Litchfield enquirer., 1878-08-22
Universal Suffrage.
ITs PERMANENT DISADVANTAGES.

will continue, in lesser degree, to permanent ly embarrass the suffrage; and that there will always be certain proportion of our intelli- gent citizens who will wilfully misuse this most important of our civic rights Give eith- CT or both these fractions of the voting public majority, and the result is that odious spe- cies of misgovernment under popular forms of which recent American history affords so many lamentable examples. We look to time, how ever, to remove most of the ignorance which now weighs down the suffrage; and, if our institutions give honest intelligence anything like fair chance, it will outnumber and out vote dishonest intelligence Nevertheless residuum of ignorance and aquarium of dishon- estv will still remain to debase our suffrage
 In the evolution of government by ballot, we notecertain stages reminding us of those epochs into which geology divides the evolution of vegetable and animal life upon the crust of our planet. Following this analogy we divide and subdivide the progress of government under popular forms as follows:
 I. IgnOr0nt, OF Premature Su1r0ge.-Sub- divisions 1, Radical Misrulc, through an Igno- rant Suffrage; 2, Conservative Msrule through the same means.
 II. Semi InteIltgent SuDrGge :-1, Radical Government through Demagogues 2, Conserv- alive Government through Politicians.
 II. InteILgent SufrGge:-1, Radical pop ular Government 2, Conservative Popular Government.
 I. Premature SufrGge-1. It is in this di- vision and chiefly in it's radical phase that most of the so-called failures of popular gov ernmcnt" occur. The voter is given the suf- ffage before he IS entitled to it and, through gross ignorance, wholly fails to appreciate its value. The radical form of government by ig- nOrance, thus enfranchised, is about the most hateful tyranny ever practised among men. It is d government by "Bosses' and "Rings"- thicving politicians of the lowest sort Such government is only possible where the voter is too degraded to know his own interest. He chooses a ruler as ignorant and knavisras him. self. partly out of vanity in seeing one of his own class elevated to power, and partly out of that envy and enmity towards wealth and in- telligence which everywhere pervade thorough vulgarity and ignorance. It is this abominable misrule of ignorance over intelligence which has till recently dominated over much of the Reconstructed South which has misgoverned, to the extent of it's opportunities, such cities as New York and Philadelphia and which has introduced anarchyintO many smaller Amer ican municipality. Mir. Parkman justly stg- matizes this form of popular misgovernment as organized ignorance, led by interruptions craft, and marching amid the applause of fools under the flag of equal rights"
 Nor can we deny that the ballot, under such a rule tends permanently to evil rather than to good. Negro rulein South Carolina not only tenn porarily promoted negro rascality. It tended towards thepermanent degradation of the white instead of towards the permanent elevation of the negro. Evilin principle as any civilized per- son must consider the Ku Klux tyranny of her white minority which failed, or the very simi- lar Mississippi" or ''Shot gun" policy which succeeded, we cannot but reckon either prefer able to the more barbarous and destructive try amy of the ignorant black majority which it overthrow. Must we look to the vigilance committee" to redeem the cities of the East as it redeemed San Francisco, from the demorali- ZatiOn of premature suffrage? We do not be- lieve the disease so serious as to require such ''herOic" treatment. Some obvious mitigations of present evils will be spoken of under sub sequent head of improvements of the suffrage. We must look to better education and bet ter social condition for the rest.
 2. What we have termed the radical gov ernment of enfranchised ignorance-a regime of thieving politicians has not been of ire quent occurrence, nor of long duration among civilized men. Property soon finds effectual methods of dominating ignorance, and govern ment by premature suffrage soon falls into it's conservative form of the plutocracy, under which wealth buys political preferment, more or less openly, of an ignorant and dependent suffrage. As Mir. Parkman tersey puts it, ''The low politician is the accomplice of the low plutocrat, and the low voter is the ready tool of both" \ favorable specimen of the plutOcracy-infuenccd to a certain extent, in- decd, by public opinion-is the government of Great Britain since the expulsion of the Stu arts in 1888. Though representative in form, this government is not representative in fact Property, especially landed property, selects the vast majority of the members of parlia- ment. Sc ignorant, dependent and degraded are the disfranchised masses of England that it is doubtful whether its plutocracy would not gain rather than lose strength by any further extension of the suffrage It might have that effect, or it might lead to such revolution as that which desolated but breathed new life in- to dead France, a century ago. In America, the plutOcrat has been so busy accu mulating his money that he has scarcely had time for the minor consideration of govern. ment. Ordinarily he has left politics to the politician, but his occasional interferences in that direction show capacity for that species of management which bids fair to make the rich man of another and more conservative generation very prominent in our politics. Wealth is already making House of Lords of our national Senate-the Camerons intro ducing even the hereditary principle into a body already sufficiently removed, one would imagine, from popular influences. Indeed these Camerons, our own Barnum, and the Bonanza Senators from the extreme West, arc a phenomenon vastly more threatning than the Kearneys and Buffers who make much more noise in politics. but accomplish far less.
 The public danger from plutocratic selfish ness has been evidenced in this country chiefly in the management of our great corporations One might imagine that the common interest Of the corpOrstorS and the shrewdness and in. telligence attributed to the possessors of capi tal who seek such investments, would secure the able, economical and safe management of tAe corporate property. Yet such has not been the history of the American corporation. These enormous aggregations of property have been controlled intheinterests fthe great stockhold- eTs.andagainst the interests of the small stock. hll@prG and nf fha ruhlia TNi,o No,..