during the whole period between the first election of
Representatives and the closing days of 1860, a large number of members
were chosen as representatives of property in men, a number sufficiently
large to decide the issue of more than one great political question. In
the Congress that met in December, 1859, the last Congress of the old
_regime_, one eleventh part of the Representatives, or thereabout,
represented slaves! Could anything be more opposed to democratic ideas
than such a basis of representation as that? Does any one suppose it
would be possible to incorporate into a democratic constitution that
should be formed for a European nation a provision giving power in the
legislature to men because they were slaveholders, allowing them to
treat their slaves as beasts from one point of view, and to regard them
as men and women from another point of view? Even in the Free States,
and down to recent times, large numbers of men have been excluded from
voting for Members of Congress because of the closeness of State laws.
At this very time, the State of Rhode Island--a State which in opinion
has almost invariably been in advance of her sisters--maintains a
suffrage-system that is considered illiberal, if not odious, in
Massachusetts; and Massachusetts herself is very careful to guard the
polls so jealously that she will not allow any man to vote who does not
pay roundly for the "privilege" of voting, while she provides other
securities that operate so stringently as sometimes to exclude even men
who have paid their money. Universal suffrage exists nowhere in the
United States, nor has its introduction ever been proposed in any part
of this country. The French imperial system of voting approaches much
nearer to universality than anything that ever has been known in
America; and yet England manages to get along tolerably well with her
imperial and democratic neighbor. Perhaps imperialism sweetens democracy
for her, just as democracy salts imperialism in France.

But our House of Representatives, as originally constituted, was a
democratic body, when compared with "the upper chamber," the Senate. The
very existence of an "upper chamber" was an invasion of democratic
ideas. If the people are right, why institute a body expressly for the
purpose of checking their operations? Yet, in making our Constitution,
not only was such a body instituted, but it was rendered as
anti-democratic and as aristocratical as it could possibly