044. The Ballot-Box

The Ballot-Box

Exo_37:1 : ’93Two cubits and a-half was the length of it, and a cubit and a-half was the breadth of it, and a cubit and a-half was the height of it.’94

Look at it!’97the sacred chest of the ancients, about five feet long, three feet wide, and three feet high. Within and without of gold, on the top of it representations of two angels facing each other with outspread wings. The book of the law and many precious things were in that box. The fate of the nation was in it. Carried at the head of the host, in the presence of that box, the waters of the Jordan parted. Costly, precious, divinely charged, momentous box! Unholy hands must be kept off it. It was generally called the ark of the covenant, but you will understand it was a box, the most precious box of the ages. Where is it? Gone forever. No crypt of ancient church, no museum of the world has a fragment of it. But is not this nation God’92s chosen people? Have we not been brought through the Red Sea? Have we not been led with the pillar of fire by night? Have we no ark of the covenant? Yes. The ballot-box is the sacred chest, the ark of the American covenant. The law is in it. The will of God and the will of man are in it. The fate of the nation is in it. Carried before our host, the waters of national trouble part. Its fate is the fate of the American Government. On the first Tuesday of November ten million men may uncover their heads in its presence. Mighty ark of the American covenant, thou ballot-box of a free people!

It is a very old box. In Athens, and long before the art of printing, the people dropped pebbles into it, expressive of their will. After that beans were dropped into it’97white beans for the affirmative, black beans for the negative; but as through that process it was easy to see which way a man voted, the election sometimes took place by night. If a man was to be voted out of citizenship, or as you would say, ostracized, his name was put upon a shell and the shell was dropped into the box. In the British Parliament, Gladstone fought for the full introduction of the ballot-box, and in 1872 it became one of the fastnesses of the English nation. It is now one of the cornerstones of our American institutions. It is older than the Constitution. Tell me what will become of the ballot-box and I will tell you what will become of the American government. What a change of feeling in regard to it since Sydney Smith shot his keenest shafts of ridicule at it, and William Cobbett felt called upon to answer thirty-eight objections to its existence! Without the ballot-box there can be no free institutions, and there can be no permanent peace. Give the people every year, or every four years, an opportunity of expressing their political preferences, and for the most part you avoid insurrection and revolution. If they cannot have the vote they will have the sword.

When John Milton was visiting in Italy, he noticed that the gardeners and farmers were cultivating the side of Mount Vesuvius while the volcano was in eruption, and he asked them if they found it safe so to do. ’93Oh, yes,’94 they said, ’93the danger and the alarm are before the eruption takes place; then there is earthquake and terror all through the country, but after the lava begins to pour forth all the people feel relieved.’94 It is the suppression of the popular will that makes moral earthquake, political earthquake. Give the people full expression through the ballot-box and there is national relief, national satisfaction. And yet there are mighty foes to the ballot-box, and I have thought it would be appropriate if, as a Christian patriot, I enumerated some of those terrible enemies.

In the first place, ignorance. Other things being equal, in proportion as a man is intelligent, he is qualified for the right of suffrage. You have ten, twenty, thirty years been studying American institutions through all the channels of information. You have become acquainted with the needs of our country. You know all that has been said on both sides the tariff question, the Chinese question, the educational question, the sectional question, and you have made up your mind, and day after tomorrow I see you coming down off your front steps. I say, ’93Good morning, neighbor; hope you are all well today. Which way are you bound?’94 You say, ’93I am going to vote.’94 You take your position in the line of electors, you wait your turn, you come up, the judge of election announces your name, your ballot is deposited, you pass out. Well done. But right behind you comes a man who cannot spell ’93president,’94 or ’93controller,’94 or ’93attorney.’94 He cannot write his own name, or if he can write at all, he makes a small ’93i’94 for the pronoun of the first person, which, while very descriptive of his limited capacity, is very hard on good orthography. He cannot tell you on which side the Alleghany Mountains Ohio is. There are educated canary birds and educated horses who have more intelligence than he. He puts in his vote for the opposite candidate, and he cancels your vote. His ignorance weighs as much as your intelligence. That is not right; everybody says that is not right. How to correct the evil? By laws of compulsory education well executed. Until a man can read the Declaration of American Independence and the Constitution of the United States and the first chapter of Genesis, and write a petition for citizenship with his own hand, and calculate how much is the interest of the United States debt, and tell the difference between a republic, a limited monarchy, and a despotism, he is not fit to vote at any polls between Key West and Alaska. Time was when there may have been an excuse for ignorance; but not now and in this day, when the common school makes knowledge as free as the fresh air of heaven.

In 1872, in England, there were two million seven hundred thousand children who ought to have been in school, but there were in school only one million three hundred and thirty-three thousand six hundred. About fifty per cent. And of all those who were in school, not more than five per cent. got anything worthy of the name of education. Much of this foreign ignorance is added to our American ignorance, and at our next election there will be tens of thousands who will vote though they may have no more qualification to do so than they would have qualification to lecture on astronomy.

Now, I advocate a law which, after it has given a sufficient number of years of warning, shall make ignorance a crime. I advocate a law which would place a board of examination side by side with the officers of registration, to decide whether a man has enough intelligence to become one of the monarchs who shall decide the destiny of this republic. Educate the people; give them an opportunity to know and understand what they do. If they will not take the education, deny them the vote. From that quarter there comes the greatest danger to the sacred chest, the ballot-box, the ark of the American covenant.

Another powerful enemy of the ballot-box is spurious voting. If in one of our largest cities one thousand scoundrels have already been discovered as having registered for a vote next Tuesday, when they have no residence there, what may you judge in regard to other parts of the country. What a grand thing is this law of registration. Without it, election day is a farce; but how sad is the condition of things when in a sovereign State both parties charge upon the other party, each party upon the other, the outrage of the ballot-box. The law needs a keener twist for the neck of the repeaters. They need something more than slight fine and short imprisonment. They are attempting the assassination of this republic. In olden times when men with unholy hands touched the ark of the covenant, they dropped dead. Witness Uzza. And when men through spurious voting lay unholy hands on the sacred chest, the ark of the American covenant, they deserve extermination.

Another powerful foe of the ballot-box is intimidation. There are corporations which compel their employees to vote as they, the head, wish them. In a delicate and skilful way they simply intimate to their employees that if they do not vote as the employers vote, they will be frozen out of the establishment. There are thousands of such places. You can go to villages where there are factories, and finding out the political sentiment of the men who own the factories you can tell how the election will go. Now, that is criminal. When an employee does his work well, and gives you full equivalent in toil for what you pay him in wages, you have no right to expect any more of him. He sells you his work. He does not sell you his political or his religious principles. Yet you are too wise to say, ’93You did not vote as I wanted you to vote; now I discharge you.’94 You call him in some day and find fault with his work, and you tell him that you have an uncle or an aunt, a cousin or a niece or a nephew who will have to have his situation! But he knows why you discharge him, and God knows. You are not fit for American citizenship.

There must be on the ark of the covenant, the sacred chest, no shadow of corporate or capitalistic intimidation. I am not surprised at the vehemence of Lord Chief Justice Holt, of England, when he says; ’93Let the people vote fairly. Interference with a man’92s vote is in behalf of this or the other party. If such cases come before me to be tried, I shall charge the jury to make the offender pay well for it.’94 Let there be no monocratic or military or mobocratic intimidation. Just as soon as in any precinct of the United States a man cannot vote as he pleases, there is something wrong.

Another powerful foe of the ballot-box is bribery. No one will ever know how many thousands or millions of dollars have been raised to carry certain elections. I do not know which party raises the most money. I know that the chief affront with one party is that one of their candidates will give only so many thousand dollars, and I know that the other party has taxed official salaries as heavily as they could bear. I simply know it is a sad state of things. I simply know that there will be neighborhoods and cities where the announcement will be made in private, ’93So many thousands of dollars for so many votes.’94

I tell you that bribery is the disgrace of American institutions. It is often the case that men are nominated for office with reference to the amount of money of their own they can put into the contest, or the amount of money they can command from their friends. Senators and Representatives and Governors buying their way into office. I tell you no news in this respect, for your own patriotic hearts have been pained with it. It is often the case that the bribe comes in the form of official position. ’93Wheel your eloquence into my side, and when I get to be President I will make you Secretary of State, or you shall be Postmaster-General or Minister to England. Wheel your eloquence into my side, and when I get to be Governor you will be Surveyor-General. Wheel your eloquence into my side, and when I get to be Mayor you will be on the Water Board.’94 The simple fact is, that by the time many of those who are running for office get to the chair they are from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot mortgaged with pledges, and the people who will go to the State capital or to Washington to get offices are applying for positions that were gone three months before the election. There are two long lines of worm fence, one line of worm fence reaching to our State capitals, the other line of our worm fence reaching to Washington; and at the time of the nominations there are great multitudes of citizens astride these fences, equally poised, ready to get down on that side where they can get the most emolument. Bribery for those who receive it and bribery on the part of those who give it kicks both ways; and it is a disgrace to the ballot-box; and it is a scourge to the sacred chest, the ballot-box, the ark of the American covenant. In the name of God I denounce it.

Another great enemy of that sacred chest is defamation of character. Can you find out from the newspapers, when two men are running for office, which is the better? How often in the autumnal elections the good man is denounced and the bad man applauded, so that you can come sometimes to no just opinion as to who is the best man, and there are hundreds and thousands of electors who go up to vote so utterly befogged they know not what they do. Is not that a fearful influence to be brought upon the ballot-box of this country? It has been so ever since the foundation of this government.

Another powerful foe of the ballot-box is the rowdy and drunken caucus. The ballot-box is robbed of its power of choice when in a back room of some groggery the nominees are made, and men come up to the ballot-box on election day, and they only have a choice between two evils. Now, you respectable men of both parties, I charge you that, having saturated your handkerchief with cologne or some other disinfectant, you go down and take possession of the caucus. You begin your work on election day, and you begin it two weeks or two months too late. In some of the cities of the United States, when the elector comes to the polls on election day he finds that the nominees are such a scaly, greasy, stenchful crew there is no choice. What if he vote for some outsider? He merely throws his vote away. Honorable men of all cities, go and take possession of the caucus, though when you return home you have to hang your hat and your coat on the line in the back yard. It is high time these things were changed. American politics have got very low, and in some States they are controlled by men who are not more in need of good morals than of a bathtub! Snatch the ballot-box from such desperadoes. Where is the David with the courage to bring back the ark of the covenant from Kirjath-jearim? The ballot-box needs to be washed and set on a higher pedestal.

Some propose, by way of improvement, that we have in this country a property qualification. They say that if men have a certain amount of real estate they are more likely to have a financial interest in good government; and they say that as soon as a man gets property he becomes cautious and conservative. I have to reply that a property qualification would shut out from the ballot-box much of the best brain of this country. Literary men are almost always poor. The pen is a good kind of implement for mending the world, but a poor implement for gaining a livelihood. I could call the roll of hundreds of literary men who never owned a foot of ground, and never will own a foot of ground until they get under it’97professors of colleges, editors of newspapers, ministers of religion, bookmakers depending on a scant and uncertain royalty paid by the publishers. A property qualification will shut out these men, and a great multitude who, though they never owned a house on earth, will have a mansion in heaven. On the other hand, you will notice that there are those who by accident of fortune got vast estate, while they are in profound stupidity; as an English millionaire told me on the steamer going over to Europe, that he was going to see the dikes of Scotland, and as a lady of much pretension, who had just returned from Europe, upon being asked last summer on the cars by a member of my family if she had seen Mont Blanc, said, ’93Well, really, I don’92t know; is that in Europe?’94 There is no more complete ignorance than you will sometimes find dismounting from a four-thousand-dollar equipage at the door of a Madison Avenue mansion. The property qualification would be a gigantic injustice.

There are only two ways in which you will ever mend these matters: one by more thorough legal protection of the ballot-box, and the other by more thorough education and moralization of the people. I have sometimes thought that perhaps we may be obliged to call upon woman to help us in the reformation of the ballot-box. Wherever she goes there is adornment and purification. I suppose you have noticed the difference between the cleanliness of the gentlemen’92s cabin on the ferry-boat and the ladies’92 cabin. I suppose you have noticed the difference between the cleanliness of the gentlemen’92s smoking-car on the rail-train, and the other cars in which women are passengers. Give woman the right of suffrage, and our polls on election day, instead of being cheerless and repulsive, will be saloons of beauty. In October in eleven thousand of the school districts of the State of New York women voted, or had a right to vote. Order everywhere. By what justice have the majority of the grown people in this country been disfranchised? Simply because they are women. Give women the ballot, and that will decide the Mormon and the temperance questions. A woman owning property must pay taxes. Ought she not then to have a right to say something in regard to the expenditure of those moneys? Many of us have been opposed to female suffrage, on the ground that we do not want woman’92s delicate nature to confront the insults and the blasphemies and the disorder of election day; but when she has the ballot, there will be no insults, no disorder, no blasphemies on election day. It is not so much what the ballot would do for woman, as what woman would do for the ballot.

I cannot understand how there should be such an aversion to woman’92s political preferment among Americans and among Englishmen in this day, when we have a great-souled Mrs. Hayes reigning in the White House and a Queen Victoria in Windsor Castle.

The ancient ark of the covenant was carried into captivity, away off to Kirjath-jearim; but one day that sacred chest was put upon a cart, and oxen were fastened to the cart, and the chest was brought back to Jerusalem with shouting and thanksgiving. So the ballot-box has been carried into captivity of demagogism and mobocracy; but I should not wonder if by prayer to God with thanksgiving that sacred ark of the covenant would be brought back and put into the temple of Christian patriotism. Take the first step in this direction next election day. It may be the last vote you will ever deposit for the highest office in this country. I know that we sometimes find centenarians pleasantly boasting that they have voted for nearly all the Presidents; but the majority of men never vote for more than three or four. Do you think your vote of no importance?

A poor soldier went into the store of a hairdresser in London, and asked for money to get back to the army. He had already stayed beyond his furlough, and he must have quick transit. The hairdresser felt sorry for him and gave him the money. ’93Now,’94 said the poor soldier, ’93I have got nothing to give you in return for your kindness except this little slip of paper, which has on it a recipe for making blacking.’94 The soldier gave it, not supposing it to be of great value. The man received it, not supposing it to be of any great value. But it has yielded the man who took it two million five hundred thousand dollars, and was the foundation of one of the greatest manufacturing establishments of England. Now, I have to tell you that that little slip of printed paper that you will drop into the ballot-box next election day will seem to be more insignificant, and yet it may have a moral and a national value beyond all estimation. So I solemnly charge you to duty next Tuesday. About seven o’92clock in the morning will begin the great snowstorm of the nation’92s suffrages. The white flakes will fall in all the villages between the Highlands of Navesink and the Golden Gate of the Pacific’97so silently falling that the keenest ear will not detect one out of the millions. Snowing on until noon, snowing on until night. The octogenarian will come up to the polls with trembling hand, and scanning the ballot with spectacled eyes, will give the ballot to the judge of election. The young man who has been patiently waiting the time when he would have a right to vote will come up, and proudly and blushingly hand in his suffrage and pass on. The capitalist with diamonded finger and the workman with hard fist will come up, and the vote of the one will be as good as the vote of the other. Snowing, snowing, snowing, until at sundown all these flakes will be united and compacted into an avalanche ready to slide down in expression of the nation’92s will. Stand out of the way! In the awful sweep of the white avalanche, may there go down sectionalism and political fraud ten thousand feet under, forever under! Remember that you not only have a vote, but a prayer which may be more powerful than a vote. God only can control the suffrages of a city or a nation.

I told you at the opening, that on the top of the sacred chest of olden times there were two angels facing each other with outspread wings. Why not on the top of the great chest, the ark of the American covenant, let there be two angels’97the angel of the North and the angel of the South, long looking different ways, now face to face with outspread wing of blessing. We cannot live under any other form of government than that under which we are living. The stars of our flags are not the stars of thickening night, but stars sparkling amid the red bars of morning cloud. Let the despotisms of Asia keep their feet off the Pacific coast. Let the tyrannies of Europe keep their feet off the Atlantic coast. We shall have in this country only one government. At the south, Mexico will follow Texas into the Union, and Christianity and civilization will stand in the halls of the Montezumas, and if not in our day, then in the day of our children, Yucatan and Central America will wheel into line of dominion. On the north, Canada will be ours, not by conquest, for English and American swords may never clash blades, but we will simply woo the fair neighbor of the north, and she will be ours, and England will say to Canada, ’93You are old enough now for the marriage day. Giant of the West, go take your bride.’94 Then from Baffin’92s Bay to the Caribbean there shall be one republic, under one banner and with one destiny’97a free, undisputed, Christianized American continent. God grant it. Amen!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage