Popular misgovernment in the United StatesCruikshank, Alfred Byron
History
Popular misgovernment in the United States
Cruikshank, Alfred Byron
Suffrage -- United States; United States -- Politics and government
primary fact of the existence of two classes of humanity, the one
including the socially fit, the socially organized, the members of the
Social Commonwealth; and the others the non-members of that
organization. As already stated, not all the inhabitants of our borders
are the lieges of Society; there is the considerable body of the
unsocial; comprising those cold and indifferent to the social cause, the
socially worthless, the nondescript and the rabble; also the
anti-social; the openly hostile, the criminals and malefactors of the
community. The existence of these two divisions of men, the social and
the unsocial, justifies and requires the State to distinguish between
them in granting the voting franchise. The primary test of voting
capacity is and must be allegiance to the social commonwealth.
Society was born when humanity emerged from savagery, and will endure
while civilization continues in the world. The Jacobins of France of
1790, like the present Bolsheviki of Russia, got possession of the State
machinery and turning it against Society swore to destroy her forever;
after a dozen years of strife she emerged from the conflict stronger
than before. She accompanied the first immigrants to Massachusetts Bay,
to Jamestown and to every other American settlement. There she was on
the very first day and ever after with her customs, traditions, beliefs,
classes, prejudices, dress, manners and standards of conduct, ready to
enforce them in America with the same despotic authority exercised long
before in the England of the Plantagenets, Normans, Saxons and Romans.
And then and there in the fields and forests of the new world, Society
established governments as her agents to enforce her mandates, imposing
her will upon the States which she thus created. Since then, by Society
has the onward course of the nation at all times been directed.
Governments may change; peace may follow war; the monarchy may give way
to a republic or dictatorship and that to a democracy, or vice versa;
laws may be enacted and repealed, constitutions established and
abolished, but the rule of the Social Commonwealth goes on forever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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