Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/148

142 or for some other cause. The most popularly governed of the American states admit these doctrines.

The policy of adopting a suffrage as wide as that which is commonly called universal, has been much and plausibly contested. Better political tests, perhaps, might be applied than those which now exist, and there can be little doubt that the present system is carried too far in its application and under the particular circumstances of the country, if not too far as a general principle.

The governments of towns and villages, for instance, are almost entirely directed to the regulation of property, and to the control of local interests. In such governments universal suffrage is clearly misplaced, for several grave and obvious reasons, a few of which shall be mentioned.

Towns and villages having no legislative control over the greater interests, such as the general protection of life, the person, the character, and property, there is neither the same necessity for, nor the same justice in, letting in all classes to participate in power. The laws which control the great and predominant interests, or those which give a complexion to society, emanate from the states, which may well enough possess a wide political base. But towns and villages regulating property chiefly, there is a peculiar propriety in excluding those from the suffrage who have no immediate local interests in them. An undue proportion of the dissolute, unsettled, vicious and disorganizing, collect in towns, and that balance of society, which, under other circumstances, might neutralize their influence, is destroyed, leaving, as a consequence, the power to control their governments, under a suffrage that is universal, in the hands of the worst part of community; for, though these persons may not be in sufficient force absolutely to elevate men of their