Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/665

Rh their own safety, if not by any more generous motive, to "educate their masters." If they knew their own moral interest, they would prefer this necessity for exertion to the torpid security afforded by what is called a strong government to wealth and pleasure. After all there will be risks, great risks, in popular institutions; but, as experience shows, nothing like so great as those which attend arbitrary power. At all events, feeble barriers merely chafe the popular flood; the only chance of safety lies in frankly embracing the democratic principle and framing securities for the ascendency of public reason over cupidity and passion, not in the interest of an upper class, but in that of the whole community.

There is a wide difference between the case of political and that of municipal suffrage. This is a point of the highest importance in America, where the cities are vexed and pillaged by a brood of municipal demagogues, such as the late Mr. William Tweed. Legislatures, in regulating the municipal suffrage, have forgotten the great change which the cities have undergone. In the middle ages they had a political life of their own, and as the antagonists of the rural aristocracy played a distinct part in political development. This belongs to the past; a city is now little more than a densely peopled district requiring a special administration. Moreover, the great merchants who were the leaders and magistrates of the cities in former days do not now live in them, but in villas outside them, nor do they seek city offices; the guilds are dead; the people, even in the same street, know little or nothing of each other. All unity is gone; there is only a human sand-heap, among the grains of which moves with sinister activity the ward politician. The chief, almost the only function of a city government in these days, is to raise and expend money; in equity and reason, therefore, the franchise ought to be in some measure proportioned to the amount of the contribution; it ought to follow the rule of joint-stock companies, rather than that of political communities, in which the poorest man's rights and liberties are of as much value as those of the richest. Nor is the present system in any way favorable to the poor, who are led by the petty bribes offered them by sharpers or rings, and by appeals to their class passions to vote for public plunder. The money goes into the pockets of the Tweeds; and nowhere are the health and comfort of the poorer citizens less cared for than in cities which are under the government of these rogues. A strong, permanent, pure, and enlightened administration, of a thoroughly business and scientific character, is what is needed by the people of every city, and by the inhabitants of the poorest quarters most of all.

Of the question of female suffrage the writer has spoken elsewhere. The spheres of the two sexes, as he believes, are, like their