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.
This subjection to Society is a condition of our life. The president is
just as much bound by it as the poorest day laborer; it is the result of
the growth of population, of public order, of civilization. The business
man arising in the morning and going out to his work, is reassured by
seeing the policeman at the corner; with a despotic gesture the officer
stops the traffic and the man crosses the street in safety. Though he
may have enemies, he knows they will not be permitted to insult him in
the street, nor to libel him in the morning papers, nor in the private
correspondence just then being delivered by the government postal
carrier, because happily free speech is not permitted in civilized
countries. He enters the government inspected street car, elevated or
subway, protected by strict authority from the presence of people with
contagious diseases. He encounters the same regulative tendency in his
private business life. In the elevator, in his office, in the commerce
exchange, in his transactions with banks and merchants, in the
restaurants, everywhere and all day long, he is under severe
restrictions, without which, as applied to others, he could not transact
his business or even live in safety. The lease to his office which fifty
years ago contained but a few simple stipulations, now includes a
hundred strict requirements formerly unheard of, all giving great power
to the landlord but really operating for the protection of the tenant. A
similar government is seen in social life; a man’s manners and the tones
of his voice, his attitude, gestures and general behaviour are regulated
by despotic custom. All this restraint and discipline, though it may
seem to curtail liberty, yet in an indirect but perfectly perceptible
way it actually enlarges its scope, by giving access to new fields of
enjoyment, made available as such by restrictions on their abuse. So
that all our satisfactions, all our joys and pleasures, our prosperity,
our bodily health, our very lives are derived from and depend not upon
liberty but upon protection, and that moral and physical restraint which
is incident to protection.
This dependence of man upon law, order and restraint for every good in
life, is not a new thing, nor a creation of modern times; it is inherent
in the nature of human society; and was as true of the primitive man as
of ourselves. This is not always understood. Some visionary writers have
pronounced a state of liberty to be the ideal state, and have imagined
liberty as a precious boon originally bestowed upon man, and enjoyed in
past ages in a higher degree than at present; they regard restrictions
as evils, incident to civilization, perhaps, but still evils. They
consider liberty to be something positive and beneficial in its
character, like a birthright which man has from time to time bargained
away like Esau for the pottage of social advantages. This is an utterly
false and mischievous conception which has heretofore helped to create
trouble, and being interpreted by half-educated leaders to a foolish
populace may do so again. Looking back as far as we choose down the
vista of the past, we find that then just as to-day law and order made
life worth living, and liberty or the absence of restraint meant misery
and death. To find a condition of perfect liberty we must go back to a
solitary savage; for complete human liberty and solitary savagery are
practically identical. From that point on every addition to human
society or civilization, whether in the shape of persons or property,
carries with it as a necessary incident its own demand for protection
and restraint. Assume if you please the existence of the solitary
primitive man, imagined by these dreamers as having perfect liberty, yet
that supposed liberty did not include any positive or definite rights
whatever. It did not for example include the right to interfere with
others, because the others did not then exist. When society came in
contact with him, he did not surrender to her any previous rights in
relation to others because such rights could not be created till those
others actually arrived. Nor could he have possessed liberty in the
sense of exemption from social rules, because as there was no society,
there were no such rules. Society therefore and government came as a
clear gain to humanity; they were additions to the imaginary abstract or
natural man and to his life; and the restrictions referred to are but
part of the gift; they are incidental to it, and constitute its
essential condition, and in no way change its character as a clear
benefit and gift to man. Thus, if one gives me a horse, it in no way
detracts from the character of the gift that I must feed and shelter the
animal. If I give a boy a drum, it is none the less a clear gift because
he is forbidden to drive a hole in its head. His liberty is not thereby
restricted, because before he had the gift he was also unable to punch
the hole. The imaginary original solitary man, upon the arrival of a
neighbor, gains in companionship, protection, help, division of labor,
etc. He loses nothing in being forbidden to kill, to maim or to rob the
newcomer. First, because the privilege of wanton destruction does not
exist as a human right, nor is it a part of natural human liberty, but
is in its nature and effect a curtailment thereof. Second, because, in
his former solitary state, there was no one in existence whom he might
kill, maim or rob. Coming up then to tribal existence, and observing the
very earliest and lowest exhibitions of social life, we find no trace of
the mythical liberty the theorists have imagined, but rather the
practice of restraint applied by law or custom as far as requisite to
protect the individual. One savage is not permitted to assault another,
without paying the penalty according to the custom of the tribe, or
suffering the vengeance of the assaulted party or his friends. He does
not possess the liberty to destroy or appropriate any ornament, weapon
or other property that any one of his fellow savages possesses. To the
first beginnings of property, is attached as a part thereof, the
incident of protective restraint upon its non-owners. When, whether in
barbarous or highly civilized communities, the citizen is forbidden to
plunder or injure property, he is not thereby deprived of any part of a
man’s inherent liberty; the restraint is merely a qualification or
condition of the property in question which does not affect third
parties or detract from their previous rights. When modern society
forbids trespassing on, or plundering cultivated fields or orchards, it
does not deprive any one of anything that his ancestors theretofore had,
because in their primitive state there was no right of trespass on or
plunder of that property; there were no cultivated fields or orchards to
rob or on which to trespass.
In short, there is no such condition either natural or acquired as that
of human liberty, nor does liberty of any sort exist in this world or
even in the whole universe. The very word “liberty” is without concrete
signification, it is a mere negation like “anarchy” and “nothingness,”
and represents an idea which is incompatible with government of any
sort. This truth is fully realized by the best students of civics, and
is just as true of American or republican government as of that of any
other country or system. “All government,” says Sir William Temple, “is
a restraint on liberty, and when men seem to contend for liberty, it is
indeed but to have a change of those who rule.” The consent of the
governed can be given only to the mere form of government, said Webster,
in a speech at the Charleston Bar Dinner, 1847, and further: “Liberty is
the creation of law, essentially different from that authorized
licentiousness that trespasses on right. It is a legal and refined idea,
the offspring of high civilization, which the savage never understood
and never can understand. Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome
restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more
liberty we have. It is an error to suppose that liberty consists in a
paucity of laws--that man is free who is protected from injury.”
In thus showing that what is commonly called “liberty” really consists
in restraint, Webster in effect smashed the silly “liberty” legend. And
Ruskin voices the same idea (_Pol. Economy, Works_, Vol. 17, p. 432):
“Americans, as a nation, set their trust in Liberty and in Equality, of
which I detest the one, and deny the possibility of the other.” And
again, (Vol. 8, p. 248):
“How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit of that
treacherous phantom which men call Liberty; most treacherous,
indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might
surely show us that not only its attainment, but its being, was
impossible. There is no such thing in the Universe. There can never
be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it
not; and we men for the mockery and semblance of it have used
heaviest punishment.... If there be any one principle more widely
than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than
another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that
principle is not liberty, but law.”
“The only liberty,” says Burke, “that is valuable is a liberty connected
with order, that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which
cannot exist at all without them; it inheres in all good and steady
government, is in its substance and vital principle.” The blessings
commonly called by the name of liberty are therefore seen to be the
result of just and efficient government, and the evidence is
overwhelming that of such government in this country manhood suffrage
has been a constant enemy.
Sometimes a foolish suggestion may be seen in print that manhood
suffrage is needed to safeguard religious liberty in the United States.
Religious liberty and political liberty are practically identical. The
noted religious struggles and persecutions in Europe were really
political affairs; and the framers of our Constitution included therein
guarantees for religious freedom as a matter of course. No further
safeguard is needed. The English race has everywhere adopted religious
liberty as a definite policy ever since 1688, and the right to
religious liberty is no longer questioned by anyone, either in this or
in any English-speaking country. There are say two hundred different
religious sects in the United States, some of which have but very few
followers, and are destitute of means or influence to defend themselves
against small or great persecutions; yet no one ever hears of their
being molested or even seriously criticised for their religious views,
and their security and protection are amply guaranteed by the
fundamental law and settled opinions of the American people. There is no
more need of shaping our suffrage laws so as to guard against religious
persecution, than there is of private gentlemen wearing swords, or of
our building our dwellings in the shape of castles for defense, as our
ancestors did in the England of the Plantagenets. But were it otherwise,
and were any tendency to religious intolerance apparent in this country,
it is almost certain that it would crop out among the uneducated and the
thriftless rabble, and not among the well-to-do, the educated or the
middle class. History and experience teach that it is among the lowest
class that the strongest prejudices exist, and that it is that class who
are the most violent, tyrannical and intolerant in their expression. The
great religious persecutions authorized by governments in past times
were incited by the clamor of the populace. The upper and more learned
classes were always less superstitious, more skeptical, tolerant and
merciful. It was the Jewish mob who demanded the death of Christ when
the enlightened Roman Governor would have set him free; it was the Roman
rabble who roared for the blood of the early Christians; and nearly all
subsequent religious persecutions in civilized nations, have either been
in accordance with popular opinion, or have been used as weapons in the
strife between two factions of the people at large. It was the lower
classes of French who slaughtered the Catholics in the time of the
French Revolution. In our own time, the brutal and lawless attacks on
religious minorities in this and other countries, the pogroms of the
Jews in Russia and Poland, and the massacres of Christians in the
Turkish dominions were popular performances. So therefore, judging by
the past, if religious liberty should ever be threatened in this
country, the menace would not come from the educated or middle classes,
nor from such thrifty and peaceable workers as may have accumulated a
few hundred or a few thousand dollars of property, but from a lawless
mob of the unthinking class who degrade our elections.
The reader may now fairly ask, what then was the struggle for liberty of
which we have all heard so much as continuing for centuries in Europe
and America? It had two aspects, in both of which the sympathy of the
element added to the voting list by manhood suffrage has been
consciously or unconsciously on the side of tyranny. One aspect was that
of the resistance of religious minorities to majority oppression; the
other, the resistance of business men to governmental oppression, by way
of excessive taxes, imposts and restrictions. The non-propertied classes
would probably in the one case have swelled the tyrannical majority, and
in the other would have favored as they still do interference with
business by the state. In the middle ages the resistance of business men
to governmental and baronial exactions was almost continuous, and was
displayed by agitations and revolts frequently described as struggles
for liberty. Always the real object was the same; the privilege claimed
by business men, of conducting honest and peaceful industries,
businesses and exchanges without interference and secured from
confiscation. There has also been in the past a steady clearing away by
merchants, traders, craftsmen and their friends and partisans, of
obstacles placed by governmental stupidity, error and prejudice in the
way of peaceful labor, business and general betterment. In short it has
been a struggle to put business men and business methods in control.
These contests continue everywhere; they are still going on in the
United States; but the non-propertied classes have never joined in them
on the side of liberty; they have been and are prejudicially arrayed
against business methods and business men. The business world has
always had to win its way and hold its ground despite them.
The other aspect of the so called struggle for liberty in the days gone
by, was that already referred to, of the resistance of religious
minorities to persecution. This persecution, though governmental in
form, was in reality a majority oppression, in which the government
merely represented the prevailing opinion. Such were the persecutions of
the British Protestant dissenters, the American Quakers and Baptists,
and the French Huguenots. Had manhood suffrage then prevailed, the
majority demanding the persecutions would probably have been greater and
more truculent. We may be sure that the populace would have uttered no
word for toleration.
Since manhood suffrage has been established the people have created six
amendments to the United States Constitution, of which five were unwise,
unjust or arbitrary and one merely formal. The record is not flattering
to popular wisdom or justice. Here they are:
_Article XIII._ Abolished slavery. This was unjust and arbitrary. The
slave owners had bought and paid for their slaves under legal and
judicial sanction. To emancipate them without compensation to the owners
was an unauthorized confiscation. England paid for her slaves in the
West Indies when she set them free. But then, the British voters were
property owners and believers in property rights.
_Articles XIV and XV._ These were intended to give the vote to the newly
enfranchised Southern negroes. After producing much turmoil, political
rascality and misgovernment in the South, the enforcement of these
measures was abandoned and they are now dead letter provisions.
_Article XVI._ This was not a new measure; it provides for an income tax
which it was formerly supposed could be levied, and was levied, till it
was found by judicial inquiry that the Constitution had failed to
authorize it. Its ratification was little more than a formality.
_Article XVII._ This provides for the election of senators in Congress
by the people instead of by the legislatures. The result has been a
strengthening of the bosses and a lowering of quality of members of the
Senate.
_Article XVIII._ Prohibits the manufacture and sale of alcoholic
liquors. A manifestly arbitrary and oppressive majority measure.
The operation of manhood suffrage in our great cities has clearly been
tyrannical, because of the absence of proper restraint upon evil doers.
Can any one truly say that the people of these cities have been
benefited in the slightest degree, by the so-called privilege of voting
for their magistrates or rulers? Assuming that their political bosses
would let them vote as they wished, or that the bosses are popular
agents, and that the people do or can govern in their cities, where is
the public benefit? It seems to be generally conceded that on the whole
the city of Washington is the best managed city in the Union, and it is
governed by a Congress in whose choice the people of Washington have no
share. Does any one find his comfort or his freedom curtailed or his
life in danger in Washington? The fact is that the exercise of suffrage
is a function, whose object is not to preserve liberty, but the
opposite, namely, to establish proper control, and when that can be
effectively done without popular elections everybody is better off.
The conclusion of the whole review of the relation between manhood
suffrage and the liberty of the citizen is that happiness and all good
results in the personal relations of men are to be found not in liberty,
but in just law, order and restraint, which no one believes are better
subserved by admission of the weak and ignorant to the suffrage; and
that as sound political institutions and religious toleration were
achieved without manhood suffrage in the past they would probably be
safer without it in the future.
This leads one naturally to the subject of the operation of manhood
suffrage in connection with government by majorities in the present day,
which will be treated in the next chapter.