within us. No Cæsar or Napoleon has seized "the reins of government with a strong hand."
A wide suffrage is a mental stimulus to the whole community. By abolishing everything that smacks of caste in voting, it arouses in the common man a desire to better his social and economic condition. It promotes an interest in public affairs. It helps the newspapers to keep the public mentally receptive. It fosters a system of education at public expense which begins at the kindergarten and ends with the university. It makes for the amelioration of social conditions. It discourages the growth of an educated aristocracy. It puts the more enlightened under the necessity of persuading the less enlightened to its way of thinking, a work that is no less helpful to the former than to the latter. It helps to widen the circle of readers and stimulates the popularization of knowledge. The market for the numerous books and periodicals that are published to-day depends in part upon universal suffrage. The rule of the people does not necessarily mean government by either the most ignorant or the most enlightened, but it raises the general level of intelligence.[1]
The right to vote has a sobering effect. It arouses a sense of responsibility. It develops self-respect. It makes for patriotism. It gives the foreign-born a sense of oneness with ourselves. It deprives violent men of any valid excuse for violence. It gives zest to freedom of discussion. The right to talk relieves the feelings of the man who talks. The right to vote offers a remedy for all grievances real and imaginary. Neither the reckless utterances of the strike leader nor those of the politician should be taken too literally. The responsibility of office usually sobers the latter, and the former, if placed on the police force, often proves a staunch defender of law and order.
A democratic suffrage is manifestly not suited to every stage of civilization. The wholesale enfranchisement of the negro by the fifteenth amendment was probably a mistake. It is notorious that many of the Latin-American peoples have never achieved anything more than a paper democracy. It is said that Venezuela has averaged one revolution a year during the last thirty years and that one is now six months overdue. Such highly unstable societies exemplify not the rule of the many, but the tyranny of the few. It is as patent, however, that we have progressed beyond the kindergarten stage in democracy as that certain other peoples have not yet reached that stage.
Probably there is no better evidence of this than that supplied by the state of Wisconsin. In freeing themselves from the humiliation of corporate rule, in subjecting the railways of the state to public control, in regulating the public service corporations, in distributing the burden of taxation more equitably, in electoral reform, in articulating the state
- ↑ Charles W. Eliot, "American Contributions to Civilization," pp. 21-30.
