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The men who framed and set up our Federal government were shrewd enough to see that if the interests of the property-holding classes were to be given effective protection, it was necessary that political power should rest ultimately upon a class basis. This they expected to accomplish largely through the judicial veto and the power and influence of the Supreme Court.
But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear. When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.
It may be said without exaggeration that the American scheme of government was planned and set up to perpetuate the ascendency of the property-holding class in a society leavened with democratic ideas. Those who framed it were fully alive to the fact that their economic advantages could be retained only by maintaining their class ascendency in the government.
"You mean an evil inherent in property-holding?" "If you like; I don't split words. The lesser of two evils. What's your remedy? You don't want to abolish property; you've confessed that property gives YOU your independence!" Again that curious quiver and flash!
So in agricultural communities like New Zealand, Australia, and some of our Western States, where there is a prosperous property-holding majority, the most complete political democracy has come to prevail.
It therefore resumed its law-abiding attitude, and placed itself upon the side of Government as against the working-men. It gave the command to fire upon the crowd in Preston, so that the unintentional revolt of the people stood all at once face to face, not only with the whole military power of the Government, but with the whole property-holding class as well.
In Bohemia, Russia and various Provinces of Austria and Germany, the principle of representation is recognized by the grant to property-holding women of a vote by proxy. The suffragists of France reported just before the war broke out that the French Parliament was pledged to extend universal municipal suffrage to women.
The disposition to guard the interests of the property-holding class rather than to prevent legislation for their advantage is also seen in the interpretation which has been given to the provision forbidding the states to pass any laws impairing the obligation of contracts.
The consequences of this were, on the one hand, a rapid fall in price of all manufactured commodities, prosperity of commerce and manufacture, the conquest of nearly all the unprotected foreign markets, the sudden multiplication of capital and national wealth; on the other hand, a still more rapid multiplication of the proletariat, the destruction of all property-holding and of all security of employment for the working-class, demoralisation, political excitement, and all those facts so highly repugnant to Englishmen in comfortable circumstances, which we shall have to consider in the following pages.
Under universal suffrage municipal self-government would mean the ascendency of the propertyless class, and this, from the standpoint of those who control the state government, would jeopardize the interests of the property-holding minority. This is doubtless one of the chief reasons why the state government has not been willing to relinquish its control over municipal affairs.
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