Page:Men of Mark in America vol 1.djvu/20

 x The poorest lad of eighteen who paid his tax into the town treasury had his share in maintaining the commerce of the state and of the nation, and to this day it is so. In Europe, almost to our day, the profits of the Post Office were paid to whatever favorite of power had received the Post Office Patent, Heaven knows when, which permitted him to carry the mails and collect the postage—Thurn and Taxes, for instance. A similar monopoly of salt was one of the plums which Charles Second or James Second could drop into the mouth of a sweetheart or other flatterer. In America, on the other hand, from the beginning, the people had understood that the benefits of the mail accrue to the People and that the People must pay the charges of the mail though this charge be more or less, whether the receipts for the mail are greater than the charges or no.

This all means universal suffrage. It would be hard to find who first introduced universal suffrage into the written constitutions of America. But it does not appear in direct statement very early. It may be doubted if a tenth part of the members of the Continental Congress, for instance, had looked squarely in the face the question whether the ballot should be given to every man who paid a tax, as it is given now.

But the theory of universal suffrage was in the air. You could not make every man serve in your train bands and die by a bullet from King Philip, and then say that if he escaped he should not share in the government which ordered him hither and thither. In the New England States, in the Revolution, there was no universal suffrage, but every man in the valley of the Connecticut River had to carry his gun in the levy which went out against Burgoyne, unless he were more than fifty-five years old. When these men came home you could not long tell them that they had no right to the ballot. And from those early days down the disposition has appeared everywhere to give the ballot to everyone who could carry arms.

The monarchical writers and, indeed, the theorists of whatever kind, are very bitter about this. Such people as Mr. Matthew Arnold