ssay from my pen,
hitherto unpublished:--

* * * * *

IS THE ONE-VOTE SYSTEM RIGHT OR WRONG?

In a nation self-governed through its own representatives, it seems
reasonable to admit that each citizen should have a vote; each citizen,
we say, simply as such; whether male or female, labourer, pauper, civil,
military, naval, or official, every one not convicted of crime nor an
attested lunatic, of full age, of sufficient capacity (evidenced by
being able to read and write), celibate or married, rich or poor,--every
person in our commonwealth should equitably, it may well be conceded,
have his or her single vote in the government of the country. Poverty is
no crime, therefore the Workhouse should not disfranchise; sex is no
just disqualification, therefore the woman should have her vote as
freely as the man, for surely marriage ought not to suffer derogation
and disgrace by denial of the common right of citizenship as its
penalty; the soldier, sailor, policeman, government-official, and any
other class which may now be deprived of their birthright by law or
custom, should certainly be admitted to the poll like other patriotic
citizens; in short, manhood suffrage, it may be theoretically argued, is
just and wise--manhood of course including womanhood, as suggested
above; for even a wife either sides with her husband or controls him in
common cases; and in the less usual instances where he rules, there need
be no more tyranny about political matters than about domesticities, and
so the home would scarcely be any the worse even for partisan zeal.

However, whilst admitting the theoretical propriety of a one vote for
each citizen in the state, there remains to be considered the higher
practical justice of many having more than one. Numbers alone are not
the strength of a people; if of inferior quality they are rather its
weakness. For the Parliament of England representation is demanded of
all the virtues, talents, and acquirements, not certainly of the vice,
ignorance, poverty, and other evils more rife among the lower rungs of
the social ladder than to those above them. The single vote system (so
far as the franchise has any influence at all) depresses and demoralises
every class, as reducing all to one dead level. The ballot plan is now
law and cannot well be done away with; but it is manifestly a
humiliation for intelligence to have to sign with "his mark" in order
that ignorance may thus