asserts itself, encourage the hope and inspire the belief that we shall not fail ultimately to reach wise conclusions, and to shape and keep the new conditions in harmony with the principles of patriotism, justice and common sense.

Since the adoption of the Federal Constitution each generation has had to meet and deal with issues which, in the opinion of the faint-hearted, threatened not only the perpetuity of the Federal Union, but the continuance of free institutions. The alien and sedition laws of the elder Adams led to the adoption of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-99, and opened the eyes of the American people to the fact that the opinion was then entertained by some of the greatest statesmen that the union of the states was in the nature of a compact, and that the violation of any of the terms of that compact by the general government absolved each state from its obligations, and that each state was the final judge of the supposed infraction and possessed the right to determine whether it should withdraw from or continue a member of a union which the framers of the constitution had fondly hoped was to prove perpetual.

It was claimed by those who opposed the acquisition of Louisiana that the erection of new states out of that territory, and their admission into the Union without the express consent of every state, would be in contravention of the federal compact, would reduce the relative importance and impair the dignity of the original states, and be equivalent in law and in morals to the dissolution of the Union.

The enactment of the protective tariff laws of 1828 was denounced as a gross violation of the Constitution and was followed by the nullifying statutes of South Carolina, which would have led to civil war but for the firmness of President Jackson, and the adoption by Congress of compromise statutes gradually relieving the hardships against which the agricultural states most bitterly complained.

The acquisition of the territories ceded by Mexico in 1848 led to questions touching the institution of slavery that for

a time seemed beyond the possibility of peaceful settlement. That discussion accustomed the minds of the people to the contemplation of the irrepressible conflict that culminated in the civil war, and was only settled at last by the destruction of an institution for the existence of which the people of all the states were alike responsible, but the evils of which fell with peculiar weight on those states where the profitable character of African slavery prevented its eradication during the earlier years of the republic.

The Union has not only survived all these disturbing issues, but rests on a firmer basis to-day than ever before. No one now asks what we shall do with the territorial issues of the past, but how we shall meet and dispose of the questions arising out of the duty we have assumed of deciding the destiny of the people who came to us with the territories acquired by the treaty restoring peace between the kingdom of Spain and the Government of the United States.

Are the people of the United States to be henceforth divided into citizens and subjects? Does the Constitution follow the flag, or are its beneficent provisions confined in their operation to the American States, between whom it constitutes the bond of union, until the representatives of those states shall extend its provisions to the stranger, brought under our jurisdiction by the fate of war or by treaty, leaving those representatives free to decide as American interests, American honor and American magnanimity may require?

These are the questions that are now being asked on every hand. The recent legislation concerning the Island of Porto Rico has given them exceptional prominence. The interest aroused by that legislation in every section of the country and with the people of every class, condition, vocation and pursuit, encourages the hope, as it gives reason for the belief, that the ultimate settlement of these absorbing issues will not be inconsistent with our theory of government or in conflict with the practical application of the great principle

that the just powers of government rest on the intelligent consent of the governed.

The danger to the perpetuity of free institutions, if such danger there be, does not grow out of expansion, and is not the more alarming because of the difficulties to be overcome in the administration of the affairs of our new possessions. If imperialism is to supersede the principles of free government, if empire is to take the place of the republic, the revolution, when it comes, will be traceable to internal and not to external causes.

It will not be provoked by our relations with the outside world, but will result from our failure to preserve at home, unsullied and uncontaminated, that highest and most sacred attribute of American citizenship, without which all talk of the consent of the governed is but a mockery.

When the civil war was raging with almost unabated fury, Mr. Lincoln, in his Gettysburg address, expressed the opinion, that the contest of arms was to decide, whether the government of the people, for the people and by the people, should perish from the earth. The triumph of the federal armies did not solve that problem; the reconstruction of the South did not solve it, and the extension of the suffrage to all the people of the United States without regard to race, color or previous condition of servitude, not only did not solve, but left it yet more difficult of solution. Manhood suffrage remains to-day an experiment, with the serious phase, that it is an experiment which can not be permitted to fail, if free institutions are to be preserved. Those who look on the manner in which the experiment is being worked out, with complacency and confidence, are unaware of the fact that we are over a slumbering volcano, from which some day an eruption may rain on our devoted heads the ashes of political destruction, as the ashes of death were rained from Vesuvius on the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Under our system of government we gather the consent of the governed from the ballot box. There is, therefore, no

question of greater moment than whether the ballot box does in fact reflect the genuine and unpurchased consent of the governed, and does represent their real will touching the administration of public affairs, by those who from time to time appear to be chosen to places of responsibility, trust and power.

The people of the revolutionary times, whose representatives joined in the declaration that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," did not contemplate the literal application of that principle, and permitted it to enter into practical government under restraints, which at the present time would be regarded not only as intolerable, but as utterly inconsistent with the theory of man's capacity for self-goverument.

Each of the thirteen original states began by attaching property qualifications to the right of suffrage. Some of them were more liberal than others, but all denied to those who possessed nothing in the way of taxable estate, the right to participate in the affairs of government, at the polls or elsewhere. If manhood suffrage be an indispensable prerequisite to the republicanism, or to the democracy of modern times, our forefathers carried on the governments they instituted through an aristocracy of property, giving no concern to the intelligence or the education or the personal worth of the individual, who was the unfortunate possessor of no estate.

Vermont and Kentucky, the first two additions to the Union after the adoption of the Constitution, set literal examples of governments of the people by the people. More than sixty years elapsed, however, before the last of the original thirteen gave in its adhesion to manhood suffrage, and up to the beginning of the civil war many of the states of the Union denied to men of African descent the right to vote, however wealthy or worthy they may have been.

As late as the end of the first quarter of this century it

was contended by enlightened statesmen, that universal suffrage endangered property and put it in the power of the worthless and impecunious to control wealth and intelligence, and was not to be contemplated except with abhorrence and fear. They called attention to its career in Europe and insisted that it was folly to expect exemption in America from the conditions that at first inflamed, and then destroyed other nations; and they warned those in power that, if they closed their eyes to the evils invariably following manhood suffrage in the countries in which it had prevailed, the delusions of that day would be lamented by posterity in sack cloth and ashes. Those warnings did not prevail, and state after state removed the disqualification of poverty, until color became the only exception to the completeness of universal suffrage, and that exception was removed by the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. It will profit us nothing to discuss the efficacy of the reforms that have taken from property its power to control in matters of government. Political rights once conferred can seldom, if ever, be recalled, and are never voluntarily relinquished. It may be possible in a few states, under exceptional conditions, to re-establish property or educational qualifications, but it is far more likely in the future, that suffrage will be extended rather than circumscribed.

We are now face to face with the question, whether suffrage is or is not a failure, and we are to work out that problem in the light of past experience with fear and trembling. Discussing this absorbing question in his querulous, but philosophic way, Thomas Carlyle, fifty years ago, used this language:

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"America, too, will have to strain its energies crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousandfold wrestle with the Pythons and mud-demons, before it can become a habitation for the gods. America's battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful, though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it.