Thus it will be seen that in the American polity the principle is practically well recognized that voting is not a natural right but a function of government which may properly be restricted, either to property holders as in fact it was by our ancestors restricted, or to any other class as the State may ordain. There is however, reason to believe that the general public has not reflected enough on the subject to assimilate or even to accept this proposition. The American masses take most of their so-called opinions ready made, and as far as any popular theory upon the subject or conception thereof is to be found among them, it is apparently a vague loose notion of a natural equality among men; an understanding that it is part of the original American tradition that every man has an equal natural right to take part in government or at least to “express himself” by his vote. We have seen in the last chapter that the original American tradition is just to the contrary, and demands a substantial property qualification for all voters. In a subsequent chapter it will appear how that original American tradition was foolishly and thoughtlessly abandoned, when manhood suffrage and the spoils system were together foisted upon us in the time of Andrew Jackson. As already stated, an examination of the libraries does not disclose any strong authority or well reasoned argument in favor of the practice of giving a vote to every adult man or woman. The doctrine of the natural right to vote which was first practised by the French radicals of the eighteenth century appears to have been accepted as a piece of popular sentimentality; apparently it has not been adopted by any great thinker or writer. Those writers who favor it are generally superficialists, and are content to refer to it vaguely as a step in the progress of the age without any close examination of its merits. As for the theories of natural equality between men, and of the right to vote as a means of self expression neither of them will stand a moment’s serious reflection. No equality of any kind whatsoever exists or ever can exist between men. It is impossible even to imagine a tolerable existence under the crushing weight of the monotony of equality. Along with variety would perish love, hope and joy; ambition, the great source of initiative and the most powerful stimulus to effort would be destroyed; life would lose its picturesqueness, and instead of a bright running stream it would become a stagnant pool. Equality means death; its domain is the cemetery. The champions of manhood suffrage therefore will have to look elsewhere for its justification than in an assertion of an equality which cannot exist.