The first national legislature to be elected by manhood suffrage without distinctions or qualifications was the notorious red radical French Convention which met at Paris, September 20th, 1792. It is that body which has the infamous celebrity of establishing and prosecuting the bloody tyranny known as the Terror, under which tens of thousands of innocent men and women of France were put to death because of their supposed political opinions. Though manhood suffrage may not be entirely and solely responsible for the excesses of the convention, yet it is safe to say that it helped create the machinery for the perpetration of the crimes and follies of the Terror; and that none of these excesses would have been committed by a body selected by a fairly qualified electorate. All that was good in the French Revolution was accomplished through a propertied electorate; and all that was worst was done under a manhood suffrage rÉgime.

The French Revolution began in 1789 as a peaceable and rational reform movement. None of the writings of Rousseau which did so much to prepare the way for the great change had directly discussed the suffrage question. The French National Assembly which met in May, 1789, at Versailles, was a sane and dignified body, chosen by a qualified electorate, and there was in its deliberations no mention and in its membership probably no thought of universal suffrage.

There was never any necessity for physical violence or revolution in order to secure the attainment of all such political reforms as even from the most liberal standpoint were needed by France at that time. The government like all other governments of that day was ignorant of economic laws, and the people had suffered under inequalities in rank and privilege, and an antiquated and inadequate financial system; but the king and the nobility were pacifist, and in the main humanitarian and inclined to liberal measures. Within three months after the Assembly convened, the nobility in open meeting voluntarily surrendered their historic privileges. At that same session of 1789 the Assembly undertook a number of reforms and the re-establishment of France upon a firm constitutional and conservative basis with proper security for all classes. Had the revolutionary movement stopped there, and the better classes been permitted to carry out their intelligent schemes, France, under a constitutional monarchy, would have embarked upon a new career of prosperity, and the wars which have since devastated her would probably have been avoided. But the Radicals got the upper hand; on pretence of remedying the embarrassments arising from poor harvests and bad financiering they established universal suffrage and the rule of the rabble, which increased the miseries of the French people five fold, and speedily evolved the Terror and precipitated the ruin of the nation. A great many, perhaps most, of these radicals were men of little experience, governed by mere sentiment and passion; others, who ultimately became the working majority were men of low moral character and defective reasoning powers; lacking in principle; demagogues and adventurers; cranks and scoundrels, who, claiming to be the champions of an ideal democracy, found it to their advantage to spout balderdash with which to gain the applause of the ignorant and emotional masses. Their stupidities, antics, vagaries, thefts, and other minor rascalities and follies; their guillotinings, drownings, arsons, street slaughters and other butcheries and outrages; their confiscations and banishments are matters of history, and have to some extent been duplicated by the Bolsheviki rabble in Russia in our own day. To the tune of crazy cries for liberty and more liberty, they attacked property, vested rights, commerce, business, the church and the Christian religion, and plunged France into chaos. They murdered and outlawed her nobility and her priests, besides tens of thousands of innocent people who were neither priests nor nobles, including farmers, artisans, tradesmen, poets, artists and professional men, the best of the land. Under the first Republic, it is computed that a million French died of famine and hardship, the direct result of Radical legislation and Radical tyranny, and chargeable to a great extent to the operation of manhood suffrage. Nor is this the total record of their mischief. Their misdeeds produced a violent reaction which resulted in the placing on the French throne of Bonaparte, whose ambitions deluged Europe with blood. A generation later he was followed by another Bonaparte, equally a result (though less directly) of the Revolution; and he plunged France into a war with Germany, which in 1871 cost her the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and out of which the recent great war of 1914 was born.

France therefore has never yet recovered from the injuries she suffered at the hands of the red radicals in the first Revolution. She may thank universal suffrage and the extremists of that time not only for the depopulation and misery inflicted upon her by the so-called republic from 1789 to 1798, and by the Napoleonic wars from 1798 to 1815, but also for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, for four invasions of her soil, for her recent sufferings from 1914 to 1918 and her reduction from the first rank to the third among the powers of Europe. In short, she has paid one hundred and thirty years of torment for the privilege of listening to the rhodomontade and vaporings of crackbrains and demagogues. Let America take warning.

Right here seems to be a good place to make a cheerful contrast to the foregoing by comparing the radical French convention of 1792 with the conservative French Assembly of 1871. It was after Germany had triumphed over Napoleon III, that clay idol of the French populace; he was in exile, the empire was at an end, the army was destroyed, and France was without resources, credit, friends or prestige. She had to form a new government and try to re-establish herself as a nation, to raise five thousand millions of francs and to get the invader from her soil. The elections were had for a new National Assembly; the manhood of France went to the polls, but with sad and serious faces. All the frivolity and humbug of politics had disappeared. The masses were poor and hungry; the Germans were at Paris; the Commune was threatening the national existence. It was a time for the people to turn to the genuine patriots, the real leaders of men, the competent, the capable, the reliable. Did they go to the demagogues, the orators, the enthusiastic ranters, the ultra-radicals, the theorists, the politicians, the inspired blatherskites whose froth and flattery are so much to the taste of the populace? No, indeed. The fear of death being upon them, the masses bethought them seriously, and for once refrained from making fools of themselves at an election. The poorer classes, the peasants, the workingmen, turned eagerly and fearfully to the solid men among their neighbors for counsel and advice and followed it. Needless to say, the new Assembly was the most able, intelligent, honest and conservative legislature poor France had seen for many a day. It was composed of men of experience, property, education, integrity and reputation; men who were noted champions of society and of civilization. As soon as the world heard what France had done at her elections, the joyful word was passed along, “France is saved,” and saved she was from that day. Confidence was restored, the Commune was suppressed with a strong and vigorous hand; public and private credit was re-established; the Prussian enemy was paid off and his troops withdrawn; industry revived, plenty came again, and France once more took her place among the nations. It would be an insult to the reader’s intelligence to proceed to point the moral of this notable incident in the political history of the world.

The red radicals of the French revolution claimed to believe, and as they were a shallow lot, some of them probably did believe as the masses here believe today, that pure manhood suffrage is a development of the principle of equality. But they were fundamentally wrong, they were in conflict with nature’s laws, which cannot be trifled with. As equality of power or capacity does not exist in nature, all that can rightly be claimed in that direction is equality of opportunity, which includes recognition of the superior claims of merit and capacity, and therefore involves the divine principle of inequality of achievement. This the French radical revolutionary leaders failed to perceive. For instance, they objected to the old aristocratic rÉgime because it was not founded on merit, and because its offices were allotted to influence without reference to qualifications; they wanted as they said “La carriere ouverte aux talents”; a career for talent, a very commendable object. But the operation of manhood suffrage is just the reverse of this; it denies the opportunity and the reward due to merit, to talent, to study, to diligence, to education. As far as possible it gives to ignorance and negligence the same weight and power as to intelligence and assiduity. To give power to electors unqualified by education or experience to overrule the wishes of the educated and experienced on political questions is to ignore merit and qualification, and that at the very foundation of government. But while the best thinkers of the French reform party at that time saw this plainly, the radical leaders overruled them, because what they wanted was a rabble constituency, since none other would give power to such a gang of fools and ruffians as they.

The world has made great progress in well-being in the last one hundred and thirty years, a progress due almost entirely to its inventors and discoverers and to the industry and frugality of its workers; and France has shared in that prosperity; but her miseries and misfortunes have also been great, and these were nearly all political, and due to one cause, the operation of manhood suffrage.