the ballot, the precious
instrument of government, must be hedged about with stringent
regulations. The question is, where shall these lines be drawn in order
that the best interests, not of any particular class, but of the whole
nation, shall be served.

Upon this question, we, as free citizens, have the absolute right to
agree or disagree with the present laws regulating suffrage; and if we
want more people brought in as partakers in government, or some people
who are already in, barred out, we have a right to organize, to agitate,
to do our best to change the laws. Powerful organizations of women are
now agitating for the right to vote; there is an organization which
demands the suffrage for Chinese and Japanese who wish to become
citizens. It is even conceivable that a society might be founded to
lower the suffrage age-limit from twenty-one to nineteen years, thereby
endowing a large number of young men with the privileges, and therefore
the educational responsibilities, of political power. On the other hand,
a large number of people, chiefly in our Southern States, earnestly
believe that the right of the Negro to vote should be curtailed, or even
abolished.

Thus we disagree, and government is the resultant of all these diverse
views and forces. No one can say dogmatically how far democracy should
go in distributing the enormously important powers of active government.
Democracy is not a dogma; it is not even a dogma of free suffrage.
Democracy is a life, a spirit, a growth. The primal necessity of any
sort of government, democracy or otherwise, whether it be more unjust or
less unjust toward special groups of its citizens, is to exist, to be
a going concern, to maintain upon the whole a stable and peaceful
administration of affairs. If a democracy cannot provide such stability,
then the people go back to some form of oligarchy. Having secured a
fair measure of stability, a democracy proceeds with caution toward the
extension of the suffrage to more and more people--trying foreigners,
trying women, trying Negroes.

And no one can prophesy how far a democracy will ultimately go in the
matter of suffrage. We know only the tendency. We know that in the
beginning, even in America, the right to vote was a very limited matter.
In the early years, in New England, only church-members voted; then the
franchise was extended to include property-owners; then it was enlarged
to include all white adults; then to include Negro