Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/173

 SECURITY OF THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE. 149

We have not forgotten the Pittsburgh riot. If our nation did not tremble during those times, it was certainly ill at ease. But these strikes have come to be so prevalent of late, that we give them but the slightest notice, unless they shake the nation to its very centre. Then if communism and socialism are the results of ignorance and pauperism, and our nation is to be freed from this dangerous element, it must be through education. Our only safeguard is the intellectual development of every citizen. Our laws to-day, and justly too, deprive the insane and idiotic of the right of suffrage, because the ballot would be unsafe in the hands of such persons ; but astonishing as the fact may seem, we have two million of voters that are absolutely unable to read and write, and one ha!f are grossly and dangerously ignorant. Is the ballot not equally unsafe in the hands of such persons? yea, more ! They are the tinder from which demagogues kindle revolutions in politics and gain political power. If this be not true, why this floating, ever-changing mass that goes with the most popular tide? They are not the educated ; for these are moved by reason, and not by harangues of demagogues.

We must not deprive these men of the ballot ; but if we would perpetuate this government, we must broaden our system of education, extend its privi- leges to all, and compel the rising generation to attain to that intelligence which will fit them for citizens. In tlu' eady days of the republic, when the people were more nearly equal in education ; when the scum of society that to-day infests our cities was almost unknown, then there was such a happy commingling of capital and labor, as almost to preclude the idea, that a con- flict between these could ever exist in our land. But of late this has become one of our most alarming questions.

I do not pretend to say that the legislation, for the past few years, has not been in behalf of the capitalists, and to the detriment of the laboring man. Facts are to numerous against such a position. I do not disparage the labor- er, because his hands are hardened and his face is brown. The laboring men are the bone and sinew of our nation ; and when we crush these, we crush out the very life-blood of our republic. Neither do I claim, as do some, that the world owes those a living who sit around on dry goods boxes, and are too lazy to earn their bread. The world owes no man a living, unless he earns it by honest and earnest toil. Legislation can never set at rest, for any length of time, the strife between capital and labor. You may give the poor and ig- norant man the money to-day ; and unless you bind the money-shark, he will not possess it to-morrow. Then if you would remove the strife between capital and labor, you must do it by education. I claim with Walker that the princi- pal difference between capital and labor is education ; and as one has said, "Universal suffrage in the United States is sure to carry questions between cap- ital and labor into politics, and the United States is the only nation in which questions between capital and labor cannot be settled by force, but must be settled by reason ;" then if questions between capital and labor must be set- tled by reason, through the ballot, " we must educate or we must perish."

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