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Hence the question arises: Is not this exclusion of the minority an injustice? Does it not amount to disfranchisement? The usual reply is either that the majority must rule or that the injustice done in some electorates is balanced in others, so that in the long run rough justice is obtained.
But Russell was clearly of opinion, and in this he was entirely in accordance with Lord Grey, that nothing but a large and comprehensive measure would be of any real use, and that "to nibble at disfranchisement and cramp reform by pedantic adherence to existing rights would be to deceive expectation, to whet appetite, and to bring about that revolution which it was our object to avert."
But the unit of society in a republic is the individual, and not the race, the failure to recognize this fact being the fundamental error which has beclouded the whole discussion. The effect of disfranchisement upon the individual is scarcely less disastrous.
Several men went to Congress and popular education began to be emphasized; but the difficulties of Reconstruction and the outrages of the KuKlux Klan were succeeded by an enveloping system of peonage, and by 1890-1895 the pendulum had swung fully backward and in the South disfranchisement had been arrived at as the concrete solution of the political phase of the problem.
Yet he prepared for the emergency as well as his means allowed; and when none of the citizens of military age were willing to enlist he made them cast lots, and punished by confiscation of goods and disfranchisement every fifth man among those under thirty-five, and every tenth man of those above that age.
Some boroughs were deprived of the right of election altogether; in others, whose population or constituency was too numerous to make their permanent disfranchisement advisable, the writ was suspended for a time, that its suspension might serve both as a punishment and as a warning, a practice which is still not unfrequently adopted.
Even then the existing partial disfranchisement of the electors would prevent a new constitution from going "too far" in a democratic direction. Certainly each change leads to more change. None of these proposed political reforms, however, even a constitutional convention, is in itself revolutionary, or promises to establish even a political democracy.
It is to escape the added tyranny, persecutions, insults, horrors which will surely be visited upon her in the establishment of an aristocracy of sex in this republic, that we raise our indignant protest against this wholesale desecration of woman in the pending amendment, and earnestly pray the rulers of this nation to consider the degradation of disfranchisement.
It is not merely that a vast number of human individuals are disfranchised; it is not even because in many of our States the disfranchisement extends to a majority, that the evil is so great; it is not merely that we disfranchise so many units and tens: but we exclude a special element, a peculiar power, a distinct interest, in a word, a sex.
This activity of the Jews went against the grain of the inquisitorial trio, Pobyedonostzev, Durnovo, and Plehve, and they decided to bar the Jews completely from participation in the municipal elections. The reactionary, anti-democratic "Municipal Regulation" of 1892 proclaimed publicly this new Jewish disfranchisement.
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