CHAPTER XXIV

ANSWER TO THE PLEA THAT THE BALLOT SHOULD BE GRANTED TO THE UNPROPERTIED CLASSES AS A PROTECTIVE WEAPON

Theargument is frequently used in certain quarters that the vote in the hands of the unpropertied classes is a weapon of defense needed to protect their weakness against governmental oppression or to enable them to procure needful affirmative legislation. This argument though without real force is sufficiently plausible to merit attention.

The first and readiest answer is that the experiment has been tried and grievously failed. They have had the ballot ninety years and have used it for naught but mischief to themselves and others. The second answer is that governmental oppression of the poor in this country is an impossibility. It would only be possible through class legislation and there is no conceivable class legislation which would favor the prosperous people at the expense of their poorer fellow citizens. There has never been class legislation in this country, and it is impossible to devise, much more to enact it in a way to be effective, because we have no fixed classes. We may use the word “class” for convenience, but there is no permanent class of poor people any more than there is a fixed class of lazy or sickly or dissolute people, or of professional men or farmers or blacksmiths. There is at all times a body of skilled and one of unskilled laborers, but they are not fixed classes; nor are their members generally paupers or propertyless; most of them either have or expect to accumulate money or property either individually or in their families, and desire to have it secured to them by equal and just laws. The poor come fromall ranks, occupations and families and so do the rich. The son of a rich farmer is a struggling doctor and the daughter of a laborer becomes the wife of a banker. In fact, the principal cause of the envy of the rich by the less rich is not usually that they belong to a fixed class, but the contrary, because they have not remained where they were but have managed by hook or crook to get ahead of their former associates. Class legislation scarcely exists today in any civilized country; it disappeared with the permanent classes of former days and is now merely a tradition of a gone-by period when no doubt the system of fixed classes served a necessary purpose. But even if we choose to consider the different occupations of men, or their pecuniary circumstances from time to time as class divisions, there is no possibility of unequal legislation affecting them, because it is so difficult as to be practically impossible to separate their interests so as to make such legislation profitable to any special interest. We may of course, to please our fancy, imagine attempts at class legislation even here and now. We may imagine enactments aimed at red-headed men or sculptors. And so we may dream of laws against the poor, enacted by a people whose charity and generosity to the poor and unfortunate is proverbial; but they will never be seriously considered in this country until we have become politically insane, in which case all democracy will be practically non-existent among us. As things actually are our intelligent people are fully aware that business prosperity to be real must be universal; that the well-being of the laboring people is absolutely essential to the well-being of the rest of the community, and they will never even consider a suggestion of legislation oppressive towards the wage earners. There are three principal bodies of propertied men; farmers, professional men and traders; who together constitute the bulk of the propertied electorate. No one can imagine the farmers as consenting to any persecution of the poor; and the successful traders and professional men are interested in the prosperity of their poorer neighbors; they are fed by a stream ofwealth which comes from a surplus created and expended by the working classes. The business interests of all the people are so bound together that the prosperity of one is in reality the prosperity of all; the wealth of one furnishes a market for the industries of the other; the need of one man gives employment to his neighbor; and all this is true though the laborer and the employer and the trader and the customer are separated by mountains, plains, seas or national boundaries. All business workers, in whatever capacity, form part of a great joint enterprise, and the body of the poorer people have therefore no business interests which are antagonistic to those of the propertied class. Rather are they interested in the successes of the wealthy, of the capitalists, and especially of those of them who are engaged in mercantile pursuits, or manufacturing industries, because it is on such prosperity that their employment depends. And the situation in political matters is similar to that in business matters. What all need in government is ability and honesty; and the poor man might as well object to being medically treated by one of a wealthy family, as to object to a competent man sitting in the legislature or administering a public office because he is rich. From Washington down to Roosevelt the men of old and wealthy families have in politics always given the poor the benefit of disinterested and enlightened service.

The upper classes are the least likely of all to favor oppressive legislation because being the best trained and most accustomed to deal with large matters, they have been and are the quickest to learn true principles, and to adopt the common sense doctrine that the prosperity of the country is their prosperity, and that class legislation is bad for everybody, and especially bad for property owners. The suffrage was originally conferred upon the unpropertied by the vote of the propertied class; and it is almost nonsensical to suppose that nothing but the ballot saves the former from political oppression at the hands of the very people who voluntarily conferred the gift of the ballot upon them. In fact, the prosperousclasses of our race have not heretofore been anywhere inclined to exercise political tyranny upon the less prosperous. On the contrary liberalism has always been promoted by the upper classes. Had they legislated with effect so as to crush those beneath them when they had the uncontrolled power to do so, the lower classes would never have been permitted to ascend. De Tocqueville says that “almost all the democratic movements which have agitated the world have been directed by nobles.” Historically, the case can best be judged by reference to England as a nation with political institutions much resembling ours, but much older and including an aristocratic order. There, liberal political measures have always been actively advocated by members of the upper classes; and though these originally held all political power, it was not through usurpation, but naturally, and out of the necessity of the case; the lower classes being totally illiterate and the middle classes politically indifferent. And so, according as the lower and middle classes acquired knowledge and wealth, they were admitted step by step to a share in the government. Here we must distinguish between individual political ambition and class legislation. The members of the gentry and of the great families sought to keep their individual places and power, for the same reason that any office holder of the present time holds on to his place with all the assistance he can muster. But they did not work together as a class against the others as a class. Had they done so the inferior orders could never have risen. In France in 1789 the Revolution was fathered by the upper classes. Lafayette and Rochambeau, who came to America to help Washington, were noblemen, and yet strong advocates of free political institutions. The nobility of France in the National Assembly aided the progress of the Revolution as long as it was sane. They voted almost to a man for the abolition of the feudal system and of hereditary privileges. It was only when the Terrorists began to tyrannize by means of riot and slaughter, that the French nobility turned against the Revolution, which had practically become an obscene andbloody march towards atheistic anarchy. This liberal attitude is not surprising, because the effect of education and refinement is to make men not only more benevolent and sympathetic but also more just. Every man of understanding and experience knows, that he is more likely to get both justice and compassion from a man of high rank and breeding, well educated and in easy circumstances, than from one of the lower classes. That is why the aristocratic British judges stand so high in the world’s opinion, and why some of the wiser among us endeavor, often with poor success, to see to it that the judges of our highest courts are well bred, well educated and paid high salaries.

Returning to the subject of class legislation, there has never been in the United States any attempt in that direction. Whether considered historically therefore, or in the light of present day experiences, the fear of class legislation in this country in favor of the middle class against the poor, is so unfounded as to be almost absurd.

The suggestion that the unpropertied should be given the suffrage, so that they may obtain affirmative remedial legislation in their behalf, remains to be answered. But it involves a really unthinkable proposition, namely, the making people prosperous who are naturally unfitted for prosperity. As well think of creating musicians or mathematicians by legislative enactment. By no legislation can the thriftless be made thrifty. By caring for them in almshouses, hospitals, and by donative relief, the State has gone to the limit of taxing the efficient to preserve the inefficient.

The doctrine that the rule of the propertied voters would be oppressive to the poor is not only false, but falsely assumes the existence of a universal tendency fatal to democracy and even to civilization. For, the avowed purpose of our democracy is to promote the material prosperity of the masses; and therefore, to encourage the production of property and the increase of wealth; but if property and wealth have the effect of making the common people tyrants; if the thrifty educated and industrious masses cannot be trusted to carry on government without the practise of tyranny upon the less prosperous, then democracy is a complete failure, and the advance of civilization is hopeless. Fortunately there is no ground for any such conclusion. All legislation which favors property favors all classes, ranks and occupations. The attitude of democracy towards property should be similar to its attitude towards education, that of complete friendliness, founded on the knowledge that it is a good thing, and that we all want it created as rapidly and distributed as widely as possible. The better it is protected the more there will be of it for everyone. The interest of the nation’s workers of all classes is not to oppose property, but to own and control as much of it as they can get.

ANSWER TO THE PLEA THAT THE PRIVILEGE OF SUFFRAGE BE GRANTED TO ALL AS A MEANS OF POLITICAL EDUCATION; AND HEREIN OF SILK PURSES MADE FROM SOWS’ EARS AND OF AMATEUR HARPING

Strangeas it may seem to any one who has given any serious thought to the subject, the proposition has been, if not urged, at least put forward, by respectable writers, that the suffrage should be granted to all citizens without distinction, solely for the educational benefit they will receive from it. The voting booths are evidently viewed by these easy-going minds not as they really are, as judgment seats, as the beginnings and sources of actual government, but as schools for all comers in politics and patriotism; as practise grounds; experimental stations; where every clumsy dunce may try his hand, hit or miss. The author has not been able to find any well-worked-out argument in favor of this fantastic proposition, but it has been seriously presented by men who evidently thought they were uttering sense. The strongest plea in its favor heretofore published appears to be the following from Maccunn, which is quoted in full because the notion is such a queer one that it cannot safely be paraphrased.

“Doubters about democratic franchise are apt to insist that no man should have a vote till he is fit to use it. The necessary rejoinder, however, is that men can only become fit to have votes by first using them. There is no other way. Preparation there may be, in the home, in school, in industrial organization, in the conduct of business. But these will not suffice. Not so easily is the citizen made. It is as Aristotle has it; the harper is not made otherwise than by harping, nor the just man otherwise than by the doing ofjust deeds. How can it be otherwise here, how can the capable voter be made except by voting capably? Citizenship is, after all, but a larger art; and to teach men to do their duties to the State, the only finally effective plan is to give them duties to the State to do. It is for this reason that many a believer in Democracy is ready with an equanimity wrongly construed by his critics as levity or simplicity, to sit unmoved under the warning that a raw Democracy may mismanage; or that even an experienced Democracy may not be the best machine for governing.” (Ethics of Citizenship, p. 81.)

And again as stated by Professor Woodburn:

“It is the old truth that one learns to do by doing. There is no other way. Here is seen the unreason of the contention that no man is entitled to the enjoyment of political rights till he is proved fit to exercise them. It is an impossible requirement. Before he has political rights no man’s fitness for them can be proved. There are certain tests, educational and economic, which may be accepted as securities, but there is only one proof of fitness—the experimental proof which shows how men use their rights after they have them....”“The ethical argument for a wide suffrage—as wide as personality and manhood—is that voting is involved in the right of self-government; that it promotes patriotism and leads to an interest in public affairs; that it tends to remove discontent and promote a feeling of partnership and responsibility; that civil and religious liberty depend upon power, and that the community or body of men who have no political power have no security for their political liberty; that the suffrage is an enlightening and educational agency and that only by active citizenship can the political virtues be developed.” (Political Parties, p. 342.)

“The ethical argument for a wide suffrage—as wide as personality and manhood—is that voting is involved in the right of self-government; that it promotes patriotism and leads to an interest in public affairs; that it tends to remove discontent and promote a feeling of partnership and responsibility; that civil and religious liberty depend upon power, and that the community or body of men who have no political power have no security for their political liberty; that the suffrage is an enlightening and educational agency and that only by active citizenship can the political virtues be developed.” (Political Parties, p. 342.)

This, which may be called the “harper theory,” is directly contrary to the doctrine herein advocated, that voting is a function of government to be operated solely for the benefit of the state, and by means of machinery as perfect and efficient as art and science can make it; the “harper” theory being that the election power house is a practise school for amateurs and blockheads, to be operated in the vague hope that the use of it may somehow improve their natures and understandings. The mere statement of this proposition ought to make its gross absurdity manifest to everybody. It would justify giving the suffrage to children sixteen years of age. As well propose to let boys snowball the passers by, because it would tend to give them exercise and raise their spirits; or to let the hens scratch in the garden, because they get such benefit from it.

The reasoning of the extracts above given strangely ignores the public interests directly involved, the mischiefs of unwise and corrupt voting and the real purpose and history of public elections in this country. Not a word as to the importance of selecting honest and competent men for office; not a hint at the notorious political scandals heretofore caused by the frequent election of fools and knaves; nothing said about the systematic use of the low voting class as organized political banditti. The notedly unfit must continue to vote knavery and folly into high places, and the honest and capable must be discredited and sent to the rear; peculation and blundering must continue indefinitely, in the hope that a set of ignorant, idle, shiftless, dissipated and worthless men may learn to do well by being trained by politicians to do evil. No doubt the act of voting will make even an incapable man think for a few minutes; possibly he may be tempted to wonder what it all means; his mind may be instructed as that of the small child who experiments with a hammer and a looking glass. We are told that the “harper is not made otherwise than by harping,” but his practising is conducted under the control of a master, and not at a public function. A better illustration than Aristotle’s harper would be the Irishman in company, who had never played the violin but was willing he said to do his best if desired. “How can the capable voter be made except by voting capably?” What is complained of is that he is voting not capably but incapably; and is being trained for that purpose. The assertion that men cannot be trained for any function except by the exercise of it is absurd. The universal practice of mankind is to the contrary. According to the “harper” theory, lawyers, doctors and engineers should be admitted to practise, and army officers granted commissions without preparation; since no man can prove his ability in anything until he has attempted its exercise. While it is perfectly true that no man’s fitness for any enterprise, profession or work can be finally ascertained except by actual test, and not always then, yet preparation may be required and preliminary tests made whereby the capacity of classes of men can be judged in advance; and the fear of the mischiefs that the ignorant or unskilled practitioner may do calls for the requirement of these wise precautions. It is well known that appropriate preparatory instruction and discipline tend to qualify men for certain duties, and the lack of them to disqualify them therefor; that a class of men trained for law, engineering, medicine, surgery, or the army will probably become competent officers, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc., while untrained men will be absolutely incompetent. Laymen are not put on the bench, there to learn the law at the expense of a series of blunders. The same theory which is applied in licensing men for the professions and in selections for the judiciary is that which should be applied in establishing suffrage tests. Those who desire to be allowed to meddle with government should first be required to think; and if ignorant, to learn in some other way than at the expense of the public weal. The training of men as voters should be carried on in the school of life, where their mistakes will injure only themselves, and that to a small degree, and not the whole community or nation to a great degree. To permit people who have never practised thinking, to begin by experimenting in the making of laws to govern their neighbors, or in the appointment of officials, is preposterous. The late war and a hundred other similar experiences ought surely to have taught the most silly of our doctrinaires, and the most absurd of our demagogues, how dangerous it is for fools to meddle with theaffairs of government, and how reprehensible it is for sensible people to permit the fools to do so.

What these writers above quoted must mean if they mean anything practicable, is that those who are already capable voters are stimulated by the actual exercise of the franchise into greater curiosity and knowledge of public affairs. This is undoubtedly true; the young doctor learns by practice, but only after he is qualified to practise. An untrained man would never become a competent physician by killing patients. The argument for the “harper” theory confuses the question; it ignores the difference in capacity between classes of citizens, and thus misses the point. It urges the educational value of the suffrage to all voters without making a proper distinction between the intelligent and propertied men and the unintelligent floaters and other controllable voters. But it is not proposed to disfranchise the former, and they do not need the suffrage for educational purposes. The question then is entirely confined to the venal and otherwise dangerous residuum, whether they shall be invited to take part in government merely in order to stimulate them to think on state questions. The answer cannot be doubtful. We may recognize the fact that the interest in politics of an already capable voter is probably stimulated by his taking part in an election; but the proposal that a dishonest or incapable man’s vote should be invited merely for the purpose of starting his dormant interest in politics, or in the hope of stimulating him to be more of a patriot and less of a rascal is ridiculous.

There is as already pointed out in a previous chapter a school of preparation and a test for voters in full operation, of whose valuable instruction the state may take the benefit; namely the school of business and the test of business success. In that school all may aspire to earn the certificate of diligence, industry and good judgment, which in the shape of a fair amount of material prosperity is given to all successful aspirants. This method will not be infallible any more than the graduate professional examinations; but it will establishthe principle of fitness; it will purify and elevate politics and will afford a fairer test than any other at present known to the world.

In the foregoing discussion it has been conceded for the sake of argument, that voting might possibly be a means of moral or mental development to the voter. But the assumption is unwarranted and contrary to the facts. There is no healthy stimulus of any kind to be gained in manhood suffrage politics. The spectacle of popular elections as at present conducted, and the display of fraud and humbug which they present, is demoralizing to the whole nation, and especially to its young men. The moral injury to the voter caused by the operation of universal suffrage, and by the immoral attitude of the nation solemnly asserting the falsity that the vote of the ignorant and disorderly is as valuable as that of the orderly and educated man was recognized by John Stuart Mill in his work onRepresentative Government, where he says that equal voting is “in principle wrong, because recognizing a wrong standard, and exercising a bad influence on the voter’s mind. It is not useful, but hurtful, that the constitution of the country should declare ignorance to be entitled to as much political “power as knowledge.” (P. 188.) That the practical influence of political life as at present conducted tends rather to degrade than to elevate the masses is the universal testimony of all having knowledge on the subject. The pursuit of politics as a business is vile, and its continued practice must have a deteriorating effect on those engaged in it. As for the influence of ordinary political activity upon the average voter, it is in no way beneficial; if anything it is injurious. For generations, worthless men have been in the enjoyment of the suffrage in the United States. It has never made an intellectual man out of an ignorant one, nor reformed a drunkard, but it has created many drunkards and loafers, and has had the effect of training many to sell their votes and to spend their time in low and disreputable local political intrigues. As for the majority, those who confine their political activities to voting forone of two candidates without any strong convictions in his favor, they cannot be said to receive thereby any ethical or intellectual exercise or benefit whatever.

“Mere existence” (says Bagehot) “under a good government is more instructive than the power of now and then contributing to a bad government.” (Parliamentary Reform, p. 340.) The mere act of voting for a man or a measure without proper knowledge is demoralizing to the mind and deadening to the conscience. Nor is there moral stimulus in the exercise of a trifling privilege, which is also enjoyed by the meanest and the least worthy, and the employment whereof is usually at best a mere futility, and frequently a farce. What moral elevation can be gained from voting to put in place either a humbug whom you know, or a non-entity whom you don’t know? And yet this is about what the exercise of the franchise usually amounts to in every village, city and town in the United States.

The “harper” suffrage doctrine in its entirety was in the decade from 1865 to 1875 applied to the Southern states, when the negroes were granted the suffrage in compliance with the hysterical demands of demagogues, fanatics, and sentimentalists, who made the American people believe that all a man had to do to become a harper was to get a harp and keep harping. The disastrous results were told in a previous chapter of this book. The history of that experiment with its sordid incidents, ought to be sufficient to convince the most credulous believer in popular rule, that our Revolutionary ancestors were right in insisting that “a silk purse cannot be made out of a sow’s ear,” that there should be no harping except under the supervision of a competent master, and that an untrained musical performer at a concert is certain to spoil the performance, disgrace himself, and benefit nobody.

ANSWER TO SUGGESTION THAT UNLIMITED SUFFRAGE IS A PART OF AMERICAN LIBERTY

“In all these scenes that I have mentioned I learn one thing that I never knew before and that is that the key to Liberty is not in the hands of License, but Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter, the seeming desire, the parade, the abandon, I see this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey those unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.” (O. Henry,A Ramble in Aphasia.)

Thereis no doubt a vague impression abroad, which though entirely erroneous, is somewhat generally entertained, that American manhood or universal suffrage is in some way actually or historically connected with American liberties. Indeed, in some minds the right to vote for something or for someone, is either confused or confounded with liberty itself, or is regarded as the guarantee or guardian of liberty, or its open and visible sign, or a combination of all three. To some, the universal ballot is a sort of fetish, which they distrust and despise yet dare not offend. There are even those who will grant all here recounted of the evils and stupidities of manhood suffrage, and yet will answer that all these, and more, if need be, must we endure for the sake of the preservation of liberty; which in some unexplained way depends on the continuation of the voting privilege to those incapable of properly exercising it. This prepossession is not sustainable by the reason or facts of thecase, but just because it is sentimental rather than rational, it is for that very reason more difficult to overthrow by logic. It is easier to meet an argument than to dispel an illusion or to destroy a prejudice. It is especially difficult when the prejudice is not definite nor formulated, but lies dormant in the mind; shadowy, vague and traditional, and yet amounting to a real obstacle to the acceptance of the truth. One might do battle with it by arraying sentiment against sentiment; the true against the false; offsetting the sham sentiment for an imaginary liberty by a true impulse of patriotic indignation at the frauds, rascalities, corruptions and waste attached to the wardenship of this pretended guardian of liberty; but this play of sentiment against sentiment can safely be left to work itself out in the breast of the reader. This chapter will therefore be devoted to an appeal to reason to dispel whatever prejudice in favor of manhood suffrage as a supposed bulwark of liberty may still linger in the reader’s mind.

First, as to our political liberties. A convincing proof that the suffrages of the unpropertied class are not needed to preserve them is found in the fact that they were originally secured without those suffrages. We are not indebted to manhood suffrage for our free institutions, nor for the valuable rights and guarantees secured by the Constitution, nor for the ideas and aspirations from which those institutions sprung. These rights and guarantees were secured, these free institutions were founded by practical and intelligent men of affairs; the propertied leaders of a propertied constituency, and by the use of practical methods, to whose success the populace only contributed their obedience to directions. Neither the Revolution, nor the Constitution recognized the doctrine of a natural right to the franchise. The Revolution in fact did not deal with individual rights at all; it was merely a movement to get rid of British imperial rule, not in order to obtain more liberty, but to secure greater efficiency in government. It came to pass because the thirteen colonies had developed to such a point, that their general interests anddefense required the establishment of a central authority. The British Parliament attempted to function for that purpose by laying taxes etc.; the colonies revolted, and finally created a central governing and taxing power of their own, necessitating political independence. The only question settled by the Revolution was that the supreme governing power should be American and not British; it in no way concerned itself with the individual liberties personal or political of the American people, nor their relations to the state; it asserted no new principle of government, nor did it enlarge the suffrage. The United States Constitution was framed by delegates, all of whom were men of property, and represented propertied constituencies. In short, American Independence was schemed, the Union founded, the Constitution adopted, and all the foundations of the greatness and freedom of this country established, without the aid of manhood suffrage, without the unpropertied vote, and by men who believed in and practised a property qualification system. It is not even likely that an inferior class of men would have ever done the work, which required skill, experience and ripe wisdom; qualities more often found in the successful than in the unsuccessful, and never to be looked for in the populace.

Therefore, in our organic scheme of political liberty, manhood suffrage counts for nothing, and its only activity in relation thereto has been to misuse it. But, says one, how about the citizen’s daily enjoyment of freedom and sense of freedom in actual life? The people of the United States like those of other civilized countries, enjoy a life enriched with a thousand material comforts and conveniences, with a sense of assurance of their continued enjoyment; is that or any part of it due to or supported by manhood suffrage? Not at all. None of this can be credited to any extension or enlargement of popular privileges or liberty, either by widening of the franchise or otherwise. The tendency of democracy is not towards an increase of personal individual liberty, and the act of voting, no matter how conducted, can in no way tend to confer personal liberty on the individual; because personal liberty is not existent in any civilized society. The progress of the country has been marked by development in the direction of the application of restraint to human actions; in other words by the very opposite of the enlargement of individual liberty. The nearest approach to a free man in a modern community, is the tramp who saunters along the road; and his existence is maintained, not by operations of liberty but by methods of compulsion. The very road upon which he walks is there because other men were compelled by government to build and maintain it. And so, the happiness of each of us is assured to him not by liberty granted, but by liberty withheld as well from him as from his neighbors. A familiar instance of this is in the creation and use of a public park in a great city; an artificially created privilege, which is not conceivable without the strictest regulation, restraint, and denial of individual liberty of action. Personal liberty as understood by the masses, that is the privilege of doing as one pleases, does not exist in any civilized community, and could not be introduced to any appreciable extent without steps toward anarchy. This is not a land of liberty, but a land of civilization, which is the antithesis of liberty. As has been well said by Moorfield Storey, “Civilization is the process of restraining the will of the individual by law.”

Every American citizen is born and lives under the wholesome but constant and severe restraint of a high civilization. Such a thing as personal liberty is unknown to him from the beginning; his infant limbs are clad, his baby food prescribed, his habits regulated, according to rules established long before he was born. As he matures, his boyish dress, his books, his studies, his language and his play are nearly all arbitrary and conventional. He must eat certain food at certain times; his hours for sleep and waking are fixed by others. This system continues through school and college, and when he enters the business world he finds an absolute régime of dress, food, hours, employment, language, games, habits and life generallyfrom which there is no escape. Even his beliefs, historical, religious, and scientific, are all laid out for him. When he goes on a short vacation even for a tramp in the mountains, his movements are all restrained, not only by the rigors of nature and the daily needs of existence, but by the rules of society. In fact all his relations to other men, involve social rules of behaviour which must be obeyed, and all these rules, laws, fashions, customs, beliefs and obligations were fixed without consulting him, and in most cases before he and his parents were born.

This subjection to Society is a condition of our life. The president is just as much bound by it as the poorest day laborer; it is the result of the growth of population, of public order, of civilization. The business man arising in the morning and going out to his work, is reassured by seeing the policeman at the corner; with a despotic gesture the officer stops the traffic and the man crosses the street in safety. Though he may have enemies, he knows they will not be permitted to insult him in the street, nor to libel him in the morning papers, nor in the private correspondence just then being delivered by the government postal carrier, because happily free speech is not permitted in civilized countries. He enters the government inspected street car, elevated or subway, protected by strict authority from the presence of people with contagious diseases. He encounters the same regulative tendency in his private business life. In the elevator, in his office, in the commerce exchange, in his transactions with banks and merchants, in the restaurants, everywhere and all day long, he is under severe restrictions, without which, as applied to others, he could not transact his business or even live in safety. The lease to his office which fifty years ago contained but a few simple stipulations, now includes a hundred strict requirements formerly unheard of, all giving great power to the landlord but really operating for the protection of the tenant. A similar government is seen in social life; a man’s manners and the tones of his voice, his attitude, gestures and general behaviour are regulated by despotic custom. All this restraint and discipline,though it may seem to curtail liberty, yet in an indirect but perfectly perceptible way it actually enlarges its scope, by giving access to new fields of enjoyment, made available as such by restrictions on their abuse. So that all our satisfactions, all our joys and pleasures, our prosperity, our bodily health, our very lives are derived from and depend not upon liberty but upon protection, and that moral and physical restraint which is incident to protection.

This dependence of man upon law, order and restraint for every good in life, is not a new thing, nor a creation of modern times; it is inherent in the nature of human society; and was as true of the primitive man as of ourselves. This is not always understood. Some visionary writers have pronounced a state of liberty to be the ideal state, and have imagined liberty as a precious boon originally bestowed upon man, and enjoyed in past ages in a higher degree than at present; they regard restrictions as evils, incident to civilization, perhaps, but still evils. They consider liberty to be something positive and beneficial in its character, like a birthright which man has from time to time bargained away like Esau for the pottage of social advantages. This is an utterly false and mischievous conception which has heretofore helped to create trouble, and being interpreted by half-educated leaders to a foolish populace may do so again. Looking back as far as we choose down the vista of the past, we find that then just as to-day law and order made life worth living, and liberty or the absence of restraint meant misery and death. To find a condition of perfect liberty we must go back to a solitary savage; for complete human liberty and solitary savagery are practically identical. From that point on every addition to human society or civilization, whether in the shape of persons or property, carries with it as a necessary incident its own demand for protection and restraint. Assume if you please the existence of the solitary primitive man, imagined by these dreamers as having perfect liberty, yet that supposed liberty did not include any positive or definite rights whatever. Itdid not for example include the right to interfere with others, because the others did not then exist. When society came in contact with him, he did not surrender to her any previous rights in relation to others because such rights could not be created till those others actually arrived. Nor could he have possessed liberty in the sense of exemption from social rules, because as there was no society, there were no such rules. Society therefore and government came as a clear gain to humanity; they were additions to the imaginary abstract or natural man and to his life; and the restrictions referred to are but part of the gift; they are incidental to it, and constitute its essential condition, and in no way change its character as a clear benefit and gift to man. Thus, if one gives me a horse, it in no way detracts from the character of the gift that I must feed and shelter the animal. If I give a boy a drum, it is none the less a clear gift because he is forbidden to drive a hole in its head. His liberty is not thereby restricted, because before he had the gift he was also unable to punch the hole. The imaginary original solitary man, upon the arrival of a neighbor, gains in companionship, protection, help, division of labor, etc. He loses nothing in being forbidden to kill, to maim or to rob the newcomer. First, because the privilege of wanton destruction does not exist as a human right, nor is it a part of natural human liberty, but is in its nature and effect a curtailment thereof. Second, because, in his former solitary state, there was no one in existence whom he might kill, maim or rob. Coming up then to tribal existence, and observing the very earliest and lowest exhibitions of social life, we find no trace of the mythical liberty the theorists have imagined, but rather the practice of restraint applied by law or custom as far as requisite to protect the individual. One savage is not permitted to assault another, without paying the penalty according to the custom of the tribe, or suffering the vengeance of the assaulted party or his friends. He does not possess the liberty to destroy or appropriate any ornament, weapon or other property that any one of his fellow savages possesses. To the first beginningsof property, is attached as a part thereof, the incident of protective restraint upon its non-owners. When, whether in barbarous or highly civilized communities, the citizen is forbidden to plunder or injure property, he is not thereby deprived of any part of a man’s inherent liberty; the restraint is merely a qualification or condition of the property in question which does not affect third parties or detract from their previous rights. When modern society forbids trespassing on, or plundering cultivated fields or orchards, it does not deprive any one of anything that his ancestors theretofore had, because in their primitive state there was no right of trespass on or plunder of that property; there were no cultivated fields or orchards to rob or on which to trespass.

In short, there is no such condition either natural or acquired as that of human liberty, nor does liberty of any sort exist in this world or even in the whole universe. The very word “liberty” is without concrete signification, it is a mere negation like “anarchy” and “nothingness,” and represents an idea which is incompatible with government of any sort. This truth is fully realized by the best students of civics, and is just as true of American or republican government as of that of any other country or system. “All government,” says Sir William Temple, “is a restraint on liberty, and when men seem to contend for liberty, it is indeed but to have a change of those who rule.” The consent of the governed can be given only to the mere form of government, said Webster, in a speech at the Charleston Bar Dinner, 1847, and further: “Liberty is the creation of law, essentially different from that authorized licentiousness that trespasses on right. It is a legal and refined idea, the offspring of high civilization, which the savage never understood and never can understand. Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have. It is an error to suppose that liberty consists in a paucity of laws—that man is free who is protected from injury.”

In thus showing that what is commonly called “liberty” really consists in restraint, Webster in effect smashed the silly “liberty” legend. And Ruskin voices the same idea (Pol. Economy, Works, Vol. 17, p. 432): “Americans, as a nation, set their trust in Liberty and in Equality, of which I detest the one, and deny the possibility of the other.” And again, (Vol. 8, p. 248):

“How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty; most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the Universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men for the mockery and semblance of it have used heaviest punishment.... If there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that principle is not liberty, but law.”

“The only liberty,” says Burke, “that is valuable is a liberty connected with order, that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them; it inheres in all good and steady government, is in its substance and vital principle.” The blessings commonly called by the name of liberty are therefore seen to be the result of just and efficient government, and the evidence is overwhelming that of such government in this country manhood suffrage has been a constant enemy.

Sometimes a foolish suggestion may be seen in print that manhood suffrage is needed to safeguard religious liberty in the United States. Religious liberty and political liberty are practically identical. The noted religious struggles and persecutions in Europe were really political affairs; and the framers of our Constitution included therein guarantees for religious freedom as a matter of course. No further safeguard is needed. The English race has everywhere adopted religious liberty as a definite policy ever since 1688, and theright to religious liberty is no longer questioned by anyone, either in this or in any English-speaking country. There are say two hundred different religious sects in the United States, some of which have but very few followers, and are destitute of means or influence to defend themselves against small or great persecutions; yet no one ever hears of their being molested or even seriously criticised for their religious views, and their security and protection are amply guaranteed by the fundamental law and settled opinions of the American people. There is no more need of shaping our suffrage laws so as to guard against religious persecution, than there is of private gentlemen wearing swords, or of our building our dwellings in the shape of castles for defense, as our ancestors did in the England of the Plantagenets. But were it otherwise, and were any tendency to religious intolerance apparent in this country, it is almost certain that it would crop out among the uneducated and the thriftless rabble, and not among the well-to-do, the educated or the middle class. History and experience teach that it is among the lowest class that the strongest prejudices exist, and that it is that class who are the most violent, tyrannical and intolerant in their expression. The great religious persecutions authorized by governments in past times were incited by the clamor of the populace. The upper and more learned classes were always less superstitious, more skeptical, tolerant and merciful. It was the Jewish mob who demanded the death of Christ when the enlightened Roman Governor would have set him free; it was the Roman rabble who roared for the blood of the early Christians; and nearly all subsequent religious persecutions in civilized nations, have either been in accordance with popular opinion, or have been used as weapons in the strife between two factions of the people at large. It was the lower classes of French who slaughtered the Catholics in the time of the French Revolution. In our own time, the brutal and lawless attacks on religious minorities in this and other countries, the pogroms of the Jews in Russia and Poland, and the massacres of Christians in the Turkishdominions were popular performances. So therefore, judging by the past, if religious liberty should ever be threatened in this country, the menace would not come from the educated or middle classes, nor from such thrifty and peaceable workers as may have accumulated a few hundred or a few thousand dollars of property, but from a lawless mob of the unthinking class who degrade our elections.

The reader may now fairly ask, what then was the struggle for liberty of which we have all heard so much as continuing for centuries in Europe and America? It had two aspects, in both of which the sympathy of the element added to the voting list by manhood suffrage has been consciously or unconsciously on the side of tyranny. One aspect was that of the resistance of religious minorities to majority oppression; the other, the resistance of business men to governmental oppression, by way of excessive taxes, imposts and restrictions. The non-propertied classes would probably in the one case have swelled the tyrannical majority, and in the other would have favored as they still do interference with business by the state. In the middle ages the resistance of business men to governmental and baronial exactions was almost continuous, and was displayed by agitations and revolts frequently described as struggles for liberty. Always the real object was the same; the privilege claimed by business men, of conducting honest and peaceful industries, businesses and exchanges without interference and secured from confiscation. There has also been in the past a steady clearing away by merchants, traders, craftsmen and their friends and partisans, of obstacles placed by governmental stupidity, error and prejudice in the way of peaceful labor, business and general betterment. In short it has been a struggle to put business men and business methods in control. These contests continue everywhere; they are still going on in the United States; but the non-propertied classes have never joined in them on the side of liberty; they have been and are prejudicially arrayed against business methods and business men. The business world has always had to win its way and hold its ground despite them.

The other aspect of the so called struggle for liberty in the days gone by, was that already referred to, of the resistance of religious minorities to persecution. This persecution, though governmental in form, was in reality a majority oppression, in which the government merely represented the prevailing opinion. Such were the persecutions of the British Protestant dissenters, the American Quakers and Baptists, and the French Huguenots. Had manhood suffrage then prevailed, the majority demanding the persecutions would probably have been greater and more truculent. We may be sure that the populace would have uttered no word for toleration.

Since manhood suffrage has been established the people have created six amendments to the United States Constitution, of which five were unwise, unjust or arbitrary and one merely formal. The record is not flattering to popular wisdom or justice. Here they are:

Article XIII.Abolished slavery. This was unjust and arbitrary. The slave owners had bought and paid for their slaves under legal and judicial sanction. To emancipate them without compensation to the owners was an unauthorized confiscation. England paid for her slaves in the West Indies when she set them free. But then, the British voters were property owners and believers in property rights.

Articles XIV and XV.These were intended to give the vote to the newly enfranchised Southern negroes. After producing much turmoil, political rascality and misgovernment in the South, the enforcement of these measures was abandoned and they are now dead letter provisions.

Article XVI.This was not a new measure; it provides for an income tax which it was formerly supposed could be levied, and was levied, till it was found by judicial inquiry that the Constitution had failed to authorize it. Its ratification was little more than a formality.

Article XVII.This provides for the election of senators inCongress by the people instead of by the legislatures. The result has been a strengthening of the bosses and a lowering of quality of members of the Senate.

Article XVIII.Prohibits the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors. A manifestly arbitrary and oppressive majority measure.

The operation of manhood suffrage in our great cities has clearly been tyrannical, because of the absence of proper restraint upon evil doers. Can any one truly say that the people of these cities have been benefited in the slightest degree, by the so-called privilege of voting for their magistrates or rulers? Assuming that their political bosses would let them vote as they wished, or that the bosses are popular agents, and that the people do or can govern in their cities, where is the public benefit? It seems to be generally conceded that on the whole the city of Washington is the best managed city in the Union, and it is governed by a Congress in whose choice the people of Washington have no share. Does any one find his comfort or his freedom curtailed or his life in danger in Washington? The fact is that the exercise of suffrage is a function, whose object is not to preserve liberty, but the opposite, namely, to establish proper control, and when that can be effectively done without popular elections everybody is better off.

The conclusion of the whole review of the relation between manhood suffrage and the liberty of the citizen is that happiness and all good results in the personal relations of men are to be found not in liberty, but in just law, order and restraint, which no one believes are better subserved by admission of the weak and ignorant to the suffrage; and that as sound political institutions and religious toleration were achieved without manhood suffrage in the past they would probably be safer without it in the future.

This leads one naturally to the subject of the operation of manhood suffrage in connection with government by majorities in the present day, which will be treated in the next chapter.

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