Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

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.