate itself had been hopelessly degraded by manhood suffrage, and the leaders of both parties were unable, if they wished, to purify politics; they were obliged either to adopt manhood suffrage low methods, or go out of public life. In vain Clay, the great Whig leader, thundered in Congress against the spoils system.

“In solemn words of prophecy, he (Clay) painted the effects which the systematic violation of this principle (Government is a trust), inaugurated by Jackson, must inevitably bring about; political contests turned into scrambles for plunder; a system of universal rapacity, substituted for a system of responsibility; favoritism for fitness; a Congress corrupted, the press corrupted, general corruption; until the substance of free government having disappeared, some pretorian band would arise, and with the general concurrence of a distracted people, put an end to useless forms.” (Schurz, Life of Clay, p. 335, Vol. I.)

Clay’s influence in Congress was enormous, but he was powerless to cure the inherent rottenness of a manhood suffrage constituency. The pressure of the spoilsmen upon the Whig Harrison’s administration equalled or surpassed that upon the Democrat Jackson, and is said to have caused Harrison’s death. It is thus described by Ostrogorski:

“When Harrison took up his abode in the White House, the rush became tremendous; the applicants literally pursued the ministers and the president day and night; they besieged the former in their offices or in their homes, and even in the streets; a good many candidates for offices slept in the corridors of the White House to catch the president the next morning as soon as he got up.” (Democracy and the Party System in the U.S., p. 36.)

Schurz thus describes the operation of the manhood suffrage spoils system as it had developed in ten or twelve years after its introduction in 1829:

“Not only were the officers of the government permitted to become active workers in party politics, but they were made to understand that active partisanship was one—perhaps the principal one—of their duties. Political assessments upon office holders with all the inseparable scandals became at once a part of the system. The spoils politician in office grasped almost everywhere the reins of local leadership in the party.... The spoils system bore a crop of corruption such as had never been known before. Swartwout, the collector of customs at New York, one of General Jackson’s favorites, was discovered to be a defaulter to the amount of nearly $1,250,000, and the District Attorney of the U. S. at New York to the amount of $72,000. Almost all land officers were defaulters.... Officials seemed to help themselves to the public money, not only without shame, but in many cases apparently without any fear of punishment.” (Life of Clay, Vol. II, pp. 183, 184.)

This from Roosevelt referring to 1838:

“The Jacksonian Democracy was already completely ruled by a machine, of which the most important cogs were the countless office-holders, whom the spoils system had already converted into a band of well-drilled political mercenaries. A political machine can only be brought to a state of high perfection in a party containing very many ignorant and uneducated voters; and the Jacksonian Democracy held in its ranks the mass of the ignorance of the country.” (Life of Benton, p. 185.)

Some writers put all the blame on Jackson for the overthrow of the old lofty ideals and standards of Federal politics, which occurred in his presidency. But Jackson, though coarse and ignorant, was not evil-minded nor intentionally unpatriotic; nor was he, even if so disposed, gifted with the power of corrupting the entire politics of the country. The mischiefs which broke out in his time were nation-wide and must have been due to a nation-wide cause. The fact is that the party of which Jackson happened to be the leader was caught in a movement, the full meaning and effect of which was unsuspected by everybody. The wash of the French Revolution had reached us and had swept manhood suffrage into our boat. Schurz says that in Jackson’s administration there was infused into the government and the whole body politic a spirit of lawlessness which outlived Jackson, and of which the demoralizing influence is felt to this day; that barbarous habits were then first introduced into the field of national affairs, and selfishness made a ruling motive in politics, resulting in a crop of corruption which startled the country. All this is true; the mistake is in ascribing to Jackson or to any one person a widespread deterioration no one man could possibly have accomplished. For such a far-reaching effect, a universal cause was needed; and that that cause was manhood suffrage no candid investigator can possibly doubt. McLaughlin in his Life of Cass (p. 136) recognizes that the introduction of the spoils system in 1829 cannot be solely charged to Jackson or to Van Buren; that they were the mere conduits through which was conducted into federal politics the flood of corruption produced by other causes. But those causes he fails to specify. “It came by natural evolution ... the offices of trust were handed over to the men who brought the greatest pressure to bear, and could make plain their political influences to the scullions of the kitchen cabinet. If the student of American politics is to understand the place which the spoils system holds he must see that its introduction was a natural phase in our national development.” And he describes the brutality of “the scrambling, punch-drinking mob which invaded Washington at Jackson’s inauguration.” It needs no Sherlock Holmes, however, to tell us that the advent of this mob and their possession of the administration would not have been “a natural phase in our national development” had it not been for the specific operation of the new institution of manhood suffrage. The influences which it introduced in our political structure were favorable to the spoils system, which was popularly felt to be a proper result of the filling of all offices by vote of the masses. The Cyclopedia of American Government states that the people favored the introduction of the spoils system. As Marcy said in a speech about that time, “They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victors belong the spoils of the enemy.” In a word the Democratic spirit ignored efficiency in office as well as in the voter; and the office became what it still continues to be, a reward, a token of gratitude for political activity.

The lamentable effects of manhood suffrage continued in full sweep after the death of Harrison and the return of the Jackson Democracy to power under Polk in 1845. The resultant flagrant misgovernment caused growing popular resentment which might have produced valuable results had it not been for the slavery agitation which soon drove all other political questions into the background. Already in 1843 the dissatisfaction of large numbers was displayed by the organization of the American or Knownothing party, which born in New York and baptized with blood in Philadelphia rapidly spread through the country. Formed ostensibly to check the growing power of Irish Roman Catholic politicians, its real grievance was manhood suffrage misrule. Its leaders mistook the cause of the new political scandals. They wrongly attributed them exclusively to the Irish; they were really due to the effect of the voting power of the newly enfranchised and organized political floaters, both foreign and American. Polk’s election was secured by the machine in 1844:

“By the almost solid foreign vote still unfit for the duties of American citizenship; by the vicious and criminal classes in all the great cities of the North and in New Orleans; by the corrupt politicians, who found ignorance and viciousness tools ready forged to their hands, wherewith to perpetrate the gigantic frauds without which the election would have been lost.” (Roosevelt, Life of Benton, pp. 290, 291.)

On Pierce’s inauguration in 1853, says Rhodes, “the importunate begging for official positions in a republic where it was so easy to earn a living was nothing less than disgraceful. Office seekers crowded the public receptions of the President, and while greeting him in the usual way, attempted at the same time to urge their claims, actually thrusting their petitions into his hands.” (Rhodes, I, 339.)

Meantime the bribery of voters and of legislatures rapidly grew more common and shameless, and about this time the purchase of legislation began to be a scandal. Referring to this period, Prof. Reinsch says:

“In those earlier days things were often managed with little adroitness. There was much indiscriminate and broadcast bribery; to buy men for a moderate amount per vote was the acme of ambition to the successful lobbyist.” (American Legislatures and Legislative Methods, p. 231.)

And Farrand writes, referring to the same period:

“For the first time in contemporary accounts much was made of the vile corruption of politics, the charge being with the growth of a class of professional politicians and the great increase of wealth that money was used improperly, both for bribing of voters and for accomplishing the miscarriage of justice.” (Development of United States, p. 209.)

Under the united influence of manhood suffrage and its offspring the spoils system, corruption, rascality and official incapacity increased enormously as time went on. The historian Rhodes writing of the decade from 1850 to 1860 says that “plentiful evidence of the popular opinion that dishonesty prevailed may be found in the literature of the time.” And that, “the executive and legislative departments of the national government were undoubtedly as much tainted with corruption between 1850-60 as they are at the present time.” (1904.) Senator Benton of Missouri writing in 1850 said:

“Now office is sought for support and for the repair of dilapidated fortunes; applicants obtrude themselves, and prefer claims to office. Their personal condition and party services, not qualification, are made the basis of the demand; and the crowds which congregate at Washington, at the change of an administration, supplicants for office are humiliating to behold, and threaten to change the contest of parties from a contest for principle into a struggle for plunder.” (Thirty Years in Congress, Vol. I, p. 81.)

And further: (p. 163).

“I deprecate the effect of such sweeping removals at each revolution of parties and believe it is having a deplorable effect both upon the purity of elections and the distribution of office, and taking both out of the hands of the people and throwing the management of one and the enjoyment of the other into most unfit hands. I consider it as working a deleterious change in the government.”

About this time public officials were assessed for political contributions; afterwards the offices were put on sale. “Under Buchanan (1857-1861) was established the practice of taxing federal office holders. The politicians after the war carried it to perfection. There were five categories of assessments on salaries; federal, state, municipal, ward and district.” (Ostrogorski; Democracy, p. 68.)

The politicians under Lincoln were no whit behind their predecessors. The new administration machine went merrily to work right after March 4, 1861. Then followed such scandals as might naturally be expected from the appointment as Secretary of War of Simon Cameron, the rapacious and corrupt Pennsylvania boss. Carbines were sold by the Government at $3.50 each and repurchased at $15, and the contract repeated, the second purchase being at $22. Large sums were spent without accounting in violation of law. Brothers-in-law were in luck. Cameron’s brother-in-law was president of a railroad which in one year exacted from the Government a million or more for excessive transportation charges. One Morgan, the brother-in-law of the Secretary of the Navy, was made purchasing agent for railroad supplies, although he was absolutely without experience in that line. Other politicians received similar favors. A great scandal was caused by the issuing of permits for trading with the enemy under which supplies to numerous amounts sufficient to furnish whole armies were sent through the rebel lines. The machine was able to obtain the signature of Lincoln himself to these permits. Foreign affairs were neglected in order that the offices might be distributed. (Stickney; Organized Democracy, Chap. III.)

Coming to the next decade we find a systematic corruption of the electorate, a large part whereof was willing no doubt to be corrupted. Ostrogorski says that “after the (Civil) War the exasperation of party spirit and the extraordinary development of the spoils system led to bribery being used as a regular weapon.... The parties often secure, in much the same way, the votes of the members of the labor unions; the leaders ‘sell them out’ to the parties without the workmen having a suspicion of it. The voters who deliberately sell themselves belong in the cities, mostly to the dregs of the population.”

And also referring to states where the vote was close:

“These states ranked among the doubtful ones, four or five in number, are drenched with money during the presidential campaign for buying the ‘floaters,’ the wavering electors who sell themselves to the highest bidder.” (Pp. 206, 207.)

During all this period and down to the present time, the spoils system built on manhood suffrage has been the dominant force in our public life.

“It is” (says Bryce) “these spoilsmen who have depraved and distorted the mechanism of politics. It is they who pack the primaries and run the conventions so as to destroy the freedom of popular choice, they who contrive and execute the election frauds which disgrace some States and cities—repeating and ballot stuffing, obstruction of the polls and fraudulent countings in.

In making every administrative appointment a matter of party claim and personal favour, the system has lowered the general tone of public morals, for it has taught men to neglect the interests of the community, and made insincerity ripen into cynicism. Nobody supposes that merit has anything to do with promotion, or believes the pretext alleged for an appointment. Politics has been turned into the art of distributing salaries so as to secure the maximum of support from friends with the minimum of offence to opponents. To this art able men have been forced to bend their minds: on this Presidents and ministers have spent those hours which were demanded by the real problems of the country.” (American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 137.)

Meantime the politicians, not content with the original operation of manhood suffrage on the spoils of office, have bethought them of adding to the fruits of these operations by increasing still further the number of elective offices. It has been easy to persuade to this move many of that small number of intelligent voters who trouble themselves about such matters. The pretence of extending the sway of democracy and liberty which has always been used to cover schemes of public plunder was found sufficient once more. On this pretence the administrative and judicial offices of various states were made elective instead of appointive as formerly. As Ostrogorski says (Idem, p. 25):

“The democratic impulse which carried Jackson into power had forced the way, in the constitutional sphere, for two important changes: the introduction of universal suffrage, and the very considerable extension of the elective principle to public offices,”

Under this system which still obtains in many states, scores of state, county and municipal offices are offered at every election to the choice of the mass of electors who on approaching the polls find themselves called on to select in addition to the members of the state legislature and Congress and state governors, a dozen or a score of administrative officials and judges. Sometimes they are invited to vote for an attorney-general, a state engineer and surveyor, a state treasurer, a state comptroller, half a dozen judges and justices, a district attorney, a sheriff, a mayor, a city treasurer, a couple of coroners, besides a governor, a state senator, and assemblymen and aldermen, say twenty in all. Sometimes as at an election in St. Louis, the list contains thirteen city officials to be elected, besides state officers and congressmen. In the cities of Ohio it sometimes includes an average of twenty-two officers at each yearly election. In a small town near New York there are about fifteen local offices to be filled at an election besides a dozen or two state and federal offices and so on throughout the Union. “Let the people rule,” say the politicians, because when the people attempt to rule by choosing administrative officials, it is really the politicians who make the choice. It is doubtful if there ever was a voter, even a professional politician, who was sufficiently well acquainted with each of the candidates on such a ticket and with his duties to enable him to decide intelligently upon his merits as compared with his rivals. Certainly not one in a hundred is competent to do so. Remember, too, that the voter has no real choice in the original selection of these candidates; that they are all chosen before the election by party managers in secret conclave, and forced through the primaries by the power of the machine; that if the voter rejects one rogue or incapable whom he happens to know or has heard of, he can do no more after all than to vote for the other party candidate who is quite likely to be likewise of the same evil stripe. The reader can see that manhood suffrage applied in this way is an infallible method of making easy and safe the selection of incompetent rascals for public office. For what the voter usually does in such case is to vote the whole party ticket, rogues, fools and all, realizing that if he fails to do so the rival set of scamps and incompetents will be the sole gainers.

Subsequent to 1850 and by degrees the army of American politicians became more and more skilled and specialized in their craft; they became highly organized and disciplined; having leaders, officers, rules and traditions. Men went into politics in youth as a profession, grew old and rich in its practice, and trained up their deputies and successors. The political leader became known as the Boss; a group of Bosses as a Ring; a combination of Rings as the Machine whose power is sometimes irresistible. Especially after the Civil War (1865) the power of the bosses increased, and they habitually after that time distributed nominations, collected assessments, and gave orders to state legislatures. The system thus perfected has continued to the present day and is everywhere working smoothly. The American people have now practically ceased resistance to the bosses. In a letter addressed to Francis A. Walker signed by William Cullen Bryant, Carl Schurz and others, dated April 6, 1876, reference is made to “the widespread corruption in our public servants which has disgraced the republic in the eyes of the world and threatens to poison the vitality of our institutions.” On March 31, 1876, Schurz writes to Bristow: “We have been so deeply disgraced in the estimation of mankind by the exposures of corruption in our public servants, and the faith of many of our people in our institutions has been so dangerously shaken.” David Dudley Field of New York, writing in 1877, says:

“The corruption of American politics is a phrase in everybody’s mouth, not only in this country, but in others.... We see offices claimed and bestowed not for merit but for party work, and as a natural consequence we see the public service inefficient and disordered. We see venal legislatures and executive officers receiving gifts.... We see legislatures, state and federal, guaranteeing monopolies to corporations and individuals, making gifts of the public lands and bestowing subsidies from the public treasury; we see the plunder of local communities by what is called local taxation, and we see demagogues clamoring for largesses under pretense, perhaps, of equalizing bounties, or other equally dishonest pretenses.... The condition of our civil service is a scandal to the country.... Taking the country together two-thirds of the present official force would do all the work needed and do it better than it is now done.”

And proceeding, he spoke of politics as then pursued as a branch of business, and the office holders as a band of mercenaries who were the supporters of misgovernment. (Corruption in Politics; International Review, Jan., 1877.)

Physicians tell us that from a source of disease, however small and obscure, a disordered tooth for instance, an infection may spread through the body until despite its apparent vigor, it in undermined and finally destroyed. The corruption begun in the electorate, has spread beyond the political system and has reached and invaded business life. This progress is so easy to trace that every business man in the country is familiar with it. Political leaders and bosses are purchasable and so are often machine-made legislators. Hence the two-fold evil, on the one hand the bribery of legislators and public officials, and on the other, threats and acts of oppression by the latter so as to compel business to pay tribute. These practices are so notorious and instances of them are so familiar, many of them referred to in this volume, that at this point it is sufficient to call attention to their frequency and extent. Again quoting Bryce:

“In the United States the money power acts by corrupting sometimes the voter, sometimes the juror, sometimes the legislator, sometimes a whole party; for large subscriptions and promises of political support have been known to influence a party to procure or refrain from such legislation as wealth desires or fears. The rich, it is but fair to say, and especially great corporations, have not only enterprises to promote but dangers to escape from at the hands of unscrupulous demagogues or legislators.” (American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 614.)

In 1889 George William Curtis, referring to the United States, approvingly quoted the saying of a United States Senator made in 1876 that “the only product of her institutions in which she surpassed all others beyond question was her corruption.” In 1890 he said that political corruption “has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished.” In 1891 Curtis said that “corruption in our politics was never felt to be so general, so vast and penetrating, as during the last quarter of a century.” In the Omaha Populist platform of 1892, it was declared that:

“We are meeting in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the Legislators, the Congress and touches even the ermine of the bench. People are demoralized.... The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes.... From the same prolific womb of political justice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”

We forbear to quote later opinions or authorities on this branch of our subject at this point, though contemporary magazines and newspapers afford them in great number, because we have wished as far as possible to keep within the domain of history and to avoid the doubtful field of present-day partisan political controversy. If proof of the evil of present conditions were desirable it is sufficiently found between the covers of this book, but such proof is quite unnecessary. The unsatisfactory character of the political life of today is as well known to the intelligent reader as to the writer or to anyone else. There has been no betterment of recent years. The activities of our political masters have kept pace with the march of prosperity, the increase of the nation’s wealth and population, and the growth of its great cities. There is today practically no political liberty in the United States. The country is badly, corruptly and shamefully ruled by a class, an oligarchy, one of the most corrupt and tyrannical at present existing anywhere, and composed of small groups of weak and tricky men not five per cent of whom under a system of properly qualified suffrage would have votes at all. Instead of free elections to public office what actually occurs is as described by Dr. Charles P. Clark:

“Two organized bands of active, intriguing and self-seeking politicians, composing less than one hundredth part of the whole voting population, dispute with each other, and one of them obtains the selection—mark the pregnant meaning of the word—of every public functionary.” (The Machine Abolished, p. 29.)

Having identified the source and origin of this evil political condition with the institution of manhood suffrage and traced the mischief down to the present-day generation, let us proceed to the next chapter wherein will be set forth a brief description or example of the nature and characteristics of the professional politician, the political Boss, the political Machine, the political Ring, and the Lobby; all of which beautiful creations are the product or result direct or indirect of that much vaunted institution, manhood suffrage. It is doubtful if any of them can be found elsewhere than in America; certainly they reach their highest development in the United States.

CHAPTER X

SHORT SKETCHES OF MANHOOD SUFFRAGE PROGENY; THE POLITICIAN AND THE BOSS; THEIR CREATIONS THE RING AND THE MACHINE; AND THEIR BY-PRODUCT, THE LOBBY

No account of manhood suffrage would be complete without proper mention of the politicians and their work, for they are the essential product of the system, its distinctive feature and its condemnation. It is they who manage the controllable vote created by manhood suffrage and without which they themselves would cease to exist; and it is they who nurse that vote, feed it and train and fashion it to their malign uses as an instrument of perfect control of American political life. The politicians are absolutely indispensable to the working of the present political system in the United States. They handle the voters like cattle intended for the stock market; like the animals the voters go willingly or half willingly to the places prepared for them, in pursuance of plans in which they take no part, which they do not understand. The voters are bargained for and delivered in batches just as the animals are, and the managers and their subordinates in charge are the political masters of the country.

These managers from the very first have been a sordid lot. De Tocqueville, writing about 1835, when the manhood suffrage régime was only ten years old said of them, “I have heard of patriotism in the United States, and I have found true patriotism among the people, but never among the leaders of the people.” (Democracy in America, Vol. I.) The present-day professional politicians may be as lacking in patriotism as the political leaders of De Tocqueville’s time, but taken all together they are and have always been a picturesque company, who have been frequently described by able writers, from some of whom extracts will here be given for the delectation and information of the reader.

There are of course high and low grade politicians, small and large leaders and managers and various grades between; besides retainers and subordinates, known as captains or henchmen with their followers or heelers. In cities, the local or district leader is often an able man in his way; and of late years as politics has developed into a science, he is often found to be sober, shrewd and well mannered. His duties are varied. He assists and protects his constituents in local political matters; obtains the saloon license; also permits for the small trades or businesses, the boot-black, the lemonade seller, etc. He protects against arrests, gets bail for culprits, sees police judges, lends small sums, distributes coal in winter, gives poultry at Christmas, sends medicine for the sick, helps bury the dead by procuring credit or cheap rates at the undertaker’s, orders drinks at the saloon, and is looked on as a ready helper in time of trouble of all kinds. He may have placed a large number of men on the city pay-roll who never do much work and whose principal duties are to attend conventions, get out the vote on election day, promise places and favors, and threaten and intimidate opposition to the regular ticket. In some cities these petty leaders are numbered by the thousand. It was estimated at one time that they totaled 12,000 to 15,000 in New York alone. As time passes the outward semblance and methods of the politician may change, or they may vary with his situation and station in the political hierarchy, but his spirit and objects and evil influence continue unaltered. The politician of our day is thus described by Dr. Clark:

“The perfect type of the American politician is a mixture of the demagogue, the intriguer and the jobber; flattering the people, locking arms with every surrounding influence and all the time looking out for himself.” (The Machine Abolished, p. 43.)

Bryce thus sketches the ward politician:

“As there are weeds that follow human dwellings, so this species thrives best in cities, and even in the most crowded parts of cities. It is known to the Americans as the ‘ward politician,’ because the city ward is the chief sphere of its activity, and the ward meeting the first scene of its exploits. A statesman of this type usually begins as a saloon or barkeeper, an occupation which enables him to form a large circle of acquaintances, especially among the ‘loafer’ class who have votes but no reason for using them one way more than another, and whose interest in political issues is therefore as limited as their stock of political knowledge. But he may have started as a lawyer of the lowest kind, or lodging-house keeper, or have taken to politics after failure in store-keeping. The education of this class is only that of the elementary schools; if they have come after boyhood from Europe, it is not even that. They have of course no comprehension of political questions or zeal for political principles; politics mean to them merely a scramble for places or jobs. They are usually vulgar, sometimes brutal, not so often criminal, or at least the associates of criminals. They it is who move about the populous quarters of the great cities, form groups through whom they can reach and control the ignorant voter, pack meetings with their creatures.” ...

“In the smaller cities and in the country generally, the minor politicians are mostly native Americans, less ignorant and more respectable than these last-mentioned street vultures. The bar-keeping element is represented among them, but the bulk are petty lawyers, officials, Federal as well as State and county, and people who for want of a better occupation have turned office-seekers, with a fair sprinkling of store-keepers, farmers, and newspaper men.” ...

“These two classes do the local work and dirty work of politics. They are the rank and file. Above them stand the officers in the political army, the party managers, including the members of Congress and chief men in the State legislatures, and the editors of influential newspapers. Some of these have pushed their way up from the humbler ranks. Others are men of superior ability and education, often college graduates, lawyers who have had practice, less frequently merchants or manufacturers who have slipped into politics from business. There are all sorts among them, creatures clean and unclean, as in the sheet of St. Peter’s vision, but that one may say of politicians in all countries.” (American Commonwealth, Vol. II, pp. 63, 64, 65.)

The political leaders, says Eaton, endeavor to bring “every form of human depravity, imbecility and ignorance to the polls. They and their minions search the garrets and the cellars, the prisons and the asylums, the grog shops and the poor houses; they lead and hustle to the ballot boxes the vilest specimens of humanity which can be made to cast a vote” (Government of Municipalities, p. 122), and he adds that some of these leaders are public officials, some have even been on the bench of justice as police magistrates. Here is a sketch of a New York district leader, veracious though imaginary, from the facile pen of O. Henry (The Social Triangle).

“Billy McMahan was the district leader. Upon him the Tiger purred, and his hand held manna to scatter. Now, as Ikey entered (the bar room) McMahan stood, flushed and triumphant and mighty, the center of a huzzaing concourse of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back into line by a resistless besom of ballots. How magnificent was Billy McMahan, with his great smooth laughing face; his gray eye shrewd as a chicken hawk’s; his diamond ring; his voice like a bugle call; his prince’s air; his plump and active roll of money; his clarion call to friend and comrade—oh, what a king of men he was! How he obscured his lieutenants, though they themselves loomed large and serious, blue of chin and important of mien, with hands buried deep in the pockets of their short overcoats.”

Besides the immediate lieutenants of the boss there are in the cities gangs of “heelers” formed by the political organizations who, as said by Ostrogorski, constitute a latent political force under the management of henchmen. They are described by him as ignorant, brutal, averse to regular work, mostly recruited from the criminal or semi-criminal classes, from among frequenters of drinking saloons and from failures and loafers of every description. When the elections come around they furnish compact bands of “floaters” or “repeaters” as they are often called, ready, for a consideration, to vote early and as often as permitted. Professor Woodburn of Indiana University writing in 1903, says that:

“A politician has come to mean one devoted not to the science and art of government, but to the success of a political party; a party worker who devotes himself to the art of making nominations and carrying elections; one who manages caucuses, committees and conventions, by which the party business and the party machinery are carried on. It is because the people have consented to turn over their parties and their party government to this self constituted class of party managers that they have come under the control of rings and bosses.” (Political Parties and Party Problems, p. 360.)

He describes a political ring as a group of these professional politicians who live by politics, bound together for mutual support in pursuit of offices, public patronage, contracts and other pecuniary opportunities, and generally unscrupulous in their methods. The leader of the ring is the boss, who usually does not hold office but controls the offices from outside, by backstairs influence.

This from Professor Hyslop:

“But the single purpose that animates the average politician is the same that inspires the beggar or the thief. Either he has failed for want of ability of an honest kind in legitimate methods of business and in competition with his fellows, and seeks a public salary with freedom to indulge his natural indolence, or he uses his ingenuity and abilities to secure the irresponsible power to plunder the public with impunity.” (Democracy, p. 270.)

The purchase of votes and the collection of funds for that purpose has always been an important part of the politician’s work. The expression “bunches of five” has become a byword ever since its use some twenty years ago by a prominent Republican politician in reference to delivery of votes for money. “Frying out the fat” is another striking expression which became current about the same time in the same way and was intended to be descriptive of the method of getting large sums from corporations for use in election purposes. The total amounts thus contributed in the past forty years to carry presidential elections would probably run into the hundreds of millions. In 1910 President Vreeland of the Metropolitan Street Railway of New York testified before a legislative committee that his company contributed campaign funds to both parties. One year it divided about $40,000 between them. This is not mentioned as an exceptional instance but as illustrative of a well known practice.

Let us now glance at the great man himself, the real Boss, the magnate, the prince of American Democracy, the man who of all men most thoroughly believes in manhood suffrage, understands it and profits by it; one of the real political rulers of the American people; he who makes and unmakes governors, senators and high judges; he for whom sheriffs, aldermen, assemblymen, state senators, and sometimes even our mayors of cities are glad to run errands and to wait in anterooms. Writing in 1914 Goodnow says of the bosses: “They control the making of laws and their execution after they are made.” (Politics and Administration, p. 169.) What is a boss like? What are his outward manifestations?

About the best analysis of his character and functions was made by Professor Reinsch of Wisconsin, as follows:

“Sooner or later there is evolved the boss, the fruit and flower of commercial politics in America. He represents the main interest but also holds the balance between the minor tributary groups. The secrecy necessary for his work gives him great power. He alone holds all the threads that bind the system together. In his person are united the confidence of the favored interests and the hopes of his political lieutenants. He commands the source of supplies. He has mastered the study of political psychology and knows by intimate experience the personal character of the prominent politicians in the state. Most of them are dependent upon him for future favors or are bound to him through past indiscretions. The character of the system demands an absolute ruler. For this reason, too, the power of the boss is continuous; it is rarely overthrown from within and only a great public upheaval can affect it. Bosses maintain themselves in the saddle and enjoy a long lease of power, because of their direct and confidential relations with the controlling interests; their inborn secretiveness leads them to keep their own counsel, and not to allow any other person a complete insight into all the intricacies of the system. They grow stronger as the years pass and no indiscretion or even crime is able to shake their authority while they keep in their hands the main threads connecting influence with its obedient tools. The abler men of this type are filled with a keen sense of the irony of their position. They have the clear insight into the coarser actualities of politics that characterized Machiavelli. The political exhorter who sways the multitudes from the stump does not become a boss; to achieve that position the power of cool analysis, of impassive control, and of unflinching execution, are more essential than any gifts of popular leadership.” (American Legislatures and Legislative Methods, pp. 236, 237.)

Another sketch:

“It must not be supposed that the members of Rings, or the great Boss himself are wicked men. They are the offspring of a system. Their morality is that of their surroundings. They see a door open to wealth and power, and they walk in. The obligations of patriotism or duty to the public are not disregarded by them, for these obligations have never been present to their minds. A State boss is usually a native American and a person of some education, who avoids the grosser forms of corruption, though he has to wink at them when practised by his friends. He may be a man of personal integrity. A city boss is often of foreign birth and humble origin; he has grown up in an atmosphere of oaths and cocktails; ideas of honour and purity are as strange to him as ideas about the nature of the currency and the incidence of taxation; politics is merely a means for getting and distributing places.” (Bryce, American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 110.)

Under the supervision of the political boss blackmail is levied for party purposes from gambling houses, saloons and houses of ill repute. He is not primarily concerned with political opinions. He controls his best men by their interests. It is his business to carry the elections and thus get power and places for self and followers. He is able to dismiss almost any politician from office and to close his political career. He and not the people is the real master of the inferior office-holders. “At all hazards he must prevent the incoming of an honest administration that will apply the public offices for public uses.” For this purpose the bosses of opposite parties unite when necessary. Woodburn mentions an instance of this in Philadelphia in 1901, and adds referring to the boss:

“Those who support him have their reward—the laborer gets his job, the placeman office; the policeman his promotion or his “divvy”; the contractor a chance at the public works; the banker the use of the public money; the gambler and the criminal immunity from prosecution; the honest merchant certain sidewalk privileges; the rich corporations lowered assessments and immunity from equitable taxation. All buy these special favors by support of the Boss’s power and policy, and all enjoy the blessings of the Boss’s government, high taxation, maladministration, stolen franchises, robbery of the public treasury, and criminal disorder in the community.” (Political Parties and Party Platforms, p. 364.)

In an article in the Outlook, April 2, 1898, Miss Jane Addams of Chicago, a well-known settlement worker, writing no doubt from personal observation, describes the Boss as an institution of American politics in similar language to that of Professor Woodburn. She depicts the typical city political boss, his personality and good-natured freebooting methods with piquancy and vigor; he is, she says, a successful boodler who is popular with the poor because in their ignorance they suppose that he only robs the rich while to the poor he is a sympathetic friend; or as they say, he has a good heart. The reader can easily trace for himself the direct connection between this point of view of the lower classes and their support of Tweed, the robber politician whom a New York City district triumphantly elected state senator shortly after his rascalities were exposed. With that connection in mind the relation between the power of the boss and universal suffrage is perfectly apparent. The class of voters brought in by unqualified suffrage prefer friendly bosses and free-handed boodlers to men who are governed by motives so superior to their own as to seem to them visionary or fantastic; who have in their pockets no stolen or easy got cash to squander on their followers, and who not being professional “handshakers” seem to the masses lacking in sympathy for common men.

But there is a power greater even than the Boss; and that is the Machine, a creation which has reached its highest development in our own time and of which the greatest politicians speak with awe. Theodore Roosevelt, the “Big Bull Moose,” was a big politician, a glorified Boss; but he went down at Chicago in 1912 crushed by the steam roller attachment of the Machine. “For the Roller came and with great eclat it laid that turrible animile flat,” was the doggerel verdict of a newspaper of that day.

“The tremendous power of party organization has been described. It enslaves local officials, it increases the tendency to regard members of Congress as mere delegates, it keeps men of independent character out of local and national politics, it puts bad men into place, it perverts the wishes of the people, it has in some places set up a tyranny under the forms of democracy.” (Bryce, American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 612.)

The word “machine” indicates its character.

“The professional politicians (says Ostrogorski) operated, under the direction of the managers, and the wire pullers with such uniformity and with such indifference or insensibility to right and wrong, that they evoked the idea of a piece of mechanism working automatically and blindly; of a machine; the effect appeared so precisely identical, that the term “machine” was foisted on the Organization as a nick-name which it bears down to the present day.” (Democracy, p. 60.)

In this machine the voter is a very small cog; he neither devised the machine, nor can he in the least control it, nor is it constructed to serve his interests. It is organized in the interests of discipline and on the principle of obedience. In New York, for instance, an important part of the Tammany Machine is the Committee on Organization, composed of the leaders of certain wards and districts, each one of whom either holds a public office or has a valuable public contract or is in some way dependent on the Boss for his yearly income. The committee man looks after his district and is responsible to the Boss for its vote. Not by the people but by the political machines are offices filled, laws enacted, government carried on. The machine discipline though sometimes severe operates on the whole for the benefit of the politician by protecting the faithful. The efficient members of the class of professional politicians are never more than temporarily shelved. If defeated at one election they are chosen at another. If they fail to get one office, room is made for them somewhere else, and so they are made to form a class of permanent office-holders, and the power and efficiency of the political oligarchy are steadily maintained.

“The City machine makes friends with saloon keepers, with gamblers and other criminal classes, or with large financial institutions, seeking to obtain control of the vast sums expended for public improvements. This source of revenue has of late proved vastly more fruitful than the earlier and more primitive methods. By means of these various alliances a large body of pledged supporters is secured. In addition to ordinary party officers the machine employs a body of workers formerly known as ward heelers now more generally called workers, gangs, gunmen, or district leaders, some of whom are accustomed to commit various sorts of crime, such as securing fraudulent naturalization papers for foreigners, entering fictitious names on the register of voters, organizing repeaters and voting them on election day.” (Cyclopedia American Political Government, Machine, Political, 1914.)

We quote once more from Bryce, writing in 1894, as to the operation of machine rule in New York City:

“Such an organization as this, with its tentacles touching every point in a vast and amorphous city, is evidently a most potent force, especially as this force is concentrated in one hand—that of the Boss of the Hall. He is practically autocratic; and under him these thousands of officers, controlling from 120,000 to 150,000 votes, move with the precision of a machine. However, it is not only in this mechanism, which may be called a legitimate method of reaching the voters, that the strength of Tammany lies. Its control of the city government gives it endless opportunities of helping its friends, of worrying its opponents, and of enslaving the liquor-dealers. Their licenses are at its mercy, for the police can proceed against or wink at breaches of the law, according to the amount of loyalty the saloon-keeper shows to the Hall. From the contributions of the liquor interest a considerable revenue is raised; more is obtained by assessing office-holders, down to the very small ones; and perhaps most of all by blackmailing wealthy men and corporations, who find that the city authorities have so many opportunities of interfering vexatiously with their business that they prefer to buy them off and live in peace. The worst form of this extortion is the actual complicity with criminals which consists in sharing the profits of crime. A fruitful source of revenue, roughly estimated at $1,000,000 a year, is derived, when the party is supreme at Albany, from legislative blackmailing in the legislature, or, rather, from undertaking to protect the great corporations from the numerous ‘strikers,’ who threaten them there with bills. A case has been mentioned in which as much as $60,000 was demanded from a great company; and the president of another is reported to have said (1893): ‘Formerly we had to keep a man at Albany to buy off the “strikers” one by one. This year we simply paid over a lump sum to the Ring, and they looked after our interests.’ But of all their engines of power none is so elastic as their command of the administration of criminal justice. The mayor appoints the police justices, usually selecting them from certain Tammany workers, sometimes from the criminal class, not often from the legal profession. These justices are often Tammany leaders in their respective districts.” ...

“With such sources of power it is not surprising that Tammany Hall commands the majority of the lower and the foreign masses of New York, though it has never been shown to hold an absolute majority of all the voters of the city. Its local strength is exactly proportioned to the character of the local population; and though there are plenty of native Americans among the rank and file as well as among the leaders, still it is from the poorer districts, inhabited by Jews, Irish, Germans, Italians, Bohemians, that its heaviest vote comes.” (American Commonwealth, Vol. II, pp. 398-400.)

A booklet published in 1887 gives some account of the organization of the political machines of New York City, showing that they all depend upon the use of a minority controllable vote presumably of men without substantial means and whose political support is therefore purchasable in one way or another. The writer says:

“The machine is governed by a singleness of purpose which produces a compactness against which good citizens can only break themselves to pieces when fighting it from within, while if they organize an outside opposition in which everything is done by honest discussion, compactness is almost impossible of achievement.... The politicians would not be difficult to beat if the people would organize for their own protection and from principle; but it is the matter of organization which is difficult, and no one understands this better than the bosses,” (Ivins, Machine Politics.)

The machine is not peculiar to the cities:

“It is also found at the court house of the rural county, at the cross roads postoffice, the village store, the town hall. The difference is one of degree; the mechanism is everywhere the same.... The corrupt political machine of today controlled by a boss is contrary to the American system of government, and were it not a terrible reality this creation would be deemed an impossibility. It is in its present state of perfection, rule of the people by the individual for the boss, his relatives and friends. It is the most complete political despotism ever known.” (Coler on Municipal Government, 1900, pp. 188-190.)

Nor is the use of the machine confined to the Democratic party; even in New York it is part of the Republican party system also. In an address delivered in New York May 2d, 1880, George William Curtis described the Republican political machine and its operations, how it practically excluded nearly nine-tenths of the Republican voters from the primaries. He stated that the bosses were “huge contractors of votes, traders and hucksters in place and pelf,” who “made personal servility the condition of political success” and were ready to “betray the party by bargaining with the enemy”; “that good men stayed at home feeling” that “politics are tiresome and dirty and politicians vulgar bullies and bravadoes”; that “public officers multiply uselessly that there may be more rewards for political and personal service. Primaries, caucuses, conventions, are controlled by the promise and expectation of a chance of plunder which the machine distributes.” Here is an account of how the votes of working men were used in Philadelphia by the Republican boss McManes, to build up a corrupt political organization:

“This gentleman, Mr. James McManes, having gained influence among the humbler voters, was appointed one of the Gas Trustees, and soon managed to bring the whole of that department under his control. It employed (I was told) about two thousand persons, received large sums, and gave out large contracts. Appointing his friends and dependents to the chief places under the Trust, and requiring them to fill the ranks of its ordinary workmen with persons on whom they could rely, the Boss acquired the control of a considerable number of votes and of a large annual revenue. He and his confederates then purchased a controlling interest in the principal horse-car (street tramway) company of the city, whereby they became masters of a large number of additional voters. All these voters were of course expected to act as ‘workers,’ i.e., they occupied themselves with the party organization of the city, they knew the meanest streets and those who dwelt therein, they attended and swayed the primaries, and when an election came round, they canvassed and brought up the voters. Their power, therefore, went far beyond their mere voting strength, for a hundred energetic ‘workers’ mean at least a thousand votes. With so much strength behind them, the Gas Ring, and Mr. McManes at its head, became not merely indispensable to the Republican party in the city, but in fact its chiefs, able therefore to dispose of the votes of all those who were employed permanently or temporarily in the other departments of the city government—a number which one hears estimated as high as twenty thousand. Nearly all the municipal offices were held by their nominees. They commanded a majority in the Select council and Common council. They managed the nomination of members of the State legislature. Even the Federal officials in the custom-house and post-office were forced into a dependent alliance with them, because their support was so valuable to the leaders in Federal politics that it had to be purchased by giving them their way in city affairs.” (Bryce, American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 405.)

“Machine politics are completely subversive both of democracy and of the principle of responsibility for which democracy is supposed to stand. It constitutes nothing except a system of self-appointed rulers, and the principle of elective representation of which we boast becomes a farce. Public servants and officers can in some way, usually, be made responsible for the administration of government, but political bosses never, or at least not until they have retired with plunder enough to live without politics. The despotism of Russia can lay some claim to legitimacy. The Czar obtains his throne and power by the forms of law and has a healthy fear of something, but not so with our bosses. They nominate our candidates for office and mortgage their support, so that we are ruled by men who are not elected to govern us at all, our nominal officers being the mere puppets of the machine. Public opinion is defied until its patience is exhausted, when it is gratified in some caprice and it lapses back again into indifference and the old game goes on. Property of all kinds is blackmailed directly or indirectly, and business terrorized. Even vice and crime come in for tribute as is well known. This is anarchy, not government, and yet we indulge the pleasing illusion that democracy is a paradise.” (Hyslop, Democracy, pp. 32-33.)

And further:

“It is the insolent disregard of public welfare, the deliberate exclusion of intelligent and honest men from office, the refusal to reason about public policy, the shameless corruption of its leaders, its organized methods of deception, bribery, and blackmail with public jobbery and frauds upon the tax-payers, that make machine politics so despicable in the estimation of the public conscience.” (Idem, p. 268.)

All nominations for public office to be voted on by the people are made by a machine whatever may be the party in whose name they are made. This is true not only of the high offices, such as president, governor, senator, etc., but also of such lower offices as mayor, judges of the state courts, state senators and assemblymen. Sometimes these nominations are made at primaries which are carried by the boss through the local organizations; or at political conventions also controlled by the machine. The details of the secret manipulations under the recent primary laws have not yet been and may never be published and exposed; but those of the old political conventions were laid bare in a book published in 1899 by Senator Breen, an experienced politician of New York. He there describes the power of the bosses and the subserviency of the masses.