The primal lodge--call it A--should consist of 10 men only. It is enough
and can meet in a dwelling house or a shop, and get well acquainted at
once. It has before it the names of the nominees of the two Great
Parties--Jones (Republican), Smith (Democrat). It fails of
unanimity--both candidates perchance being good men and about equally
acceptable--and casts seven votes, say, for Jones and three for Smith.
It elects one of its ten to meet similar delegates from any number of
local A lodges and hand in its vote. This body--call it a B
lodge--examines the aggregate vote; this time the majority may be with
Smith. The members carry the result to the A lodges; and these, by the
conditions of their membership, must vote for Smith.
In the case of a state election, bodies each consisting of a number of B
lodges would elect a delegate to a state council, and the state council
would examine the aggregate vote and give its decision in favor of the
Republican or Democratic candidate receiving the majority of the Casting
Vote’s suffrages.
In the case of a presidential contest, the state council would appoint
delegates to a national convention, and these would examine the
aggregate Casting Vote vote and determine and announce the choice of the
Casting Vote organizations of the whole country. At the presidential
election the A lodges throughout the land would vote for presidential
electors of the Party indicated.
If the reader thinks well of the project, let him begin a private
canvass among his friends and give it a practical test, without waiting
for other people to begin. If in the hands of men who regard their
citizenship as a high trust this scheme shall fail upon trial, a better
must be sought, a better must be invented; for it cannot be well or safe
to let the present political conditions continue indefinitely. They can
be improved, and American citizenship should rouse up from its
disheartenment and see that it is done.
THE UNITED STATES OF LYNCHERDOM
(1901)
law, and when in 1901 a particularly barbarous incident occurred in
his native state he was moved to express himself in print. The article
was not offered for publication, perhaps because the moment of
timeliness had passed. Its general timeliness, however, is perennial
and a word from “America’s foremost private citizen” on the subject is
worthy of preservation.--A. B. P.
I
And so Missouri has fallen, that great state! Certain of her children
have joined the lynchers, and the smirch is upon the rest of us. That
handful of her children have given us a character and labeled us with a
name, and to the dwellers in the four quarters of the earth we are
“lynchers,” now, and ever shall be. For the world will not stop and
think--it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a
single sample. It will not say, “Those Missourians have been busy eighty
years in building an honorable good name for themselves; these hundred
lynchers down in the corner of the state are not real Missourians, they
are renegades.” No, that truth will not enter its mind; it will
generalize from the one or two misleading samples and say, “The
Missourians are lynchers.” It has no reflection, no logic, no sense of
proportion. With it, figures go for nothing; to it, figures reveal
nothing, it cannot reason upon them rationally; it would say, for
instance, that China is being swiftly and surely Christianized, since
nine Chinese Christians are being made every day; and it would fail,
with him, to notice that the fact that 33,000 pagans are _born_ there
every day, damages the argument. It would say, “There are a hundred
lynchers there, therefore the Missourians are lynchers”; the
considerable fact that there are two and a half million Missourians who
are _not_ lynchers would not affect their verdict.