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3774
If the poorest, most numerous, most Ignorant cites can be persuaded to hate the 
smaller class and to vote solely for the purpose of injuring them, the party manager 
will have achieved his end. *                 *                 *                 *                 *                
*               A bad harvest or some disaster over which the Government can have 
no more influence than over the march of the planets will produce a discontent 
that will often govern dubious votes and may, perhaps; turn the scale in a nearly 
balanced election.   *   *   * There is another and very different class who are 
chiefly found in towns They are the kind of men who may be seen loitering 
listlessly around the doors of every gin shop-men who, through drunkenness and 
idleness or dishonesty, have failed in the race of life; who either never possessed 
or have wholly lost the taste for honest, continuous work; who hang loosely on 
the verge of the criminal class and from whom the criminal classes are chiefly 
recruited.   These men are not the real laborers, but their presence constitutes 
one of the chief difficulties and dangers of all later questions, and in every 
period of revolution and anarchy they are galvanized into a sudden activity.   
With a very low suffrage they become an important element in many 
constituencies. Without knowledge and without character, their Instinct will be to 
use the power which is given them for predatory and anarchic purposes To break 
up society and to obtain a new deal in the goods of life will naturally be their 
object.
We recognize this picture.   It delineates some campaigns in this 
country as if made to order. Business depression, a dry time in 
summer, an unseasonable frost, are the demagogue's opportunity, 
and always have been and always will be. The whittling statesman 
loitering at the gin-house door while his wife supports the family is 
not an unfamiliar figure in our civilization, and the candidate who 
goes about the country scattering firebrands of discontent from the 
rear ends of special cars has reappeared from time to time in our 
history and will soon again reappear in our history. But I believe 
there is great truth, Mr. Chairman, in the theory that the right of 
free expression at the polls is in the nature of a safety valve, and as 
to the controlling influence which Mr. Lecky thinks the creditor may 
exercise over the debtor, we have controlled that somewhat by the 
Australian ballot system, and of late, in some recent campaigns, the 
man with a dollar ahead has been made to feel that he actually 
ought to conceal the fact or apologize. To yield to the pessimistic 
theory that a man is not able to govern himself because of abuses 
here and there, would be to yield the consummation and flower of the 
evolution of political freedom which is typified and illustrated in our 
nationality, and if we can not yield it as a whole, we can not yield it 
in spots. Sir, there is an underlying principle at stake here, dear to 
the hearts of all American citizens, more important than property, 
more important than the Hawaiian Islands, namely, the right of 
every American citizen to participate in the government to which he 
owes allegiance. We doff our hats to no king.   We make our own 
laws, and we rule our own political destinies.   Here, between the 
Atlantic and the pacific, between the lakes and the Gulf, there are 
thousands of people, white and black, who do not possess even the 
educational qualification which we exact here in this bill, and yet 
they are entitled to vote. Macaulay somewhere satirically remarks 
in his history that none of those Virginia patriots who vindicated 
their separation from the mother country by proclaiming it to be a 
self-evident truth that all men were endowed by their Creator with 
an inalienable right to liberty would have had the slightest scruple 
about shooting any negro slave who had laid claim to that same 
inalienable right. But by the arbitrament of war since that time we 
have determined on many battlefields in this country that a man's a 
man, tho' e'er so black, that a man's a man for a' that and a' that, 
and although it was once, as late as 1790, held among the States of 
this country that the right to vote and the right to hold office were 
dependent, not on manhood qualifications, but on religions opinions, 
on acres of land, and pounds, shillings, and pence. Although it was 
held in Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina that a man 
must have 50 acres of land or personal property of the value of $30; In 
New York that a man must be worth $20 York money or pay house 
rent of 40s. a year, pay his taxes, and carry his tax receipt in his 
pocket; In Massachusetts that he must have a freehold estate 
yielding $3 a year or possess an estate worth $60; In Connecticut an 
annual income of $7 from real estate rated on the tax list at $134; In 
New Jersey, that a man must reside there, be of age, and have 
property, and in one other State the sole requirement was that the 
voter should have a white skin and property of the value of $10-
Although such were the laws of the earlier days of our Republic, since 
that time we have written with a firm hand the amendments to our 
Constitution which lift us now above the just reproach of history, 
and property qualification is an obsolete antiquity.

Property is not the only interest of men in the social compact. Man is 
something more than a mere taxpayer.   He is above all a man, and 
the laws touch not only his held but they touch also the man.   And it 
is one of the boasts as it is one of the bulwarks of our free American 
civilization that -
A mon's a mon though e'er sae puir- A mon's a mon for a' that.
We are called upon here Congress after Congress to vote in contested-
election cases where the colored man is defrauded of his right to 
vote, and where the proof is ample we unseat the man who is 
shown to have obtained his seat by defrauding the colored man of his 
right to vote.   How would a gentleman's speech urging the right of 
the colored men in the South to exercise the right to vote read in 
parallel columns with his speech defending the property 
qualification for the Hawaiians? Sir, there is force in the contention 
for a property qualification. It is ably defended by such men as 
Lecky in his Democracy and Liberty; but I do not see how we can 
make local exception to a great underlying rule of our Republic.   
We have not heretofore required a property qualification in any of our 
Territories, although riotous and ignorant legislation might in some 
instances have been apprehended. Then, sir, put the proposition to 
yourself.   Let any man put the proposition to himself.   If a man must 
first get an education, and then must get real estate of the value of 
$1,000 and carry his tax receipt in his pocket, or have obtained a 
position drawing $600 a year salary, how many absent minded 
literary beggars would have been excluded from "Fame's eternal 
camping ground" and had to wander down below, while some 
gentlemen with the money-getting instinct would have been sitting in 
the forum or swaggering in the public glare? It is said of the late 
Emory A. Storrs that some rich men were once chaffing him about 
the fact that he had not acquired much property.   Mr. Storrs stood it 
for a while and then said: "Gentlemen, the money-making instinct is 
a mere animal trait.   It is the instinct of accumulation.   The 
chipmunk possesses it; the beaver possesses it in an eminent degree.   
Doubtless the rich men of Athens sat around with their thumbs in the 
armholes of their vests and talked about the splendid work they were 
doing on the Parthenon; but, gentlemen, where are the rich men of 
Athens to-day, and where is Phidias?" To my mind there is no true 
aristocracy except the aristocracy of brain.   And it is true now, as it 
was true always, that - Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple 
faith than Norman blood.
And I would not be willing to put myself on record as the advocate of 
any government that would exclude a man from participating therein 
simply because he had not laid up dollars and cents. I can not give my 
support to a proposition which makes impecunious youth to stand 
longer and longer at the outer door of corporate opportunity waiting 
to be invited in and given a job and which makes his future 
subservient to some other man's money-making instinct.   I do not 
denounce wealth.   Far from it.   I recognize that wealthy men are 
realizing their responsibilities to society now as they never have 
before.   Some of the work of wealth now-a-days is magnificent, 
superb. I know of their charities, I read of their magnanimity, and I 
realize that immunity from hard manual toil gives greater oppor-
tunity for reading and thought, and in some instances leads to brain 
expansion - in fewer instances to heart expansion. But the men who 
have appeared on earth heretofore apparently charged with a 
message from God to the whole of mankind, who have been raised 
up as leaders in great crises, have come up from tow-paths, tanyards, 
from lonely frontier cabins, and from mangers, and I will not vote 
to put the property O. K. mark on any man's struggle upward.    Let 
me supplement the subserviency of Mr. Paley and the pessimisms of 
Mr. Lecky with the splendid words of Lamartine:
When there is no election every man is a slave or a serf.   When the election is 
limited to a small number of citizens, some are sovereigns and others are 
subjects; when the election pertains to all, no one is subject, no one is serf, no 
one is slave.   All are free and more than free; all are citizens and more than 
citizens; all are kings.
That is the ideal republic; and in my humble opinion, gentlemen, if 
we fall away from that ideal of the Republic, the Republic is in 
danger.    [Applause.]
CHINESE EXCLUSION AND CONTRACT LABOR.
The Hawaiian Islands.are now occupied by the following races and 
nationalities:
Hawaiians and mixed blood ................ ................................................................  
39,000 Japanese....................... ........................................ 
............................................   25,000 Chinese........................................ 
......................................................................   21,000 
Portuguese....................................... 
...................................................................   15,000 Americans 
................................ ..........................................................................     4,000 
British....................................... 
...........................................................................     2,250 Germans and other 
Europeans.............................. .................................................    2,000 Polynesians 
and miscellaneous ...... .............................. .........................................    1,250
Total    ................................ 
................................................................................ 109,500

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