The nature of the educational requirement, in my opinion, would have to do with two sorts of preparation other than the ability to read, write and speak the English language. First, we should demand an intelligence test such as is now required of every applicant for enlistment in the United States Army or Navy. These tests have been reduced to a high degree of scientific accuracy. The specific requirements would be somewhat different, of course, than those demanded for the admission to the Army or Navy, insofar as they would have a different object. But the principles should be the same. The purpose of such a test would be to reject all imbeciles, morons, and the mentally unbalanced. We now know that these groups number from ten to fifteen per cent of our population. Placing the ballot in their hands amounts to the same thing as intrusting it to children from six years to fifteen years of age.
The second feature of our test should have to do with a different sort of qualification. The purpose of the intelligence test should be to reject those who are so lacking in natural intelligence as to be unfitted for the simpler responsibilities of life. Our second requirement would have to do with positive preparation. Any applicant should have a full measure of sound knowledge with regard to the history and government of the United States and current political and social problems. Unhappily not only many immigrants, Negroes, and illiterate native whites are at present unfitted to vote intelligently. I fear that an enormous percentage of quite intelligent, and in some respects well educated, persons are not in a position to pass the simplest examination upon the elements of our history and government. Let me not be misunderstood here. I do not propose to limit the suffrage to those who are qualified to become judges on the bench or professors of history and political science. I would favor no standard so high that an intelligent young person could not fully prepare himself in a year, by careful study for a few evenings a week. The last two years of any efficiently graded school should furnish courses sufficient to prepare the student in these things. Indeed, any child completing his grade course where such studies were offered and required would naturally be considered as having measured up to this part of the suffrage requirement. His diploma on leaving school, properly attested, signed and publicly registered, should give him, upon arriving at the age of twenty-one, the right to vote. For children who have not been enabled, for any reason, to complete the grade school work, the necessary process seems simple enough. Evening classes or other means of preparation can be furnished them at any time during the years preceding voting age. Whenever they can pass the examinations they will receive the testimonial of proficiency, so there will be placed in their hands a most valuable and precious document entitling them to the sacred privileges and duties of an American enfranchised citizenship.
My basic contention in this matter is simply this: both our young people and our immigrants must be asked to fit themselves with the greatest care for the use of the ballot. I am agreed that a great many, native-born and foreigners alike, should be admitted to every other privilege and right of citizenship except that of the ballot. Nothing should be denied these except the power to degrade and destroy our government through ignorance and incompetence. The ballot is both a sacred heritage and sacred privilege. It must be recognized and appreciated as such. The scandal of the criminal use of the ballot by outright purchase is the primary source from which flows political corruption. A premium is put upon the achievement and honors conferred in the hearts of the people upon the successful politician regardless of the methods by which he attains success. Most recently this has broken out upon the body of the nation as a putrid sore, revealing within a systemic condition portending the decay and death of our democratic civilization.
Our American democracy, generally successful at first, has more recently left much to be desired. Even a hundred years ago, when we were a primitive, farming population, our victorious democracy had its seamy side. It brought with it every sort of inefficiency. It thrust upon the nation the diabolical spoils system, which is still so largely with us. Yet at that time democracy was saved by the very simplicities of our national life. To-day all is so different. It is time for democracy to tie up its loose ends and pull up the slack at every point. Our public problems to-day are most perplexing to the best informed minds among us. Our whole citizenship must not only acquire a degree of education in public affairs which no people has ever yet attempted—they must be reanimated by a spirit of sound morals and an intense desire to serve their country well. Otherwise no purely negative reforms can save our democratic system.
National Solidarity Through Education
In discussing the public school system of the country there is little new for me to say. But the importance of the public school system in our democracy makes it necessary to state again and again the dependence of our government upon the public school. In the building of a peculiar civilization, the home and the church, as two necessary institutions of divine planting, have been everywhere emphasized. But in the maintenance of a democracy, a system of free schooling is as absolutely necessary as the home or the church. Democracy, however interpreted, must mean a leveling of all the people upward. Intelligence is essential to progress. There is no pathway to higher and better living except that which is illuminated by the light of a general intelligence. Our democracy must be taught to think, and taught to think right, if it is to live. The nations that continue to grovel and grope, indeed, the nations that are being overwhelmed by internal revolutions and internecine strife, are all untaught or badly taught. I have been told that a hungry man near starvation has strange dreams of palaces and feasts. Untaught human minds, unfed by information, unstimulated by sound knowledge and undirected power of logic, have strange dreams. Communism, Sovietism, Bolshevism, Anarchy, are the nightmares of ignorance.
Our American democracy, in its earliest declarations, emphasized the necessity for the general public training of the children and the youth. Probably this was the real thought in the mind of Mr. Jefferson when he wrote his equality clause in the Declaration of Independence. Nothing he ever said has been so misinterpreted and misapplied. Certainly he could not have meant that all men are fundamentally and constitutionally equal. John C. Calhoun, the most logical mind in American history, except perhaps Hamilton, said that that would be a self-evident falsehood and not a self-evident truth. The great Lincoln said that there were physical differences between the African and the Anglo-Saxon that precluded political and social equality. No two things in the universe are equal in this impossible sense which has been distorted from Mr. Jefferson's statement that, "It is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal." Among the billion colored people of the earth, the black, the red, and the yellow, not one nation has ever developed and maintained a constitutional government. If there were equality in the essential things that go to make up the characteristics of the colored races, certainly during the ages there would somewhere have developed among them a civilization capable of producing an upright, dignified, independent manhood. All that this phrase meant at the founding of the republic, and all it means to-day, is equality of opportunity for realizing the inherent possibilities that are locked up in human nature.