THE FOUR YEARS CIVIL WAR IN THE UNITED STATES IS DIRECTLY CHARGEABLE TO MANHOOD SUFFRAGE The American Civil War, which lasted four years, was both morally and politically absolutely unnecessary and therefore absolutely unjustifiable. It is difficult for an American to discuss the subject coolly even at this distance, when he realizes that this, the greatest calamity which ever befell the country, was perfectly avoidable and was due entirely to stupidity and mismanagement. It is time that the truth was told; the Civil War was caused, not by the difficulty of the questions to be dealt with but by a lack of statesmanship, by the dull selfishness and asininity of the politicians of the day and by the system of low politics which had long before been established among us. To say that the question between the free and the slave states was of a nature which required a settlement by the sword is absurd. In 1860 there were fifteen slave and eighteen free states. The constitutional right of the former to the ownership of their slaves could not be denied; and the vast majority of the people in the free states so believed and asserted. The question on which the country was divided was whether slavery could or should be established in the Territories and in the new states to be erected from the Territories. To assert that that question could not be settled peaceably is to assert either that the American people were fools and brutes, which is not true, or that their representatives having the matter in hand were incapables or worse, which is true. The war was entirely due to the conduct and misconduct of the politicians in power and they were placed there by manhood suffrage. The American people North and South at that time were as harmless and peaceable a people as ever existed on the face of the earth. They did not want any war, least of all a civil war. Tens of thousands of inhabitants in each of the two sections had dear friends and relatives in the other section. Most people refused even to believe it possible until hostilities actually began that a civil war could possibly be forced upon the country. Neither side was in any way prepared either in men, officers, equipment, ships or money for even a small war. There was no desire for a conflict on either side, and no need of it; and yet it came; because the country was in the hands not of patriotic statesmen, but of a manhood suffrage politician President, and a manhood suffrage politician Congress, infused with a small, mean, manhood suffrage spirit, the spirit of humbug, of selfishness, of insincerity, and of moral cowardice. It came because for his own petty temporary purposes, each of the politicians, too dull and short sighted to see the danger of his own acts, had been for years nagging the people of his own district into dislikes, suspicions and hates towards the people of other districts and portions of the country.