us from the danger of corruption. A century or more ago, the suffrage was anything but democratic and yet there was scarcely any kind of political chicanery which the men then in public life did not practise. "In filibustering and gerrymandering," writes Professor McMaster, "in stealing governorships and legislatures, in using force at the polls, in colonizing and in distributing patronage to whom patronage is due, in all the frauds and tricks that go to make up the worst form of practical politics, the men who founded our State and national governments were always our equals, and often our masters."
While no one can be blind to the evils which have been associated with democracy in the United Slates and in the Old World, no serious student of history, when he compares the long train of abuses, brutalities and disorders connected with the rule of kings, priests and nobles, can doubt for an instant that as between democracy and the outworn systems of the past there can be no choice. Every branch of law that has been recast under the influence of popular will has been touched with enlightenment and humanity. Compare the brutal criminal codes of old Europe with the still imperfect but relatively enlightened codes of our own time. Compare the treatment of prisoners, women and children, the education of the youth, and the public institutions devoted to general welfare, with those existing before the age of democracy. Mr. Bryce's remark that evidences of philanthropy and humanitarianism are mingled in our state politics with folly and jobbery "like threads of gold and silver woven across a warp of dirty sacking" is true, and yet when one looks for evidences of philanthropy and humanitarianism in the folly and jobbery that characterized aristocratic and monarchical institutions in the old regime, one does not even have the satisfaction of getting the gleam of gold and silver across the dirty sacking."[1]
(To be concluded)
- ↑ Charles A. Beard and Birl E. Schultz, op. cit., p. 14.
