And now, looking back after a century and considering the immense importance of the subject, one cannot help regretting that the fruits of the convention labors were merely local and temporary; that it met after suffrage extension had been practically allowed to go by default throughout the Union, and that the Virginia delegates came to Richmond pledged each to one side of a sectional dispute, instead of prepared to take part in a philosophical or statesmanlike search for political truth. Very different might have been the result had the Virginia political mind taken up this question freed from local and slavery prejudice, and had the political talent wasted in a struggle for sectional control been employed in the useful work of studying the real foundation principles of suffrage in a democracy and presenting the conclusions to the Virginia electorate and to the world. In such case it might have reached such a result and brought out such a declaration of principles as would have saved the country and the world centuries of wallowing in the slough of political corruption and despond. To complete the record it may be added, that in 1850, by a vote of 75 to 33, another Virginia convention further extended the suffrage to all male adult residents. As before, the question was confused with the old dispute over the apportionment of the respective claims of the east and west to representation in the legislature; this was again settled by a compromise after a prolonged deadlock and the settlement was approved by a popular vote of 75,748 to 11,060. This may be said to be the final close of the property qualification controversy in Virginia and in the Union, though it had been substantially decided a generation before; and since 1850 there has been nowhere any serious discussion of the question of the right of property to direct representation in government and it has been generally regarded since that time as forever disposed of. But nothing is finally settled till it is settled right. And so, after a survey of the entire history of the establishment of manhood suffrage in the United States, we see that this great experiment was originally undertaken by the American people, with but little realization of its importance and almost no foresight of its calamitous results. We have here another of the numerous instances of the truth of the dictum that “Often the greatest changes are those introduced with the least notion of their consequence, and the most fatal are those which encountered least resistance.”