es; then, in several
Western States, to include women.

Thus the line has been constantly advancing, but with many fluctuations,
eddies, and back-currents--like any other stream of progress. At
the present time the fundamental principles which underlie popular
government, and especially the whole matter of popular suffrage, are
much in the public mind. The tendency of government throughout the
entire civilized world is strongly in the direction of placing more
and more power in the hands of the people. In our own country we are
enacting a remarkable group of laws providing for direct primaries in
the nomination of public officials, for direct election of United States
Senators, and for direct legislation by means of the initiative and
referendum; and we are even going to the point, in many cities,
of permitting the people to recall an elected official who is
unsatisfactory. The principle of local option, which is nothing but that
of direct government by the people, is being everywhere accepted. All
these changes affect, fundamentally, the historic structure of our
government, making it less republican and more democratic.

Still more important and far-reaching in its significance is the
tendency of our government, especially our Federal Government, to
regulate or to appropriate great groups of business enterprises formerly
left wholly in private hands. More and more, private business is
becoming public business.

Now, then, as the weight of responsibility upon the popular vote is
increased, it becomes more and more important that the ballot should
be jealously guarded and honestly exercised. In the last few years,
therefore, a series of extraordinary new precautions have been adopted:
the Australian ballot, more stringent registration systems, the stricter
enforcement of naturalization laws to prevent the voting of crowds of
unprepared foreigners, and the imposition by several states, rightly or
wrongly, of educational and property tests. It becomes a more and more
serious matter every year to be an American citizen, more of an honor,
more of a duty.

At the close of the Civil War, in a time of intense idealistic emotion,
some three-quarters of a million of Negroes, the mass of them densely
ignorant and just out of slavery, with the iron of slavery still in
their souls, were suddenly given the political rights of free citizens.
A great many people, and not in the South alone, thought then, and still
think, that it