Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

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.