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ARTICLE IX.-THE CRIME AGAINST THE RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE.

IN a free commonwealth it is the duty of every citizen to care for the welfare of the state; and it is his right to speak his honest thought wherever he can find a hearing. The duty of remonstrating against public evils, and of contributing to correct them, is not incumbent on magistrates and legislators only, but on every citizen. Against every peril hanging over the commonwealth, an appeal may always be made to the people; for the safety of the state against perils from within, as well as against perils from without, is dependent on the people.

It is the boast of these states that they are self-governed. The officers of government, in every department, legislative, executive, or judicial, are not, in the strict use of language, rulers-not sovereigns, doing as they list and irresponsible except to God; but servants, sustaining to the people, by whom they are directly or indirectly appointed, a relation almost identical with that which the various functionaries in a despotic government sustain to the monarch whom they serve. The great duty of a sovereign is to fill all the offices of government with capable and faithful men. A monarch, however absolute, can rule only through the agency of the officers whom he appoints to serve him; and his great business is to get good officers for every trust. He must have his royal or imperial council from which his legislative edicts shall proceed, and in which the policy of his government shall be considered and determined. In this council, it is his duty to collect the wisest, most just, most honorable, and most faithful of his subjects. He must have his judicial officers to hear and decide, according to the law and the facts, in all cases of crime against the government, or of wrong or controversy between one subject and another. For these duties he must select men of thorough learning in the system and science of

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the laws by which they are to judge, of a quick and inflexible sense of justice, and of unimpeachable and incorruptible honor. He must have his executive functionaries-heads of the departments of administration-superintendents of the police chief rulers, under him, of provinces and cities; and all these must have their subordinates. In such posts of trust and power, he must place the right men, men of competent understanding and skill, men of known integrity and of suitable dignity and weight of character. All this—which, in a simple monarchy, depends on the will of the sovereign-is with us dependent on the will of the people expressed by their suffrages. As, under a simple monarchy, all misgovernment by whatever officers, must be in some sense the fault of the sovereign, proceeding from some incapacity or delusion on his part, or else resulting from some unjust and wicked intention in him; so, under our political institutions, all misgovernment by the various functionaries entrusted with power, is in some sense the fault of the people by whose suffrages, directly or indirectly, those men are placed in office. It may be because the people are ignorant and deluded; it may be because they are carried away by some bewildering but dishonorable and criminal excitement; it may be because, through some negligence on their part, their intentions as expressed by their votes are defeated, but it is difficult to conceive of misgovernment which may not be in some sense imputed to the people. Even when the will of the people, as expressed by the majority of actual and legitimate suffrages, is defeated, that defeat must be owing, in some sense, to the ignorance, the impetuosity and heedlessness, or the apathy of the people themselves. It must be because the people, for some reason, are not sufficiently awake and enlightened, or not sufficiently on their guard to prevent the perpetration of the fraud.

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It has often seemed to us-and more and more for the last twenty years that the moral turpitude of illegal voting at elections, and of other kindred crimes, which may be classed together as the crime against the right of suffrage,—is not duly estimated by American citizens generally, and that the

facilities which exist for the perpetration of the crime in one form or another, and the temptations which are created by party organizations and by the tendency of party politics, are not considered as they ought to be.

We hardly need to say that the crime is the same in effect whether it is committed by depositing in the ballot-boxes votes which by the law and the constitution of the state have no right to be there, or by fraudulently excluding votes which the law permits to be deposited,-or by a false count and return of the votes actually given,-or by a false summing up and statement of the result by those to whom that final duty is entrusted. When the same end is aimed at by violence,as, for example, when bands of ruffians, ready for any outrage, are permitted to surround the place of voting, and thus to prevent the access of aged and feeble voters, and of others who are willing to forego their right of voting, rather than encounter the insults and dangers which they must face in the performance of their duty; or when a mob rushes upon the ballot-boxes and destroys them or carries them away to prevent the votes from being counted against their party-the crime differs from a simple fraud only as highway robbery differs from theft.

In regard to the turpitude of this crime, it is difficult to speak but by comparing it with other crimes to which it may be thought to bear some resemblance. It seems to us that in comparison with this crime, stealing, and swindling, and forgery, are respectable. The attempt to deprive a man of fifty, or a hundred dollars, by picking his pocket-the attempt to get possession of a merchant's goods by false pretenses-the attempt to abstract five thousand dollars from a bank by means of a forged check, or endorsement-does not approximate in baseness to this crime. If the crime were simply an attempt to put one man, by a fraudulent proceeding, in possession of the salary and perquisites of an office which, in due course of law, that is, by the legal votes of the people, truly counted, belongs to another man-then it would be a crime. exactly of the same sort, not with stealing, but with swindling and forgery. This, however, is only the smallest part of the

wrong which the giver or procurer of a fraudulent vote intends to commit. When an election is pending for Governor of Connecticut, the question whether this man or that shall have a certain pitiful salary, is insignificant-nobody thinks of it. When the whole American Union is agitated with the election of a President, the question whether John Doe or Richard Roe shall have possession of a certain house for four years, with an annual salary of twenty-five thousand dollars, is not taken into consideration. The question, in such cases, is not who shall have a certain salary, but whom shall the people honor with their confidence-who shall be entrusted with the direction of public affairs-what shall be the character and tendency of the government. These are questions of such moment that the pecuniary question dwindles into nothing, by the side of them. These questions may involve boundless results. The election of one man rather than another may bring upon the country all the moral evils and commercial disasters of an inflated currency. The election of one man rather than another may be the decision of the question between the violation and the integrity of public faith, or between the loss and the redemption of national honor. It may decide the question between peace and war. It may decide the question whether liberty or slavery shall be extended over vast regions of luxuriant wilderness-whether the country shall be indeed a country of freemen, with free thought, free worship, and free labor, or shall embark in a crusade against Christendom for the indefinite perpetuation and extension of the most atrocious and most mischievous of all the institutions of barbarism. To determine the question directly or indirectly dependent upon the issue of an election, is the prerogative of those to whom the constitutions and laws of the country have committed the sovereignty-of those, in other words, who, by the constitutions and laws of the country, are invested with the right of suffrage. The crime, then, which we are considering, is an attempt, not to defrand this man or that of some little amount of property, but to defraud the people of their highest prerogative. It is an act of treason against the sovereignty of the republic. It is an attempt to

usurp fraudulently, if not by a direct act of perjury, the power of determining the most momentous questions, and to precipitate a free people upon some course of policy which their judgment and their will rejects. By the side of such a crime, all ordinary frauds upon property-theft, swindling, forgery-seem light and venial.

The guilt of this crime, it is to be observed, does not rest exclusively upon that individual culprit whose hands actually deposit an illegal vote upon the ballot box. That culprit rarely, if ever, perpetrates his crime except at the procurement and under the influence of somebody else. He is responsible; but ordinarily, if not always, somebody else is responsible too. And often the actual perpetrator is far less guilty in the matter than those under whose instigation he has acted; but who very likely would despise the thought of perpetrating such a deed with their own hands.

The sophistry by which men may persuade themselves either to commit this crime themselves or to connive at the commission of it by others, is easily imagined, and by an honest mind as easily refuted. There is no crime without. some form of apology-no wickedness without some sophistry which the perpetrator thinks, at the time, may be sufficient to excuse it.

It is easy for a man, under certain influences, and especially under the strong influence of political partisanship, to say within himself, or to say outright, "The laws here do not indeed give me in this case the right of voting, but they ought to do so, and they have conferred that right on many who are far less competent than I am to exercise it wisely. The arrangement which forbids my vote, is arbitrary, unreasonable, unwise, unjust;-and therefore it is not unjustifiable, it is nothing more nor less than simple equity, if I evade the law in any way that happens to be practicable." And many men there are who can impose upon themselves in a question of right and wrong by arguments less plausible than this. But what is this reasoning? It is the very logic of the thief. "The laws and arrangements of society," he says, "are all wrong. The distribution of property which takes place under

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