Although the action of New York in 1821 following Massachusetts in 1820 practically insured the triumph of manhood suffrage in the United States, yet the most interesting and ablest discussion upon the subject was yet to take place at Richmond, Virginia, in the State Convention of 1829. The State of Virginia had still clung to the old freehold suffrage qualification; in that Commonwealth prior to 1829 it was not enough that a voter should have property or business experience; he must be the owner of land or a freehold interest therein. The standard was not high, from $25 to $50 according to circumstances, but it established the principle and excluded the most degraded. Unfortunately, it also excluded many thrifty and intelligent citizens whose holdings did not happen to be in the form of real estate. On the demand then made for extension of the franchise, an opportunity to consider and discuss the theory of suffrage was naturally presented to the Constitutional Convention. That body was composed of about one hundred members, including the ablest political thinkers and most skilful and aggressive debaters of Virginia. In point of statesmanship and forensic ability its membership has probably never been surpassed in the history of the United States. It included ex-Presidents Madison and Monroe, Chief Justice John Marshall, John Tyler, John Randolph, William Giles and Alexander Campbell. The convention sat for over three months and in the course of the discussion on matters connected with the suffrage dozens of speeches were made, the perusal whereof is very interesting to the political student. Unfortunately, it so happened that though the debates were able, the consideration of the whole matter was biased by local rivalries and by the slavery question, then beginning to confuse and prejudice the Southern mind, and the most distinguished of the delegates took only a minor part in the proceedings. Between the Blue Ridge and the sea was Eastern Virginia, the Old Dominion, where tobacco raising flourished, white labor was scarce and all influential white men were freeholders. West of the Blue Ridge lay a new region, where the industrial situation was similar to that of the free states, and where there was a large body of non-freeholding white working men of the borderland type, who for years had been agitating for the abolition of the old freehold qualification. It was a clash between the Old East and the New West; between free labor and slave proprietorship. The Convention not only undertook the individual suffrage controversy, but entered into the question which also divided the two sections of the State, whether the basis of county representation in the legislature or in either branch thereof should continue as heretofore to be property values rather than population; thus bringing up the fundamental question of whether numbers only should govern without regard to intelligence, creative power or value to civilization. In this