F

exposed. But the argument may be turned back against itself. For if there is to be a limitation of suffrage apart from the consequences of crime, it must depend either on want of property or of intelligence or of character; or as now almost everywhere in this country, must be confined to males over twenty-one, born or naturalized. The question now is whether the classes excluded by the three first of these limitations need protection against those who can vote, or the latter against the former. As the classes excluded by sex or minority follow the condition of the families to which they belong, there can be in general for them no want of protection. Suppose now the classes without intelligence or property or character to have the suffrage and to be predominant in society, will the elections of local or of more public officers be made more intelligently than if they had been excluded? Is it not quite conceivable that such an element among the voters would give rise to a class of demagogues, whose means of gaining power would be to produce a division between classes, and to array the poor against the rich? It is moreover a maxim of English liberty, on which the American colonies insisted at the time of the revolution, that taxation and representation should go together. But with a universal suffrage there is danger of electing persons who will not respect this principle; and especially when municipalities lay their own taxes, there is great danger that they who pay nothing will outvote those who pay everything. So in choosing magistrates, if police judges and the members of a police are chosen by the votes of those members of a community who have an interest in being screened from punishment, how can the interests of society be safe in the hands of such officers? But it is not difficult to make such elections in those large cities, where all are admitted to the polls. Nor is this all. If the classes of the community in question were entirely honest, their situation in life prevents them from taking large views of public policy, and thus they will cast their vote for small men, they will misjudge the character of candidates for office. On the other hand, if the possession

of a small amount of property brings the reward of sharing in political power, it encourages thrift, industry, morality. Property, however, is only an index; and if suffrage is not thrown open to all, it ought to be confined to such as can read and write, who have also some interests at stake which make them desire good government. The franchise ought to be taken away also, not from those who lose their property, but from those, whether rich or poor, who lose their character by any serious offence against the laws. Civil ignominy would become a punishment severe and much dreaded; but recovery of rights after a term of good conduct ought to be possible.

CHAPTER VII.

LIBERTY AND EQUALITY IN CONFLICT, OR COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM.

Conflict between

sire of equality of condition.

§ 101.

IN the preceding discussion we have felt ourselves obliged to maintain that an exact equality of political liberty and the de- condition, as it respects the right of suffrage and the right of holding office, cannot be justly claimed by every citizen of a free country; that universal suffrage does not secure the government of the wisest nor even secures the liberties of a country placed under such a democratic constitution, much less secures its order and stability. But in such a country liberty and equality are not necessarily in conflict. It is possible to conceive of the same political rights being open to all; that is, that justice and right should be equal, while yet in outward circumstances great inequality prevails. Indeed, that is the state of all free societies. But equality may be taken in another sense; it may be made to mean equality of condition or possession, and here it must come, if a state is founded on such a basis, into direct hostility to the rights which are included under the term liberty; especially the rights of property, of free industry and of free transmission of property. The state, in such a system of things, or some community under the state, is looked to for the exercise of a control over these rights, which would be, if realized, more tyrannical than any under which the citizens of antique republics ever suffered.

It is our purpose in this chapter to consider first the inequalities which grow up in society from the unrestricted exercise of the rights of property and inheritance, and then the

schemes ending in modern communism and socialism, which have it for their object to prevent or remedy such inequalities.

Let us conceive of a community which knows nothing of differences of classes or of political disabilities among the citizens, and has divided up the territory in equal lots among the inhabitants, giving them the power, however, to retain or dispose of those lots at will. In such a free society equality of condition would not long continue, if there were any industrial progress. Inequality inevitably springs out of differences of vigor of mind, of intelligence, of sobriety, of number of children, of thrift, and of economy. The law of inheritance -that law which is the great stimulus to industry and the great civilizer of mankind, only perpetuates differences of condition. The advantages obtained by the father might be retained and increased by the child. Division of labor, inventions kept secret at first and thus benefiting certain persons more than others, various superiorities of soil, climate, or situation, would add to these inequalities, and give a still more favorable position to the strongest.

But, still further, the movements even within a community where all were free, would tend to create and perpetuate strata in society, so that instead of one community there would be a number of social layers, or fractions, or cliques, the members of which would be brought together by wealth or poverty, culture or the want of it, or some other cause which would unite equals only, and divide one body into separate parts. There can be no society in a state under the best possible laws, where there will prevail a uniform sympathy, where some will not be innocently estranged by circumstances from others. Nor can we expect, as human nature now is, that the inequalities of condition, manifest in the world, will not lead to envy and discontent, or will not depress some kinds of dispositions as much as they fill others with eager longings. At all events, the strata of society will misunderstand one another, will have often a bitterness toward one another, which freedom itself, and a sense of equality must

only intensify, which is not found to the same extent in a community where the lower class consists of slaves.

If in such a society capital and labor join in production, and if the law of family inheritance is preserved intact, the strata of society might be continued from age to age. This, indeed, would not be absolutely and without exception true, as the history of industry and of invention makes clear, but it would be in the main true, and it would become more manifestly a law of society with the introduction of labor-saving machines, which, being expensive in themselves and in their repairs, must be owned by the wealthy, There will arise also a necessity that a capitalist should be on hand to pay the laborer his wages, during the progress of his work and before it is offered for sale. And if there should arise a class of capitalists who lend money to employing producers, the system is only so much the more complicated; it is not altered in its essential features. Modern production, moreover, is so unrelenting, that it has destroyed in great measure the competition of individual laborers. The woman at home, in her cottage, can no longer work during odd hours at spinning or weaving; the man, for the most part, can no longer give part of his time to manufacturing, and spend the rest of it in labor on a garden or field. Alas! in some countries he has no field and no cottage of his own; he must say, "This one thing I do; I toil ten hours a day in the manufactory, liable to lose my work in any change which diminishes demand for the products which I help to create."

The growth of a feeling of liberty and of equal political rights only aggravates the evil working of this necessary state of things. Very different in many respects is the condition of the workman, in the productive countries of the present, from his condition in the old world and in the middle. ages of Europe. We refer not to his treatment by his employer who was then his owner also, but to the effect which the emancipation of the serf and the admission of the peasant to political rights must necessarily have on his mind. Slavery brought with it to the old political writers its prob