“The elevation of the government, laws and institutions of a republic must necessarily depend upon the average intelligence and virtue of its voting population. Hence it is a most dangerous experiment for America to reduce the qualifications of its voters to the level of the lowest, instead of raising the latter to a certain definite standard at which the right of suffrage might with comparative safety be placed in their hands.” Another writer thus expresses himself: “It is perfectly idle to attempt to give political power to persons who have no political capacity, who are not intellectual enough to form opinions or who are not high minded enough to act on those opinions.... Lastly the events of the earlier part of the last century show us--demonstrate we may say, to us,--the necessity of retaining a very great share of power in the hands of the wealthier and more instructed classes, of the real rulers of public opinion.” (Bagehot, _Parliamentary Reform_, p. 316.) And Lecky predicts that the day will come when the adoption of the theory that the best way to improve the world and secure national progress is to place the government under the control of the least enlightened classes will be regarded as one of the strangest facts in the history of human folly. Indeed, but little political discernment is required to enable one to realize the fatal mischiefs attendant upon the plan of according a place in the electorate to females generally and to the ignorant, idle, unthrifty, purchasable, vicious and anti-social males. It is not difficult to see that such a scheme is erroneous in principle, antagonistic to civilization, and to society as the agent of civilization. History informs us that manhood suffrage is contrary to our best traditions; that it has been mischievous and unclean in practise; that it has filled the body politic with the foulest corruption; that it is largely responsible for the Civil War and other serious blunders and mischiefs; that it has cost thousands of millions to the American people in money stolen and squandered. Reason plainly teaches us that the suffrage is not a natural right, but a function in the social system belonging only to those who by the process of natural selection are qualified as men of education and property to take a part in government; that unlimited universal or manhood suffrage is dangerous for the future and if not overthrown may ultimately cause our national destruction. There is not therefore after all any real difficulty in determining that universal suffrage is the political disease under which America is suffering. Its specific cause is the virus of the rabble vote; men without character and destitute of achievement should be excluded from the suffrage; they are by nature political nonentities, and were they content to mark zero on their ballots thus indicating the