Morning journal and courier., 1881-07-02
Universal Suffrage.

the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, chronic distrust of the people pervndes the book educated class of the North they shrink from that free speech which is God s normal school for educating men, throwing upon them the grave responsibility of de ciding great questions, and so lifting them to hihger level of intellectual or moral life. Trust the people-the wise and the ignorant, the good and the bad-with the gravest questions, and in the end you educate the
 race, while you secure, not perfect institu- tions, not necessarily good ones, but the best institutions possible while human nature is the basis and the only material to build with. Men are educated and the State uplifted by allowing aH-every one-to broach all
 their mistakes and advocate all their errors. The community that will not protect its hum. blest, most ignorant and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions no mat ter how false or hateful, is only gang of slaves.
 Anacharsis went into the Archon's court at Athens, heard case argued by the great men of that city and saw the vote by five hun dred men. Walking in the streets, some one asked him, ''What do you think of Athenian liberty ?" 1T think,'' said he. ''wise men argue cases, and fools decide them" Just what that timid scholar, two thousand years ago, said in the streets of Athens that which calls itself scholarship here says to- day of popular agitation,-that it lets wise men argue questions and fools decide them, But that Athens where fools decided the gravest questions of policy and of right and wrong, where property you had gathered wearily to- day might be wrung from you by the ca prices of the mob to -morrow,-that very Athens probably secured the greatest amount of human happiness and nobleness of It's era, invented art, and sounded for us the depths of philosophy. God lent to 1t the largest ID telleets, and it flashes to day the torch that gilds yet the mountain peaks of the Old World; while Egypt, the bunker conserva- tive of antiquity, where nobody dared to differ from the priest or to be wiser than his grandfather where men pretended to be alive, though swaddled in the grave-clothes of creed and custom as close as their mum mics were in linen, that Egypt is hid in the tomb it inhabited and the intellect Athens
 has trained for us digs under those ashes to find out what buried and forgotten bunker ism knew and did.
 knew a signal instance of this disease oi scholars distrust, and the cure was as re markable.
 In boyhood and early life was honore6 with the friendship of Lathrop Motley. He grew up in the thin air of Boston provincial ism, and pined on such weak diet. I remem Der sitting with him once in the State House when he was member of our Legislature With biting words and keen crayon ht sketched the ludicrous points in the minds and persons of his fellow members, and tearing up the pictures, said scornfully
 'What can become of a country with sucI fellows as these making it's laws no safe in vestments; your good name lied away any hour, and not worth keeping if it were not. In vain combatted the folly. He went te Europe-spent eight or ten years. I me him the day he landed, on his return. AS Ii our laughing talk in the State House haG that moment ended, he took my hand witl the sudden exclamation, You were all right I was all wrongl It ts a country worth dy ing for: better still, worth living and work l ing for, to make it all it can be!'' Europe
 made him one of the most American of al Americans Some ten years later, when he l sounded that bugle note, in his letter to the London Tunes, some critic who knew hiG early mood, but not it's change, suspected there might be a taint of ambition in what l they thought so sudden a conversion. could testify that the mood was ten years old years before the slightest shadow oi political expectation had dusked the clear l mirror of his scholar life.
 l This distrust shows Itself Ill the growing dislike of universal suffrage, and the efforts to destroy it made of late by all our easy classes.
 The white South hates universal suffrage l the so-called cultivated North distrusts 1t l Journal and college, social science convention | and the pulpit, discuss the propriety of re | straining it. Timid scholars tell their dread l of it. Carlyle, that bundle of sour preju l dices, houts universal suffrage with bias l phemy that almost equals its ignorance. Se' 1 his words: Democracy will prevail wher men believe the vote of Judas as good as tha | of Jesus Christ"
 | No democracy ever claimed that the vot' 1 of ignorance and crime was as good in an. l sense as that of wisdom and virtue. It onl, asserts that crime and ignorance have tn ! same right to vote that virtue has. Only b,
 allowing that right, and so appealing to thei sense of justice and throwing upon them thu burden of their full responsibility, can VI hope ever to raise crime and ignorance to thu | level of self-respect. The right to choos | your governor rests on precisely the sam | foundation as the right to choose your relig | ion; and no more arrogant or ignorant ar l raignment of all that is noble in the civil an(
 religious Europe of the last five hundred l years ever came from the triple crown on tn
 Seven Hills than this sheer of the bigo | Scotsman.
 | Protestantism holds up it's hands in hol,
 horror and tells us that the Pope scoops ou the brains of his churchman, saying, 'I'l
 think for you; you need only obey" Blu | the danger is, you meet such popes far ava,
 from the Seven Hills. and 1t is sometime
 difficult at first to recognize them, for the.
 do not by any means always wear the tripl | crown.
 Evarts and his committee, appointed to in
 quire why the New York city government i 1 failure, were not wise enough, or did no
 dare to point out the real cause, the tyrann, of that tool of the demagogue-the corne grog-shop; but they advise taking away tn
 ballot from the poor citizen. But this pro
 vision would not reach the evil. Corruption
 does not so much rot the masses, it poison Congress. Credit Mobilier and money ring
 are not housed under matched roofs-the,
 Haunt at the capitol As usual in chemistr,
 the scum floats uppermost; the railway kin
 disdained canvassing for voters-'sit is cheap CT, /" he said, .'to buy legislatures.'
 l It is not the masses who have most dis
 graced our political annals I have seen man
 mebs between the seaboard and the MississiI | pi never saw or heard of any but well I dressed mobs, assembled and countenanced
 if not always led in person, by respectabilit
 and what called itself education.
 The unrivalled scholar, the first and great
 est New England ever lent to Congress, sis
 l ralfad his advent bv uuotinQ the origin.