In all of the older States the suffrage was hedged about by limitations - ecclesiastical, residential, and pecuniary. . . . Eligibility to office was still more narrowly guarded. The property qualifications restricted office-bearing practically to the local notables or gentry. . . .

This entire regime of a restricted suffrage, of class control, of appointive offices obtainable only through interest, and of permanent incumbency of such positions, was alien to the spirit of the new West. Economic equality to the new States had been translated into radical political equality. To the industrial opportunities which that section afforded were now added the proffer of wider political rights and opportunities than were enjoyed in the East. Partly by a process of political infection, many of the older States began to reshape their franchise on more liberal lines. The center of political gravity was thus being continually shifted within the older States; and by 1824 the new electorate had become conscious of its power in the arena of national politics. The Congressional Caucus which had named the succession to the presidency for half a century fell into abeyance as the new device of nominating conventions was launched. These nominating conventions were composed of delegates from the various localities, chosen by popular voice. They now named candidates for the presidency as they had previously done for other State and local offices. No sooner had the nominating convention system been established than virtue departed from the Electoral College. Thenceforth its members ceased to exercise any deliberative or independent volition, and simply registered the presidential choice of the party which had elected them. Thus the election of the president was finally made dependent upon the popular vote; and with a representative hero in the person of Jackson, the new democracy in 1828 forced the doors of the old regime, and "the political control of the gentry, which the Constitution framers had counted on as perpetual," passed forever away. The character of the presidential office became radically changed. From being an embodiment of executive prerogative, independent of popular choice, it became an elective kingship; and where the incumbent is himself a forceful character, like Jackson, or

Lincoln, he wields the immense powers of tribunative authority.

It cannot in fairness be denied that this transformation of our constitutional system had likewise a very seamy side. The spoils system which had already infected local politics was now introduced into national politics, and wholesale proscriptions of office-holders became the rule when the opposition party came into power. The envious traits of democracy were so played upon, that the possession of even moderate wealth became a positive obstacle to a political career. Moreover, in its haste to take the government out of private hands, and to subjugate the old hereditary bureaucracy, the new democracy had created a vast multitude of elective offices with short official terms; and some enginery was necessary to organize the frequent nominating conventions, and to manage the complicated business of frequent elections. As a result, a new set of party managers, a sort of outside unofficial magistracy, - the so-called Machine, a body unknown to the law, and subsisting originally on the spoils of offices, - became a permanent fixture. Thus the original economic equality in the new West had transformed the older constitutional system of class rule into one based practically on universal suffrage. It had made the political organization or Machine national in its extent of power. It had made the president a popular tribune; but it had dislodged an enormous mass of social debris, - a result which is often the price that must, temporarily at least, be paid even for a peaceful revolution.

II. Slavery and free labor. In the original Southern States, and in the new States to the south of the Ohio River, economic life and development had been profoundly modified by negro slavery. In earlier colonial times slavery had prevailed in all the colonies; but the negro cannot thrive in the rigorous climate of the farther North, and has always been numerically a negligible element in its population. For intensive farming, as for mechanical labor, requiring skill, the negro had been found to be a costly laborer. These causes, reinforced by humanitarian views, led to the early and easy abolition of slavery in the North. In the South, conditions, both climatic and economic, were different. The black could and did increase and multiply in that region. The cultivation of tobacco on the seaboard by negro labor was at the outset immensely profitable, the negro's lack of skill being offset by the unparalleled richness of the soil and by the wasteful system of soil-exhaustion. But as this process of earth-butchery about reached its limit, it seemed for a time likely that economic causes would cooperate with the humanitarian sentiment, originally very prevalent amongst the Southern gentry, against the slave system. At the same time, the numerous negro population of the South rendered extrication from the impasse difficult in the extreme. Removed often by only a generation from primitive African savagery, they were clearly untrained for self-rule or for immediate political equality with the whites. Slavery with all its drawbacks was essentially a system of government, and an effective alternative which would have afforded security to the whites and subsistence to the negro seemed practically unattainable. It appeared for a time not impossible that the moribund system might develop into the mild patriarchal rule of a primitive agricultural state. But the invention of the cotton-gin in 1793 gave slavery a new and undreamed-of lease of life. Hitherto only cotton of the long staple had been grown, and that only in the tide-water sections. The cotton-gin made profitable the cultivation of the short-staple variety, and opened the vast unoccupied upland of the South to cotton culture. The planter with his gang of slaves penetrated the Southern wilderness, moving in parallels to the white pioneer and settler on the North and West. The early economic complexion of the South was thus irretrievably fixed by slavery. Free labor would not betake itself to a section where slavery had stamped an odium on manual toil, and the subsequent stream of European immigration left the South untouched. The two westward currents finally converged in the border

States of the West, and first in Kansas the free settlers and the slave-owners contended for the territory in question. The contest grew until it involved the nation in civil war; and eventually the arbitrament of war swept slavery away altogether. The ultimate economic result of the war upon the South, impoverished and exhausted by the struggle, was regenerative. The deeps of its industrial stagnation were stirred, and its isolated homogeneity was destroyed. Manufactures and commerce have invaded its territory and diversified its occupations, so that eventually its economic structure will conform closely to that of the other sections of the nation. It is true that the legacy of slavery still persists in the South in the shape of sharp race antagonism. "What the outcome of that situation will be no one can say. Racial amalgamation is so improbable, and, if possible, so incredibly distant, that the hypothesis may be dismissed as beyond the scope of present inquiry. Political equality was conferred on the negro by amendments to the Federal Constitution, but its denial in practice only indicates that, as a solution of the race question, it was an untimely step. There is unfortunately not very much to be anticipated from the speedy growth of the black in wealth; for while a few negroes have prospered individually, the race as a whole has hardly shown aptitude sufficient to warrant belief in its power as a permanent competitor with the white in many occupations. Even in cotton-planting, the recent Italian immigrant is, in some sections, ousting the negro tenant-farmer from the land. The most that a sane optimism can reasonably hope is, that a remnant may be trained so as to hold their own as small cultivators, artisans, and servants, and that white immigration to the South may very appreciably lessen the relative proportion of the blacks to the entire population. Recent censuses give some considerable color to this latter contingency. If the negro individually shows remarkable talent, recognition of his achievement is bound to follow, and it would be wrong as well as impossible in the long-run to withhold it. But the deep-seated racial antipathy that so often leads a white mob of the South, incensed at negro brutality, to acts of inhumanity that make civilization a mockery, is only an index of the cancerous nature of the race problem in our Southern States.