for members of the upper branch of the legislature who does not own
fifty acres of land. Every State requires more or less of a property
qualification in its officers and electors; and it is for discreet
legislation, or constitutional provisions, to determine what its amount
shall be. Even the Dorr constitution had a property qualification.
According to its provisions, for officers of the State, to be sure,
anybody could vote; but its authors remembered that taxation and
representation go together, and therefore they declared that no man, in
any town, should vote to lay a tax for town purposes who had not the
means to pay his portion. It said to him, You cannot vote in the town of
Providence to levy a tax for repairing the streets of Providence; but
you may vote for governor, and for thirteen representatives from the
town of Providence, and send them to the legislature, and there they may
tax the people of Rhode Island at their sovereign will and pleasure.

I believe that no harm can come of the Rhode Island agitation in 1841,
but rather good. It will purify the political atmosphere from some of
its noxious mists, and I hope it will clear men's minds from unfounded
notions and dangerous delusions. I hope it will bring them to look at
the regularity, the order, with which we carry on what, if the word were
not so much abused, I would call our _glorious_ representative system of
popular government. Its principles will stand the test of this crisis,
as they have stood the test and torture of others. They are exposed
always, and they always will be exposed, to dangers. There are dangers
from the extremes of too much and of too little popular liberty; from
monarchy, or military despotism, on one side, and from licentiousness
and anarchy on the other. This always will be the case. The classical
navigator had been told that he must pass a narrow and dangerous strait:

"Dextrum Scylla latus, laevum implacata Charybdis,
Obsidet."

Forewarned he was alive to his danger, and knew, by signs not doubtful,
where he was, when he approached its scene:

"Et gemitum ingentem pelagi, pulsataque saxa,
Audimus longe, fractasque ad litora voces;
Exsultantque vada, atque aestu miscentur arenae.
... Nimirum haec ilia Charybdis!"

The long-seeing sagacity of our fathers enables us to know equally well
where we are, when we hear the voices of tumultuary assemblies, and see
the turbulence created by numbers meeting a