h section
of an act passed by the New Jersey Legislature in June, 1820 (1 Laws
N. J. p. 741), expressly reenacted this same property qualification. By
about the year 1840, however, nearly all the States had adopted manhood
suffrage, so far as it applied to whites. The severest and most dramatic
conflict took place in Rhode Island. In 1762 an act had been passed
declaring that the possession of L40 was necessary to become qualified
as a voter. This law continued in force in Rhode Island for more than
eighty years. In the years 1811, 1819, 1824, 1829, 1832 and 1834 the
workingmen (or the mechanics, as the official reports styled them), made
the most determined efforts to have this property qualification
abolished, but the propertied classes, holding the legislative power,
declined to make any change. Under such a law it was easy for one-third
of the total number of resident male adults to have the exclusive
decisions in elections; the largest vote ever polled in Rhode Island,
was in the Presidential election of 1840, when 8,662 votes were cast, in
a total adult male population of permanent resident citizens of about
24,000. The result of this hostility of the propertied classes was a
rising in 1840 of the workingmen in what is slurringly misdescribed in
conventional history as "Dorr's Rebellion,"--an event the real history
of which has not as yet been told. This movement eventually compelled
the introduction in Rhode Island of suffrage without the property
qualification.

How did the propertied classes meet this extension of suffrage
throughout the United States?

CORRUPTION AT THE POLLS.

A systematic corruption of the voters was now begun. The policy of
bribing certain legislators to vote for bank, railroad, insurance
company and other charters was extended to reach down into ward
politics, and to corrupt the voters at the springs of power. With a
part of the money made in the frauds of trade or from exactions for
land, the propertied interests, operating at first by personal entry
into politics and then through the petty politicians of the day, packed
caucuses and primaries and bought votes at the polls. This was equally
true of both city and rural communities. In many of the rural sections
the morals of the people were exceedingly low, despite their
church-going habits. The cities contained, as they always do contain, a
certain quota of men, products of the industrial system, men of the
slums and alleyways, so f