“The present situation has been described over and over again. Briefly, it is constant encroachments by the legislature upon the executive; legislation under irresponsible ‘bosses’ for personal ends, blackmailing of corporations by politicians, and of society by corporations to recoup the plunder of the politician, or to accumulate ill-gotten gain, both of them very good imitations of the Spanish policy in the colonies which is terminating in the ruin of an empire; favours shown to special forms of business and industry; unjust taxation; the irresponsible conduct of our legislatures whose deliberations are the signal for alarm and confusion in the commercial world; and mass-meetings every week to frighten politicians into submission, libel, bribery, and lying in campaign work, government by perjurers, pugilists and pimps, and political leadership by men who know no arts but those of Alcibiades and Catiline--all these and a hundred other facts like them create a profound and justifiable suspicion of institutions that confer the supreme power upon those who are equally unfit to govern themselves and others.” _Democracy_, Hyslop, p. 294. Now, let us more carefully examine and consider the essential character of the political system which has produced these unsatisfactory results. Its basis is unlimited or unqualified suffrage, until recently appearing and manifested as “manhood suffrage,” but now, since the so-called “enfranchisement” of women more nearly fitting the name “universal suffrage.” In any case in theory at least it is government by numbers, in contradistinction to government by intelligence, birth, wealth, experience, talent or by any combination of these or other qualities or achievements. This doctrine of unlimited or unqualified suffrage is now and has long been recognized as an established principle of government in this country by most of us; indeed we may say by all Americans with the exception of the natives or inhabitants of the Southern or former slave States. By these latter pure manhood suffrage has been tried and condemned and has been replaced by white manhood suffrage by means of certain well known and successful political devices amounting practically to a strict race qualification; though the important and suggestive fact that thereby the basic principle of manhood suffrage was expressly repudiated by the entire South has been carefully blinked by Americans generally.