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Updated: June 15, 2025
Parliament has been reformed, and the long-desired mechanical security provided for the voter's freedom. We no longer aspire after all these things, you may say, because our hopes have been realised and our dreams have come true. It is possible that the comparatively prosaic results before our eyes at the end of all have thrown a chill over our political imagination.
Ask yourself then how long before it would make an end of us, if let alone. Put it this way: you cannot let men live like pigs when you need their votes as freemen; it is not safe. You cannot rob a child of its childhood, of its home, its play, its freedom from toil and care, and expect to appeal to the grown-up voter's manhood.
Public opinion has universally settled in favor of the former; and to protect the voter's freedom, the so-called Australian ballot has very generally been adopted, the principle, of course, being a ballot on which all candidates' names are printed, with or without party designations, and against which the voter makes his mark.
This was a sort of signal that the voter's mind had been made up and that he should be let alone, yet even with this signal showing, in hotly contested elections the voter ran a noisy gauntlet of eager solicitors, harassing him on his way to vote as cab drivers assail the traveler when he alights from the train.
The man of the Southwest won many a vote where the voter's conscience did but half consent. Wherever he went, he made bitter enemies or devoted friends, rather than cold critics and lukewarm admirers. Adams was an honest man, but nobody had ever called him "Old Hickory."
A body of from five to seven intelligent women, informed on the question, re-enforced by local volunteers, called from house to house, talking to the voter or his wife, leaving suffrage literature and if possible getting the voter's signature to a card pledge to vote yes.
That was nervy of her and I frowned; after which she remarked that she objected to voting without being told in advance that the cause of liberty was trembling in the voter's palm. I remember wondering at the time where she had dug up all that rot.
With each proposal the voter's task becomes more complicated and difficult. Yet our ballots are already too complicated. The great blanket sheets with scores of officers and hundreds of names to be marked are quite beyond the intelligent action in detail of nine men out of ten.
The briber might, in the shelter of privacy, behold with his own eyes his bargain fulfilled, and the intimidator could see the extorted obedience rendered irrevocably on the spot; while the beneficent counter-influence of the presence of those who knew the voter's real sentiments, and the inspiring effect of the sympathy of those of his own party or opinion, would be shut out.
The high-sounding platforms, the frenzied orators, the parades, mass meetings, special trains, pamphlets, books, editorials, lithographs, posters all these paraphernalia are conjured up in the voter's mind when he reads the words Democratic and Republican.
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