United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When the Negroes become intelligent factors in society, when they become thrifty and accumulate wealth, they will find the way to larger exercise of citizenship. They can never sit upon juries to pass upon life and property until they are property-owners themselves, and they can never hold the reins of government by reason of mere superiority of numbers.
In 1906 one more State adopts the idea of giving a vote to female property-owners in money elections. One puts the age of consent up to sixteen. In a good many States it is already eighteen. Women's suffrage is again rejected in Oregon; and finally even South Dakota reforms her divorce laws. Perhaps a word should be given to other laws relating to minors as well as to young women.
Before the property-owners came, and while still the population was homogeneous, a sort of continuity in the life of the valley impressed itself upon one's consciousness, giving a sense of security. Here amidst the heaths a laborious and frugal people, wise in their own fashion, had their home and supplied their own wants.
In 1878 it was reported by the Pennsylvania Municipal Commission, as a remarkable but notorious fact, that the accumulations of debt in Philadelphia and other cities of the state have been due, not to a non-property-holding, irresponsible element among the electors, but to the desire for speculation among the property-owners themselves.
They were all by way of being property-owners, and they all expected to benefit by freedom from interference in the acquisition of wealth. It was this community of interest and point of view which prepared the way, not only for the adoption of the Constitution, but for the loyalty it subsequently inspired in the average American.
This demonstration, too, was one of the few indications which have as yet met the public eye of a very real division of the Democratic party in this city into two sets of politicians, known familiarly as "Short-Hairs" and "Swallow-Tails" the former comprising the rank and file of the voters and the latter "the property-owners and substantial men," who are endeavoring to make Tammany an instrument of reform and to manage the city in the interest of the taxpayers.
We know only the tendency. We know that in the beginning, even in America, the right to vote was a very limited matter. In the early years, in New England, only church-members voted; then the franchise was extended to include property-owners; then it was enlarged to include all white adults; then to include Negroes; then, in several Western States, to include women.
Lenine and his followers distrusted the peasants as a class whose interests were akin to the class of small property-owners. He would only unite with the poor, propertyless peasants.
I have offended the rich men and the property-owners in Milton. I could not help it; I was obliged to do so in order to speak as I this moment solemnly believe my Lord would speak. I have aroused opposition because I asked men into the church and upon this platform who do not call themselves Christians, for the purpose of knowing their reasons for antagonism to the church we love.
And in 1791 they seemed as far from realizing their hopes of betterment as they had been in 1789, for the bourgeois constitution-makers had provided that only taxpayers could vote and only property-owners could hold office.
Word Of The Day