Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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and for all nations.’ The right of suffrage will vary almost infinitely, according to the special circumstances and characteristics of a nation.3
The American Legislature acted on this principle. In the colonial period ‘no uniform rules in regard to the right of suffrage existed. In some of the Colonies … freeholders alone were voters; in others, a very near approach was made to universal suffrage among the males of competent age; and in others, again, a middle principle was adopted, which made taxation and voting dependent upon each other, or annexed to it the qualification of holding some personal estate, or the privilege of being a freeman or the eldest son of a freeholder of the town or corporation.’ When the Revolution separated the Colonies from the mother country the same diversity was suffered to continue. ‘In some of the States the right of suffrage depends upon a certain length of residence and payment of taxes; in others, upon mere citizenship and residence; in others, upon the possession of a freehold or some estate of a particular value, or upon the payment of taxes, or performance of some public duty, such as service in the militia or on the highways. In no two of these State constitutions will it be found that the qualifications of the voters are settled upon the same uniform basis.' A proposal to establish a uniform system of voting on a common principle was brought before the Convention which framed the Constitution of 1787–88, but after full discussion it was resolved to leave the existing diversities untouched, and to confide to each State the power of regulating as it pleased the system of suffrage. All that the Convention established was, that the electors for the House of Representatives should, in each State, have the qualifications requisite for the electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature. As a matter of fact, for many years property qualifications were required in most States for electors, and a diversity in the system of election prevailed which was little, if at all, less than in England. In several of the State legislatures, though not in the Federal Legislature, a property qualification was required in representatives and in the Federal Legislature representatives, and direct taxes were apportioned by the same ratio.4
If we now pass from the two great English-speaking communities to France, we find ourselves in a different region of thought, over which Rousseau exercised the strongest influence. It is not necessary for me here to enter into a general examination of the political theories of Rousseau, or of the many inconsistencies they present. The part of his teaching which had most influence, and with which we are now specially concerned, is that relating to the suffrage. He held that absolute political equality was the essential condition of political freedom, and that no diversities of power, or representations of classes or interests should be suffered to exist in the Constitution. Every man should have a vote, and a vote of the same value; a representative should be nothing more than a delegate under the absolute control of the constituency; and no law can have any binding force which has not been directly sanctioned by the whole community. His whole system rested on the idea of natural and inalienable rights.
These views did not at once pass into French legislation. The States-General which met in 1789 had been elected by orders, the nobles and the ecclesiastics voting separately and directly for their own representatives. For the third estate the system of double election was adopted, the electors being themselves elected by a very wide constituency, consisting of men of twenty-five who had a settled abode and who paid direct taxes. In the Constitution of 1791 the system of double election was maintained; the right of voting for the primary assemblies was restricted to ‘active citizens’ who, among other things, paid direct contributions to at least the value of three days' labour; while the men whom they elected, and who in their turn elected the representatives, were required to possess a considerable property qualification. It varied, according to the size of the constituencies and the nature of the property, from a revenue of the value of 500 days' to a revenue of the value of 100 days' labour. In 1792, however, the Legislative Assembly very nearly established manhood suffrage, though it was qualified by the system of double election. The connection of voting with property and taxation was abolished. All Frenchmen of twenty-one who had resided for a year in the department, and who were not in domestic service, might vote in the primary assemblies, and no other qualification was required, either for the elected electors or for the deputies, except that they should have attained the age of twenty-five. It was under this system that the Convention—the most bloody and tyrannical assembly of which history has any record—was elected. The Constitution of June 1793 completed the work of democratic equality. The Convention decreed that ‘all Citizens have an equal right to concur in the enactment of the law and in the nominations of their delegates or agents’; that ‘the Sovereign people is the universality of French citizens,’ and that ‘they should nominate directly their deputies.' Population was made the sole basis of national representation. All citizens of twenty-one years who had resided for six months in the electoral district were made voters, and every 40,000 voters were entitled to return one member. This Constitution itself was submitted to and ratified by direct universal suffrage.
The year when this Constitution was enacted was one of the most tragical in French history. It was the year when the ancient monarchy was overthrown; when the King and Queen were brought to the scaffold; when the flower of the French nation were mown down by the guillotine or scattered as ruined exiles over Europe; when the war with England began which raged, with one short intermission, for more than twenty years.
The Constitution of 1793 never came into force. It was adjourned till after the war, and long before the war had terminated France had passed into wholly different conditions. The downfall of the Jacobins in 1794 soon led to a restriction of the suffrage and a revival of the old system of double election, and in the strong reaction against the horrors of the Revolution France moved on by steady stages to the absolute despotism of Napoleon. The system of direct election of members of Parliament was not established in France till 1817, and universal suffrage, as it had been designated by the Convention in 1793, did not revive until 1848. But the theory that each change in the Constitution should be ratified by a direct popular vote showed more vitality, and successive Governments soon learned how easily a plebiscite vote could be secured and directed by a strong executive, and how useful it might become to screen or to justify usurpation. The Constitution of 1795, which founded the power of the Directors; the Constitution of 1799, which placed the executive power in the hands of three Consuls elected for ten years; the Constitution of 1802, which made Buonaparte Consul for life, and again remodelled the electoral system; the Empire, which was established in 1804, and the additional Act of the Constitution promulgated by Napoleon in 1815, were all submitted to a direct popular vote.5
A great displacement of political power was effected by the French Revolution of 1830 and by the English Reform Bill of 1832. Tocqueville, in a recently published book, has shown very clearly how the true significance of the French Revolution of 1830 was the complete ascendency of the middle, or, as the French say, bourgeois class. In that class all political powers, franchises, and prerogatives for the next eighteen years were concentrated; their good and evil qualities pervaded and governed the whole field of French politics; and, by a happy coincidence, the King in mind and character was in perfect harmony with the representatives of the people.6 Constitutional government was carried out during these years faithfully, and in some respects even brilliantly, but it was tainted by much corruption, and it rested on an electorate of much less than a quarter of a million.
In England, a similar though not quite so decisive influence was established by the Reform Bill of 1832. Many causes contributed to this measure, but two predominated over all others, one of them being industrial and geographical, and the other political. The great manufacturing inventions of the eighteenth century had called into being vast masses of unrepresented opinion in the provincial towns, transferred the weight of population from the southern to the northern half of the island, and, partly by depleting old centres of power, and partly by creating new ones, added enormously to the inequalities and anomalies of English representation. On the other hand, the great wave of Toryism that overspread England after the French Revolution produced a greatly increased disinclination among the governing classes to all change, and especially to all measures of parliamentary reform. The Royal prerogative of summoning new centres of population to send members to Westminster had long since become wholly obsolete. Pitt, with much prescience, had attempted in 1783 and 1785 to meet the growing inequalities of representation and provide for a gradual diminution of the