n the land if he take
advantage of the public schools, the colleges and the many opportunities
freely offered. It is this equality of rights which makes our nation a
home for the oppressed of all the monarchies of the old world.

And yet, notwithstanding the declaration of our Revolutionary fathers,
"all men created equal," "governments derive their just powers from
the consent of the governed," "taxation and representation
inseparable"--notwithstanding all these grand enunciations, our
government was founded upon the blood and bones of half a million human
beings, bought and sold as chattels in the market. Nearly all the
original thirteen States had property qualifications which disfranchised
poor white men as well as women and negroes. Thomas Jefferson, at the
head of the old Democratic party, took the lead in advocating the
removal of all property qualifications, as so many violations of the
fundamental principle of our government--"the right of consent." In New
York the qualification was $250. Martin Van Buren, the chief of the
Democracy, was a member of the Constitutional Convention held in Buffalo
in 1821, which wiped out that qualification so far as white men were
concerned. He declared, "The poor man has as good a right to a voice in
the government as the rich man, and a vastly greater need to possess it
as a means of protection to himself and his family." It was because the
Democrats enfranchised poor white men, both native and foreign, that
that strong old party held absolute sway in this country for almost
forty years, with only now and then a one-term Whig administration.

In those olden days Horace Greeley, at the head of the Whig party and
his glorious New York Tribune, used to write long editorials showing the
workingmen that they had a mistaken idea about the Democratic party;
that it was not so much the friend of the poor man as was the Whig, and
if they would but vote the Whig ticket and put that party in power, they
would find that it would give them better laws than the Democrats had
done. At length, after many, many years of such education and
persuasion, the workingmen's vote, native and foreign, was divided, and
in 1860 there came to the front a new party which, though not called
Whig, was largely made up of the old Whig elements. In its turn this new
party enfranchised another degraded class of labor. Because the
Republicans gave the ballot to negroes, they have been allied to that
party and hav