We are not permitted to vote for a President, but are allowed to help choose electors who represent not us, but the state. There is no such thing as a citizen of the United States, so far as the franchise is concerned. If you have a vote it is by grace of the state in which you reside. The Constitution does not recognize your individual sovereignty in any way. If you doubt this assertion read that document.
The state fixes your qualifications as a voter. It might debar you because of your sex, because of your height, because you were not worth $100,000, and you would have no redress under the Constitution of the United States. Possibly you did not know this.
In practice you are privileged to vote for members of the Lower House of Congress. That is the beginning and the end of your influence so far as your national government is concerned. You have nothing to do with the selection of senators, and I doubt if you are consulted as to the composition of the Supreme Court.
As I have explained, if the Lower House of the Legislature in England passes a law, it at once becomes a law. Under our Constitution the Senate has the power to amend or defeat it. This is supposed by us to be the quintessence of all earthly legislative wisdom. This is Check Number One on the mandate of the foolish people. In passing, I desire to repeat that this is the only alleged republic or constitutional monarchy yet remaining on earth which assumes that its majorities are unfit to influence legislation.
If the measure demanded by the people be so fortunate as to pass the House and Senate, the President may veto it. This is Check Number Two on the mandate of the foolish people. If the President sign the measure the Supreme Court may declare it unconstitutional, and that is the end of it, unless a subsequent infallible Supreme Court should overrule the decision of the first infallible Supreme Court. This is Check Number Three on the mandate of a free and enlightened people. In the event that the Supreme Court should decide that a law is a law, the financial interests adversely affected may and do defeat its enforcement by legal quibbles as to details, or may and do resort to the bribery of the officials charged with the execution of the law. These are Checks Numbers Four and Five on the will of the people in this, the one perfect system of popular government ever designed in all history.
We are the most corrupt nation on earth because of “our peculiar form of Government”; because of the exactions and limitations of a Constitution which was designed to protect and conserve the interests of property rather than of citizenship. Those who are astounded or offended at this statement need only read the record of the convention which drafted the Constitution in order to satisfy themselves as to its moderation. I do not mean to insinuate that the fifty-five delegates who met in Philadelphia in 1787 had any idea of establishing a system which would foster corruption, but the records absolutely prove that they deliberately planned to suppress the rule of the majority in order that popular clamor might not menace property interests. The train of abuses from which we now suffer flow logically from the checks they then provided; checks which place selfish and corrupt wealth beyond the reach of public redress.
Those foolish persons who have been taught in school and in the public prints that the founders of our Constitution were sincerely desirous of establishing a system of government in which the will of the people should find free expression, will be shocked and undeceived when they read its debates and proceedings as recorded by James Madison, one of the delegates from Virginia. When one comes to learn of these fifty-five delegates that not more than ten are on record as voicing the slightest degree of confidence in the wisdom of the people or their fitness to rule, he is likely to take a new view of the Constitution framed by them, and he is able to account for the innumerable ills which we are compelled to suffer.
I will quote a few expressions of opinion from delegates who wielded the greater influence in the construction of the Constitution:
Roger Sherman—“The people should have as little to do as may be about the Government.”
Elbridge Gerry—“The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy, the worst of all possible evils.”