e or office holding or both were
further restricted by religious provisions. No single sect was powerful
enough to dominate after the Revolution, but, for the most part,
Catholics and Jews were either disfranchised or excluded from office.
North Carolina and Georgia denied the ballot to any one who was not a
Protestant. Delaware withheld it from all who did not believe in the
Trinity and the inspiration of the Scriptures. Massachusetts and
Maryland limited it to Christians. Virginia and New York, advanced for
their day, made no discrimination in government on account of religious
opinion.

=The Defense of the Old Order.=--It must not be supposed that property
qualifications were thoughtlessly imposed at the outset or considered of
little consequence in practice. In the beginning they were viewed as
fundamental. As towns grew in size and the number of landless citizens
increased, the restrictions were defended with even more vigor. In
Massachusetts, the great Webster upheld the rights of property in
government, saying: "It is entirely just that property should have its
due weight and consideration in political arrangements.... The
disastrous revolutions which the world has witnessed, those political
thunderstorms and earthquakes which have shaken the pillars of society
to their deepest foundations, have been revolutions against property."
In Pennsylvania, a leader in local affairs cried out against a plan to
remove the taxpaying limitation on the suffrage: "What does the delegate
propose? To place the vicious vagrant, the wandering Arabs, the Tartar
hordes of our large cities on the level with the virtuous and good man?"
In Virginia, Jefferson himself had first believed in property
qualifications and had feared with genuine alarm the "mobs of the great
cities." It was near the end of the eighteenth century before he
accepted the idea of manhood suffrage. Even then he was unable to
convince the constitution-makers of his own state. "It is not an idle
chimera of the brain," urged one of them, "that the possession of land
furnishes the strongest evidence of permanent, common interest with, and
attachment to, the community.... It is upon this foundation I wish to
place the right of suffrage. This is the best general standard which can
be resorted to for the purpose of determining whether the persons to be
invested with the right of suffrage are such persons as could be,
consistently with the safety and well-being of the comm