. The assumption of
Divine right would be a full vindication of the natural right
contended for here, provided it did not involve the hereditary
obligation to obey.

Again, in other States, embracing the Republics, and especially
our own, including the States which make up the United States,
this right has been made to rest upon the authority of political
power, defining who may be an elector, and what shall constitute
his qualification; most States in the past period declaring
property as the familiar basis of a right to vote; others,
intelligence; others, more numerous, extending the right to all
male persons who have attained the age of majority. While the
conditions of the right have varied in several States, and from
time to time been modified in the same State, the right has
uniformly rested upon the express authority of the political
power, and been made to revolve within the limitations of express
law.

Passing from this brief allusion to the political history of the
question to the consideration of its inherent merits, we do not
hesitate to believe that the legal vindication of the natural
right of all citizens to vote would, at this stage of popular
intelligence, involve the destruction of civil government. There
is nothing in the history of the past that teaches us otherwise.
There is little in current history that promises a better result.
The right of all men to vote is as fully recognized in the
population of our large centres and cities as can well be done,
short of an absolute declaration that all men shall vote,
irrespective of qualifications. The result in these centres is
political profligacy and violence verging upon anarchy. The
influences working out this result are apparent in the utter
neglect of all agencies to conserve the virtue, integrity and
wisdom of government, and the appropriation of all agencies
calculated to demoralize and debase the integrity of the elector.
Institutions of learning, calculated to bring men up to their
highest state of political citizenship, and indispensable to the
qualifications of the mind and morals of the responsible voter,
are postponed to the agency of the dram-shop and gambling hell;
and men of conscience and capacity are discarded, to the
promotion of vagabonds to power