How the World Votes: The Story of Democratic Development in Elections

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Preface

Thb war and the defeat of the Hohenzollem have assured the victory of democracy, not merely in the wider sense, but in the more narrow field of elections. With the acquisition of universal suffrage in Great Britain and the passing of the old Prussian system, a definite milestone on the road of political evolution has been reached. Henceforth we enter upon a new stage — that of assuring the safety and the usefulness of democracy and the democratic suffrage. With that latter stage of the future this book is not primarily concerned. It deals with the earlier process, the development of a popular electoral franchise, first in Great Britain, then in the United States, and finally in all the important countries of the world. The process has been delayed in eastern and central Europe and denatured in the Iberian peninsula and South America; but the main thesis of the book is nevertheless the continuous growth of the people's control as expressed at the polls.

The authors have laid emphasis upon the Anglo-Saxon countries and France alike, because of the natural direction of American interests and because of the importance of the growth of an electoral democracy in these countries. They have also given to many of their chapters an historical character, for it seemed profitable to investigate the origins of the British and American systems, and to linger somewhat over the details of early elections in Great Britain and the United States. Their vi PREFACE

point of view, however, has always been that of the present; they have not aimed at presenting anything approaching a complete historical survey, but have sought to furnish simply the background necessary to an intelligent comprehension of the various S3rstems of elections now in operation.

The authors have drawn freely from the published works of many writers who have dealt with the subject of elections both in the past and the present, reference to whose books will be found in the bibliographical note at the end of these volumes. They are also deeply in* debted to those persons who, by their assistance and advice, have made possible the publication of this book, particularly to Professor C- M. Andrews, of Yale Uni- j

versity. Professor F. W. Coker, of Ohio State University, to the Review of Reviews, and to the authorities of the Yale University Library and of the New York Public »

Library.

Table Of Contents

VOL. I

PAoa

I. Introduction. Thb Foub Thbobibs of thb

Chapter I

INTRODUCTION. THE FOUR THEORIES OF THE BUFFRAQB

Our modem suffrage is a composite of ideas and practices, which have their source in the most widely separ rated epochs of the world's history, from Pericles to Jeremy Bentham, and from the laws of Solon to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In formation it resembles the successive stratifications of geology rather than the organic growth of biology, for the chapters in the history of the franchise are not necessarily interdependent. There have been four different ways in which in general man has regarded his right to participate in government by means of his vote. He has, in distant times and comparatively simple conditions, considered it a natural accompaniment to his membership in the state, from which he could in no way divorce himself save by forsaking the state. Secondly, in the Middle Ages men voted only by virtue of the land or the title they held, not because of their manhood or their citizenship. This attitude was supplanted in the days of budding constitutionalism by the belief in the franchise as an abstract right, to which a man is entitled, as he is thought to be entitled to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Finally, in the nineteenth century we have come to regard voting as we do office holding^ a function of citizenship to be exercised for the service and at the will of the state.

In Athens, as well as in other early governments, the theory of the suffrage was primitive and tribal The vote was neither a function of government nor a right, but a normal and essential act of citizenship. The Greek state was a projection of the family on a national scale, if the use of the word here be not premature. Membership in the family and in the state was equally natural. There were many ceremonies to remind ihe citizen of his relar tions to his fellows, which betrayed their familial origin — the common feasts, or in Sparta, the barracks and -the common table ; the gathering of the elders, the fathers of the tribes; and so on. The omnipresence of the state in the. most intimate affairs of life was so ov^^adowing that the state was in one sense almost despotic. It was impossible to separate the state and the individual; neither could the latter distinguish the acts which he performed as an individual from those which he performed as a citizen. Not all of the inhabitants of Athens voted ; but all the citizens voted, just as they all took part in the worship on the Acropolis.

The vote was not used in Athens for the election of magistrates except in the case of special offices, which required higher capacity than could be secured by chance. The Athenians believed election by lot to be the only qrstem possible in a democratic state. In the early stages of civilization the lot was regarded as a taking counsel with the gods, and offices filled by lot endowed their holders with a peculiar sanctity. From the days of Homer to the end of the Roman Empire the lot was employed in choosing the priests. In Athens it was used for naming the archons, whose office was a union of the functions of priest and magistrate. Although in its origin the bt was undoubtedly religious, statesmen after the fifth oentiuy avowedly maintained it because it was democratic; and in many Greek states outside of Attica the lot was adopted for the special reason that it was thou^t essential in a democracy.

An understanding of the complete identification of the individual with the state will make clear the basis of this ahnost xmiversal belief. The demos did not appoint its representatives, and then deliver its right of self-government into their hands until the next election; it was a compact and visible body, capable of gathering en masse in the Assembly and of passing laws for itself. The people did not bind itself to follow a set policy, by giving control to officials conunitted to that policy. If officials, chosen by lot, attempted to carry out an unpopular program, the Assembly could reverse their action; and the officials did not resign, but rather conformed to the Assembly's will — or else faced trial when their term had expired. The generals and other magistrates were the servants of the people in a more exact sense than are any modem presidents or prime ministers. The lot was preeminently adapted both for avoiding the election of masterful individuals, not content to derive their authority from the Assembly, and for assuring all, even the humblest, citizens an opportunity to hold office. Aristotle recognized that the demos was a tyrant, in that it must prevent individuals from attaining great importance in the state. All men and all offices must depend on the people.

In addition to the election by lot, the popular will was assured expression by another means: the vote in the law courts. The peculiar ^stem of courts, whereby every public man was continually liable to prosecution by the lowliest of citizens, was a check upon officials. Conviction in the courts meant little more to the accused than does an adverse general election to the British Prime Minister. Pericles, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, all suffered condenmation witii but slight loss of prestige: Aristophon was accused and acquitted seventy times. The courts afforded to tiie Athenian the same opportunity for criticism which the modem citizen enjoys in ihe vituperations of the electoral campaign. This fact diminishes our amazement at the extraordinary activity of the Athenian courts. The vote in them was, like the direct, popular vote in the Assembly, really a supplementary act of election.

The people thus gathered to itself all departments of government, the legislative, the judicial, and the electoral; and of these perhaps the least important was the third. At Athens the Assembly, not the magistrates, governed. Public office was not then so much coveted for the power it gave ; for the lot made it the prize of mediocrity, by ordaining that it should be merely the machinery of administration, not the guiding hand.

Although the citizenship was more generously granted in Rome during the Republic than in Athens, the government of the two was identical in this respect, that both were city states without representative assemblies, states in which the people as a whole elected its magistrates and made it laws. In the political functions of the government all citizens of Rome were equal, after the beginning of the fifth century ab urbe condita. Their functions were performed, however, in a totally different manner from that which we have described in Greece. They actually elected their officers by a process fairly similar to modem customs of voting.

There were at the end of the Republic three electoral assemblies in Rome: the Comitia Curiata^ the Comitia Centuriata and the Comitia Tributa. The first named had come down from the early history of the city, as a general assembly of the thirty curiae, into which the citizens were divided. It had long been largely a formal survival of a by-gone system, a political appendix. The Comitia Centuriata had robbed it of its significance by assiuning the election of a majority of the chief magistrates — ^the consuls, the censors, the praetors, the decemvirs, and the military tribunes. All Roman citizens of the city itself had the right to vote, as well as all citizens who did not inhabit a colony or a municipality with electoral rights of its own. The order of vote began with the knights, then following the centuries of the first class (determined by lot), and so on. Voting continued only until a majority for some candidate had been obtained, and rarely did an electoral contest prolong itself until all the citizens had expressed their choice.

As the early vote of the knights gave the patricians a marked advantage in both the Comitia Curiata and the Comitia Centuriata, in the course of democratic development the Comitia Tributa was created as a more thoroughly plebeian assembly. It needed no authorization from the Senate to meet under presidency of the tribune. When so convened, it elected the tribunes and the sediles plebis; when presided over by a consul it named the^ qusestors and most of the lower magistrates. Here all Romans voted by their tribes, of which there were four in the city of Rome and thirty-four in the rest of the Republic.

The elections by the Comitia Centuriata took place on the Campus Martins, the field outside the walls where formerly atiiletic contests had been held. At sunrise the heralds passed through the city with trumpets, and soon all Rome was streaming out through the gates to the assembling place. The voting lasted tlirough all of the long, Italian, summer day. In the war-like days of the early Republic, the citizens met, like our own Pilgrim fathers, with arms in their hands and flags at their head, and part of the people voted, while others stood guard. Later, when the danger of attack had passed, the Comitia was a jostling but good-humored crowd, which Cicero described as an immense and profound sea, troubled by the winds, which rolled and timibled it hither and thither. The Campus Martins was equipped with the wooden stockades into which the dealers in mutton herded their flocks. Into these enclosures were now herded the citizens of Rome, small and great, and they were not allowed to emerge until their turn to vote had arrived. The ceremonies began with prayer and sacrifice. Then the order of vote was determined by lot, the century of the knights being the first to vote, according to the Servian constitution. Out of their pens the voters passed by means of stiles, and as they came out they spoke ihe name of the candidate of their choice to the tellers at the gate, or marked it on a wax tablet with a stylus. The tribunes protested against the imfair pressure which resulted from this public vote, and the Lex Gabinia later provided for the use of the ballot Each voter, at the moment of voting, was given by an attendant a tabella, or list containing the names of the candidates, and a carved, wooden ballot for each of the names thereon. He dropped his choice into an urn under the watchful eyes of friends of the candidates stationed there to prevent dishonesty, and returned the other ballots to an attendant outside. The result of the poUing was announced by herald.

Among the Germans, likewise^ voting was an act in which every member of the tribe participated by virtue of his membership. The words of the elders and the nobles carried more weight only because th^ were the witans, wise men, not because they were better bom or more wealthy ; and the freemen of the tribe might override the counsel of the chiefs. Tacitus describes the method of vote in the teibal assembly. Measures were prepared and discussed in a smaller gathering of the chiefs, before they were laid before all the voters. Tlie assembly met under arms, and listened respectfully to the arguments of its elders, then expressed its consent by shouts of approbation, its dissatisfaction by clashing of arms.

The theory that the suffrage was a necessary adjunct of citizenship passed from the classical state to its lineal descendants, Hie medieval cities of Italy and Southern France. In several of them the lot was employed in election ; in practically all, the Council, superior to the Assembly, was retained.

The body of citizens was hardly broader than it had been in Athens, and as time went on, citizenship became hereditary in a comparatively small number of old families. In modem times we still feel the influence of the primitive idea of the suffrage, to the extent that we make citizenship one of the qualifications for voting, although only one. It is a legitimate question whether, supposing that the principle of an international league of nations gains acceptance, it would not be more sensible to abandon the theory which we have inherited from classical times and to extend the suffrage to aliens also, who have fulfilled a residence requirement.

The second theory of the suffrage, which formed the basis of elections in the medieval state, held that voting was not a natural act of citizenship, but a privilege attached to a definite economic status, generally the ownership of land. This concept was a corollary of the general feudalization of society and government. Since the day when the national assembly, the Marzjeld, became too large to be convened, no man of the middle ages had seen the "people." The city-state of Greece was based upon men; the medieval state rested on and was representative of land. There was indeed no common, imited people to be represented. The day of the national state was not yet, and the three estates of the nobles, tlie clergy, and the commons, were as widely separated as were the English, the Germans, and the JVench. When, after the welter of the Carolingian break-up, national states began to appear upon the Continent, they were "Estates States," won by the arms, and guided by the counsels, of propertyowning nobles. The development in England was not dissimilar. Out of the band of privileged nobles, who had been called to the King's side as his councilors, grew the House of Lords. The right to be summoned to the House of Lords attached to a feudal status, determined by the amount of land which an individual possessed and the natiu'e of his tenure. When in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries lower Houses made their appearance in England and on the Continent, the right to vote for delegates to these bodies was identical in kind with the right of the noble to be summoned in person to appear in Parliament. Some jurists have argued that even in the cities the suffrage was based upon the ownership of a considerable piece of land or, m fewer cases, of a house. Chief Justice Holt in England said in 1704 (Ashby vs. White) : "Hie election of knights belongs to freeholders of the counties, and it is an original right, vested in and inseparable from the freehold, and can no more be severed from the freehold than the freehold itself can be taken away. As for citizens and burgesses, they depend on the same right as the knights of the shires, and differ only as to the tenure ; but the right and manner of their election is on the same foimdation." There is a large element of truth, although perhaps not the whole truth, in this contention.

The suffrage as a vested privilege was imported with English institutions into the American colonies and affected electoral law until well into the nineteenth century. Its undemocratic tendency was less evident because of the plentiful supply of free land, which made it easy for any man to qualify himself as a voter; but the spirit of colonial legislation was in harmony with English precedent, as niunerous expressions of a desire to emulate the latter testify. Men of property considered it a dangerously subversive innovation, when personal property was first accepted in lieu of land. This second theory of the suffrage has been the basis of English elections until to-day, and indeed of the property qualification for voting, wherever found. It is seen in a multiplicity of ingenious devices for giving preponderance to the propertied classes. Weighted voting, such as is practiced under the Prussian three-class system of special representation for wealtii, plural voting in Belgium and elsewhere, the extension of tiie vote to women tax-payers and not to other women, all accomplish the same end by divers means.

Even in the days when the feudal theory of the suffrage was most generally accepted, a third school of thought was forming, which did not reach maturity until modem times — that of the philosophers who believed that men should vote because of their rights as human beings. In sharp contrast to the omnipotence of Land was the value set upon the individual by those who believed in the Rights of Man. Althou^ the era of the French Revolution caught up the doc1»*ine and blazoned it in letters of flame, it was far older than the Frenchmen of 1789 or the Americans of 1776. Thomas Aquinas, the incarnation of medieval scholasticism, clearly implied an abstract, popular right to vote, when he wrote that sovereignty belongs to the whole people.

In the days when the great Church Councils were striviag to end the grievous schism in Christendom, other churchly statesmen saw in Aquinas' words the promise of a panacea for all the ills of Rome. Marsi^o of Padua insisted that a ruler, even though he be Pope, had authority only through his election by ihe people, that the latter had the right to make all laws. William of Ockham and Nicholas of Cues pushed the theory of popular sovereignty to still more explicit and radical lengths. They found in the voluntary delegation of power by the nation a ruler's only claim to the obedience of his subjects. The philosophers of the Conciliar Movement elaborated from this groundwork the structure of a parliamentary papacy with an assembly, representative of Christendom, elected by all true believers.

The dream of tiie fourteenth century did not perish, although a rejuvenated papacy prevented its fruition within the Catholic church. It still inspired the champions of religious liberty, until in the seventeenth century it became an accomplished political fact. Robert Browne, tiie first formulator of Congregationalism, called the Church a company of Christians, which "by a voluntary covenant made with their God are under His governance and live in one holy communion." As for the power which Cihrist bestowed upon the Church, John Robinson, pastor of the Plsrmouth Pilgrhns at Scrooby said: ''The Papists plant it in the Pope; the Protestants in the bishops; the Puritans in the Presbytery. We, whom you name the Brownists, put it in the body of the congregation, the multitude called the Church." It was the Separatist custom, therefore, that ministers should be elected by their congregations.

In the church-state of Plsrmouth and in the Fundamental Constitutions of Connecticut the principal of ecclesiastical elections was extended, without violence to logic, to the election of public officials also. Thomas Hooker of the Hartford colony declared that the election of magistrates belongs to the people by God's own* allowance. We shall see that in the New England colonies some of the features of church elections were carried over into politics, showing how little distinction was made between government and religion. The right to vote was, however, most often a right of church members only.

Throughout the century, after the colonization of America gave it partial effect, the theory of the abstract right to vote was germinating both in America and in Europe, where it attracted a very different type of champion from the Puritan statesmen and philosophers. It came to its own with the American and the French Revolutiona We shall not undertake here to determine the relative importance of French philosophy and Puritan tradition in ushering in the epoch of the Rights of Man, for it would be a difficult task to allocate the chief responsibility among the ecclesiastical statesman. Hooker, the brilliant atheist, Rousseau, and the sage, Montesquieu. For at least a quarter centiuy there was a close mutual interchange of ideas between the two allies against George

III. Not an American but is familiar witii the passage in the Declaration, which affirms, after the manner of the philosophers we have mentioned, that ''all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Of perhaps more influence in France were the State constitutions of our early federal period, with their bills of rights. Five years before the fall of the Bastille the constitution of New Hampshire declared: "All government originates from the people, is founded in consent, and instituted for the general good. All men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights. ... All elections ought to be free, and every inhabitant of the state having proper qualifications has an equal right to elect and to be elected into office."

In France, Montesquieu had agreed in the main with the abstract right theory, but would also have deprived of the right to vote those who were in so humble a situation as to have no will of their own. His limitation was not accepted by the radicals of 1789. Condorcet was for complete equality: "One of these natiu^al rights we consider to be that of voting for common interests, either personally or by freely elected representatives. Women should have absolutely the same rights. . . . Either no individual member of the human race has any real rights, or else all have the same."

Here in very brief form is the substance of the theory which has been the breath of life to European Liberalism during the nineteenth century. It is the faith of the masses to-day regarding the suffrage. They have not yet ceased to think in terms of the social contract and popular sovereignty. It is one of the many cases where an untenable political doctrine has served a righteous end.

for unquestionably the great advance of democracy since 1789 is largely due to the strong popular belief in the rights of man. But in spite of its services to direct representation and to parliamentary government, the theory that every man has a natural right to vote no longer commands the support of students of political science.

It is an error to identify the whole nation with the electorate. Although government may derive its authority from the nation, it does not derive it solely by virtue of the votes in an election. Otherwise non-voters or members of minorities would be automatically excluded from the life of the state. In voting the voter exercises, not an inherent right, but a privilege conferred upon him by the whole people. The result of his vote in the election of a representative, and the legislative acts of that representative, are subject to the higher revision and control of the nation as a whole, botii voters and non-voters, in other words, to public opinion.

The fourth theory of the suffrage, that it is a fimction of government, seems to have had its rise even at tiie moment that the theory of natural right was reaching the apex of its popularity in France. To protect the bourgeoisie from being swamped by the flood of plebeian votes, which a strict application of the Declaration of Rights would have permitted. Abbe Sieyes, the constitution-maker of the Revolution, evolved the theorem that there were in the state active and passive citizens, the latter being those who did not contribute enough to the taxes so that they had a right to share in the sovereign acts of the government. "The exercise of a public function is not a right but a duty, and the officers of the nation have beyond the citizens only greater duties."

However narrow-minded in its first application, the concept of the suffrage as a public office is accepted to-day by the weif^tiest authority as being the basis of a more efficient democracy than can be developed upon natural right. The suffrage is a means towards working the constitution without which a vote would have no worth per 86. It is therefore a right existing by grace of the law^ and not prior to law; it is not on a par with civil rights, the minimum of protection with which a citizen is safe. A man has no more right to vote than he has to be a member of parliament, for both electorate and legislature are organs of the state, created by law, and modi^ fied for reasons of political expediency. Their size can be alike expanded or contracted by the government whose foundation they are, if the hi^est interest of the state wiU be served thereby.

''The suffrage in the state and for political purposes is not a natural right of man, but a political right, derived from the state and serving its ends. Not as men but as citizens do the electors exercise their right. They have it, not because of themselves, not because their personal existence demands it, but they have received it from the state's constitution and exercise it in the service of the state." President Cleveland expressed this idea, when he said : 'Tfour every voter, as surely as your Chief Magistrate, under the same high sanction though in a different sphere, exercises a public trust."

This latest theory of the suffrage is the sole justification for much of the electoral legislation which occupies Parliaments the world over. If every human being has an inherent right to vote, ihe only end of law-making would be to put the fullest universal suffrage into effect witli the least possible delay. We should not be bothered with endless debates over woman's rights, a literacy test.

a tax-payer's qualification. Because the electoral organ of the government needs to be competent to function efficiently, it must be enli^tened and independent, not weakened by the morally, or perhaps the financially, bankrupt. Because tiie electorate must truly mirror the whole nation, minority opinion must be cared for by proportional representation, even though the ^^ri^t" of the majority to rule be tiiereby impaired. Compulsory voting and ballot reform are but means to render the electorate more efficient. Despite all the vices of the Prussian electoral system and the ignoble ends which it has served, there is this of good in it, that it does obtain beneficial results by granting special power to the wealthy and intelligent few, results which we fail to obtain by entrusting unregulated power to tlie boss and his dishonest oligarchy. The purpose of special representation of interests is thus, in tlieory at least, better to serve the state. We must, however, never lose sight of the ideal society in which education will have qualified all for an equal share, and we must be sure that the interests specially represented are not those of selfish and obstructionist monopoly.

Since by itself the franchise, granted merely as the instrument of a public duty, is narrow and sterile compared to the enthusiasm inspired by the acquisition and defense of a personal right, it needs to be supplemented by a clear perception of the moral content of the vote. Lincoln's vision of the citizenship of the emancipated negro had its source in the passionate faith in the moral worth of the individual hmnan being. Kant gave this noble concept words: ''So act as to treat hmnanity in ourselves and in others always as an end, never as a means only."

Although the franchise is not a native right, entailing no responsibility upon its holder, it is something to which he is entitled as soon as he has demonstrated even an elementary fitness for it, because it is necessary for his full, moral development. 'There is no means to be named beside political rights, whereby the wider interests of life may be made a vitalizing influence throughout the rank and file of democracy." 'The right to vote can alone open up to its possessor the sphere of public activity, which cannot be closed on him who is fit for it, without contracting his life and stunting his development. We cannot respect men for the moral worth that is in them, and yet think it a final and satisfactory state of things, that they should spend Uiemselves on interests that never go beyond the range of private lives."