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When a man's vote is challenged and refused, he does not dream of saying: "I shall not pay my tax," and the assessor never inquires whether he votes or desires to vote. The men in the District of Columbia do not find their unfranchised condition assuaged by the smallness of their account with the assessor.
They went to the ministry; they asked to be guided; they asked to be governed. Commerce requested a code; trade required a currency; the unfranchised subject solicited his equal privilege; suffering labour clamoured for its rights; a new race demanded education. What did the ministry do? They fell into a panic.
But while recognizing these differences, which manifest themselves partly in what may be described as national characteristics, and partly in constitutional varieties, we may trace one course of historical progression in all except Venice. This is what natural philosophers might call the morphology of Italian commonwealths. To begin with, the Italian republics were all municipalities. That is, like the Greek states, they consisted of a small body of burghers, who alone had the privileges of government, together with a larger population, who, though they paid taxes and shared the commercial and social advantages of the city had no voice in its administration. Citizenship was hereditary in those families by whom it had been once acquired, each republic having its own criterion of the right, and guarding it jealously against the encroachments of non-qualified persons. In Florence, for example, the burgher must belong to one of the Arts. In Venice his name must be inscribed upon the Golden Book. The rivalries to which this system of municipal government gave rise were a chief source of internal weakness to the commonwealths. Nor did the burghers see far enough or philosophically enough to recruit their numbers by a continuous admission of new members from the wealthy but unfranchised citizens. This alone could have saved them from the death by dwindling and decay to which they were exposed. The Italian conception of citizenship may be set forth in the words of one of their acutest critics, Donato Giannotti, who writes concerning the electors in a state: 'Non dico tutti gli abitanti della terra, ma tutti quelli che hanno grado; cioè che hanno acquistato, o eglino o gli antichi loro, facult
The prevalence of mobs; the entrance of the unfranchised populace, by means of "body" meetings and mass meetings, into the political arena; the leveling principles and the smug self-righteousness of the patriot politicians; all this led many a conservative to consider whether his interest were not more threatened by the insurgence of radicalism in America than by the alleged oppression of British legislation.
The mass of the voters, small freehold farmers in the country and "freemen" in some of the towns, holding themselves superior to the unfranchised, yet not claiming equality with the favored few; the tenant farmer or small shopkeeper, deferring to the freeholder and the freeman, but aware that fortune had placed him above the artisan and day laborer; the artisan and the day laborer, proud that none could call them "servant": these were the simple folk who in all the colonies made the great majority of free citizens.
Jacobi is willing to say that "in the eye of the law, the married white woman in the North was as devoid of personality as the African slave in the South," and she also says: "By another error of interpretation, certain laws which remain on the statute-book, or which have been recently added, have been considered so peculiarly favorable to women, that they are thought to prove a legislative tendency to grant special immunities to women so long as they consent to remain unfranchised."
Does she mean to say that the lawmakers have asked the women if they would consent to remain unfranchised? I thought that leaving them unfranchised without asking their consent was, in Suffrage eyes, the very front of the offending.
Furthermore, a Presbyterian cabal in Plymouth and Massachusetts, 1644-1646, gathered to it the discontent of large numbers of unfranchised residents within the latter colony, and under threat of an appeal to Parliament boldly asked for the ballot and for church privileges.
Certainly, the question cannot be said not to have received the attention that any vital subject might have claimed, and the answers show that, as comprehension of the meaning of democracy has grown, and as liberty of thought and action for men and women has increased, the proposition to cast an unequal burden, not upon a disfranchised class, but upon an unfranchised sex which in every class has its own correlative and equal duties, rights, and privileges, is losing ground.
And the colonies were not represented in Parliament; no, not even in that "virtual" sense which might be affirmed in the case of many unfranchised English cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool; from which it followed that the Stamp Act, unquestionably an internal tax, was a manifest violation of colonial rights.
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