Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/122

 ferred upon all men who owned real estate yielding forty shillings a year income, or possessed other property to the value of £40. Pennsylvania, likewise combining commerce and farming, allowed all men who held personal property worth £50, as well as freeholders, to vote for assemblymen. To the property tests were sometimes added religious provisions: Catholics and Jews were often disfranchised by law and to some extent in practice.

Although property was widely distributed in America and most of the free colonists were Protestants and Gentiles, the various limitations on the suffrage excluded from the polls a large portion of the population—just how large a percentage cannot be ascertained from any records now available. Certainly, in the country districts of Pennsylvania, half the adult males were denied the ballot; in Philadelphia the restrictions disfranchised about nine-tenths of the men, a sore point with a growing class of artisans, and an interesting side light on the concentration of property in that urban area. On the other hand, it is estimated that about four-fifths of the men in Massachusetts were eligible to vote, so numerous were the owners of small farms.

Perhaps more citizens were kept from the polls by indifference than by law. A large share of the population of the colonies, it must be remembered, came from classes in England and in Europe that had never taken part in the governing process. As a rule, English agricultural laborers and artisans had enjoyed no more political rights than French Huguenots or German peasants; and transportation to the New World could not automatically give any of them a political sense. At all events, it seems safe to say that from one-half to two-thirds of the adult males did not vote, even in Massachusetts where interest in political affairs ran unusually high.

The weight of the active property owners in colonial government was further enhanced by qualifications upon members of assemblies. In South Carolina, for illustration, an