Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v5.djvu/609

1787.] the superior information incident to its holders; from the popular sense of justice, enlightened and enlarged by a diffusive education; and from the difficulty of combining and effectuating unjust purposes throughout an extensive country,—a difficulty essentially distinguishing the United States, and even most of the individual states, from the small communities, where a mistaken interest, or contagious passion, could readily unite a majority of the whole, under a factious leader, in trampling on the rights of the minor party.

Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the mass of citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who are to administer them. And if the only alternative be between an equal and universal right of suffrage for each branch of the government and a confinement of the entire right to a part of the citizens, it is better that those having the greater interest at stake—namely, that of property and persons both—should be deprived of half their share in the government, than that those having the lesser interest—that of personal rights only—should be deprived of the whole.

The right of suffrage being of vital importance, and approving an extension of it to housekeepers and heads of families, I will suggest a few considerations which govern my judgment on the subject.

Were the Constitution on hand to be adapted to the present circumstances of our country, without taking into view the changes which time is rapidly producing, an unlimited extension of the right would probably vary little the character of our public councils or measures. But, as we are to prepare a system of government for a period which it is hoped will be a long one, we must look to the prospective changes in the condition and composition of the society on which it is to act.

It is a law of nature, now well understood, that the earth, under a civilized cultivation is capable of yielding subsistence for a large surplus of consumers beyond those having an immediate interest in the soil; a surplus which must increase with the increasing improvements in agriculture, and the labor-saving arts applied to it. And it is a lot of humanity, that of this surplus a large proportion is necessarily reduced, by a competition for employment, to wages which afford them the bare necessaries of life. The proportion being without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights, to be safe depositaries of power over them.

What is to be done with this unfavored class of the community? If it be, on one hand, unsafe to admit them to a full share of political power, it must be recollected, on the other, that it cannot be expedient to rest a republican government on a portion of society having a numerical and physical force excluded from and liable to be turned against it, and which would lead to a standing military force, dangerous to all parties, and to liberty itself.

This view of the subject makes it proper to embrace, in the partnership of power, every description of citizens having a sufficient stake in the public order and the stable administration of the laws; and particularly the housekeeper and heads of families; most of whom, "having given hostages to fortune," will have given them to their country also.

This portion of the community, added to those who, although not possessed of a share of the soil, are deeply interested in other species of property, and both of them added to the territorial proprietors, who in a certain sense may be regarded as the owners of the country itself, form the safest basis of free government. To the security for such a government, afforded by these combined numbers, may be further added the political and moral influence emanating from the actual possession of authority, and a just and beneficial exercise of it.

It would be happy if a state of society could be found or framed, in which an equal voice in making the laws might be allowed to every individual bound to obey them. But this is a theory which, like most theories, confessedly requires limitations and modifications. And the only question to be decided, in this as in other cases, turns on the particular degree of departure, in practice, required by the essence and object of the theory itself.

It must not be supposed that a crowded state of population, of which we have no example, and which we know only by the image reflected from examples elsewhere, if too remote to claim attention.

The ratio of increase in the United States shows that the present