understand all its provisions and to be able to determine the meaning and effect of any and all amendments thereto, which are or may possibly be proposed. Now, all this is of course absurd; no such belief in the wisdom of the electorate is entertained by the masses or by anybody, for no one in the world is such a fool as not to be aware that at every election large numbers of the voters are absolutely incapable of passing upon the merits of candidates far above them in education, station in life, and capacity to fill offices whose high duties they could not be made to understand by any amount of explanation. Few even of the most ignorant are unaware that only trained minds are capable of construing and understanding constitutional provisions and forecasting their probable effects. There must therefore exist within the manhood suffrage scheme, some principle or theory more sane than a belief in the omniscience of the rabble of ignorance, stupidity and indifference which it proudly marshals to the polls; and though this principle or theory has never been precisely or authoritatively defined, yet on examining the numerous written or spoken expressions in support of universal suffrage found in books, speeches and newspaper articles, we discover that the postulate at the bottom of the manhood suffrage proposition is this: not that the mass of voters are competent judges of conditions or policies, but that they are the natural, necessary and proper arbiters thereof; not that ignorance, stupidity and vice do not go to the polls, but that in the nature of the case they are there and have a right to be there; that it is intended and expected that they shall be actually represented and expressed in the vote; that in politics all have equal right to be heard; that government and law should be an expression of the will of all the people or at least of all of the men of this country; not merely of those having patriotism, experience, virtue, judgment, and wisdom, or any one of these qualities; but of the whole populace; including the ignorant, stupid, worthless and depraved; and that each of these latter should have an equal voice with the wise and worthy. Such is and must be the underlying theory of manhood suffrage; and as women are notoriously still more ignorant of political affairs than men, the adoption of woman suffrage is evidently a mere extension of this same theory of equality of political value to the female sex; so that under a system of universal suffrage the law and the government include the expression of the ignorance, stupidity and depravity of both sexes of the community, state or nation as well as of its education, wisdom and goodness. And this principle is in effect generally carried out at our elections; so that practically the only disfranchised classes are those of the publicly supported paupers and the negroes in the South, and the whole immense national mass of ignorance, incapacity and hostility to social