36,000,000 of electors should be reckoned. The most extended
system reckons only 9,000,000. Three persons out of four, then, are
excluded; and more than this, they are excluded by the fourth. Upon what
principle is this exclusion founded? Upon the principle of incapacity.
Universal suffrage, then, means--universal suffrage of those who are
capable. In point of fact, who are the capable? Are age, sex, and
judicial condemnations the only conditions to which incapacity is to be
attached?

On taking a nearer view of the subject, we may soon perceive the motive
which causes the right of suffrage to depend upon the presumption of
incapacity; the most extended system differing only in this respect from
the most restricted, by the appreciation of those conditions on which
this incapacity depends, and which constitutes, not a difference in
principle, but in degree.

This motive is, that the elector does not stipulate for himself, but for
everybody.

If, as the republicans of the Greek and Roman tone pretend, the right of
suffrage had fallen to the lot of every one at his birth, it would be an
injustice to adults to prevent women and children from voting. Why are
they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is
incapacity a motive for exclusion? Because the elector does not reap
alone the responsibility of his vote; because every vote engages and
affects the community at large; because the community has a right to
demand some securities, as regards the acts upon which his well-being
and his existence depend.

I know what might be said in answer to this. I know what might be
objected. But this is not the place to exhaust a controversy of this
kind. What I wish to observe is this, that this same controversy (in
common with the greater part of political questions) which agitates,
excites, and unsettles the nations, would lose almost all its importance
if the law had always been what it ought to be.

In fact, if law were confined to causing all persons, all liberties, and
all properties to be respected--if it were merely the organisation of
individual right and individual defence--if it were the obstacle, the
check, the chastisement opposed to all oppression, to all plunder--is it
likely that we should dispute much, as citizens, on the subject of the
greater or less universality of suffrage? Is it likely that it would
compromise that greatest of advantages, the public peace? Is it likely
that the excluded