It is difficult to imagine what can be said by the defenders of manhood suffrage in reply to these charges and proofs. The witnesses are mostly Americans, friends of democracy, men of trained minds and high standing, speaking from observation and common report. Look again at the array of names: James Bryce; Theodore Roosevelt; John Stuart Mill; Professor Garner; M. Faguet; E. L. Godkin; Professor Commons; Professor Hyslop; Ostrogorski; Lecky; Professor Reinsch; Albert Shaw; J. Bleecker Miller; M. de Tocqueville; Reemelin; Brooks Adams; New York _Evening Post_; Appleton’s _Cyclopedia_; San Francisco _Bulletin_; _American Political Science Review_; no one can impeach such testimony. It covers the whole period under survey. These witnesses charge that the present system of election of legislators by manhood suffrage in the two most enlightened countries where practised, namely, France and the United States, has produced inferior legislators; that the tendency to widen the suffrage has everywhere brought about like results; that the quality of the membership of the United States Congress has strikingly deteriorated under the manhood suffrage régime, while the state legislatures composed of still inferior men have actually become infested by blackmailers and the like; that the legislature of New York is like a school of vice, while that of California is vile, an assemblage of bandits; that the others are similarly corrupt; their members being the tools of political machines, and that highly cultivated men therefore refuse to accept seats in these bodies. A great part of what they thus assert is within the knowledge or reach of knowledge of most of us. Is the American reader of these lines willing to continue to tolerate longer this atrocious system? Whether he believes in a property qualification for voters or not, the writer calls upon him to resolve that this present foul system be forever destroyed, and be replaced by something which an American can think of without rage and shame. CHAPTER XIII MANHOOD SUFFRAGE AS APPLIED TO THE GOVERNMENT OF AMERICAN CITIES HAS NOT ONLY BEEN A FAILURE BUT A DISASTER AND A SCANDAL The worst ravages of pestilence do not appear in thinly settled countries, but in the dense populations of cities. In like manner the worst records of our manhood suffrage misgovernment are to be found in American cities rather than in country districts. In the United States all elective municipal officers are chosen by manhood suffrage. In Europe this is not the case. In England, France and Germany it has not been considered safe to trust the populace with the power to squander away the city taxes; the municipal purse is by one device or another kept within the control of the local property owners and business men. The result is that the city governments in all these three countries are far superior to ours. A prominent American writer says: