There are sincere people who might think that because the Bolsheviks have kept themselves in power, that they must be right. We can not agree with the reasoning. Even if we knew nothing about the bayonets and machine guns and firing squads and prisons, we would not agree to the reasoning that the Bolshevik government is right just because it is in power. We prefer the reasoning of the greatest man whom America has produced, Abraham Lincoln, whose words, which we quote, seem to us to exactly fit the present Russian situation:
“A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only free sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”—Abraham Lincoln.
The Chamber of Commerce of the United States has, through Frederic J. Haskin, Washington, D. C., distributed an admirable pamphlet, temperate and judicial, which compares the Soviet system with the American constitutional system. This pamphlet written by Hon. Burton L. French, of Idaho, concludes his discussion as follows:
“In a government that has been heralded so widely as being the most profound experiment in democracy that has ever been undertaken, we would naturally expect that the franchise would be along lines that would recognize all mankind embraced within the citizenship of the nation as standing upon an equal footing. The United States has for many years adhered to that principle. It was that principle largely for which our fathers died when they established our government, and yet that principle seems foreign to the way of thinking of Lenin and Trotsky as they shaped the Russian constitution.
PARALLEL 8—THOSE WHO MAY VOTE
RUSSIA
1. The franchise extends to all over 18 years of age who have acquired the means of living through manual labor, and also persons engaged in housekeeping for the former.
2. Soldiers of the army and navy.
3. The former two classes when incapacitated.
UNITED STATES