Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

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 on Representative 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 for one 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.

CHAPTER XXV

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.)

There is 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 the case, 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 and defense 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 generally from 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.