The majorities in favor of manhood suffrage, wherever the question was tested, were overwhelming, but they prove nothing; they merely illustrate once more the well known human lack of vision. Many other equally foolish measures have been adopted by similar majorities and attended by similar popular manifestations of satisfaction. The vote in South Carolina for secession was unanimous and the popular rejoicing thereat was unbounded. Yet we all now see that that secession vote was a stupendous blunder made without moral or political justification or ground for hope of success. Many of the French Revolutionary lunatic performances were almost unanimously decreed and approved by popular vote. In like manner the American people in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were blinded into the acceptance of manhood suffrage or into comparative indifference concerning it, little realizing that in place of thereby securing as they were told for themselves and their descendants a greater measure of political liberty, they were thereby fast riveting upon them the chains of political bondage. CHAPTER IX FIRST EFFECTS AND SUBSEQUENT RESULTS OF MANHOOD SUFFRAGE; SPOILS SYSTEM; TRAFFIC IN VOTES; ORGANIZED CORRUPTION; THE BOSS; THE MACHINE; RULE OF POLITICAL OLIGARCHY. _Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabas. Now Barabas was a robber._ (John: Chap. xviii, 40.) On March 4th, 1829, the old Federal régime died with the departure of John Quincy Adams from the White House. The year 1828 is generally taken as the last full year of the old honorable and high-toned political system inaugurated by Washington; the last year at the Federal capitol of real statesmanship, of high ideals and of strict and uncompromising devotion to duty. Manhood suffrage had by this time become established and in operation in almost every state in the Union, and it had succeeded in electing as president of the United States a spoilsman, Andrew Jackson, the apostle of extreme democracy, by whom the former rule of appointments to public office for merit only, and the old doctrine of the continuance of faithful officials in their places were flung to the winds.