One naturally turns for enlightenment on the merits of the question to the records giving the arguments used pro and con in the discussions on the suffrage extension propositions of that time, but they are more interesting than important, because the debaters lacked the light of modern experience. Our political bosses and machines had not yet arrived, and America had then no immense populations of millions accustomed to live on daily wages, lacking the slightest knowledge of the principles or practical operation of finance, banking, trade and commerce; ignorant of the very elements of political economy, and yet ready to vote on all these matters under the direction of demagogues, themselves in the employ of bosses and machines. There were then no such divisions of classes as now; no large criminal and pauper population; no masses of foreigners herded together in tenement house life and ignorant of our problems and conditions. Our ancestors of a century ago were not gifted with imagination or prevision sufficient to enable them to foresee the enormous future immigration from Europe; the factory and tenement house systems; the vote market; the absolute and corrupt oligarchy of politicians, the political ring, machine and boss. Had they been gifted with this foresight it is safe to say that instead of lowering the suffrage qualifications they would have put the bars up so high that the disgraceful record of American politics for the last eighty years would never have been made.