At the end of the last chapter was suggested a question which troubles many superficial but honest and sympathetic thinkers. How, say they, can a democratic State justly refuse the suffrage to any citizen? They see plainly the policy of such refusal in many cases; they realize the mischief of permitting discordant voices to mar the democracy of the cultivated choir of good citizenship, the danger of allowing rotten timbers in the structure of the ship of State; they wish for some superior power to silence the one or remove the other; but they cannot see that such a power exists. Can a man or any group of men in a democracy justly assume such superiority of judgment as the exercise of this power would imply? If the State be as democracy asserts, the creature, the agent of the people, how can it by refusing the franchise to any of its citizens rightfully deprive them of a voice in its deliberations? Is not such refusal in its essence a tyranny and a negation of democracy? No doubt some such feeling as above expressed, though perhaps more vaguely formulated, actuated many who, with more or less reluctance made the blunder of acquiescing in the establishment of white manhood suffrage in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and also many of those who forty years later made the still greater blunder of accepting negro suffrage. An answer to all these scruples familiar to all sound lawyers and quite sufficient for most intelligent men, is found in the law of self preservation. Before any law or rule of a state or community can be enacted, the state or community must have existence, and the enactment implies that the state’s continuance is to be secured. The original law of its being must first be satisfied, and must ever remain superior to all other of its enactments. It is sufficient reason therefore for the suppression of the votes of the unworthy that they are prejudicial to the State, and the State in its struggle for existence may rightfully suppress them.