nearest to a practical manhood suffrage, unnaturalized foreigners,
minors, and certain classes of criminals, are excluded from voting.
And why so? What is the cause of this exclusion? Here are men by
tens of thousands--men of widely different classes and conditions--
peremptorily deprived of a privilege asserted to be a positive
inalienable right universal in its application. There is manifestly
some reason for this apparently contradictory state of things. We
know that reason to be the good of society. It is for the good of
society that the suffrage is withheld from those classes of men. A
certain fitness for the right use of the suffrage is therefore deemed
necessary before granting it. A criminal, an unnaturalized foreigner, a
minor, have not that fitness; consequently the suffrage is withheld
from them. The worthy use of the vote is, then, a qualification not
yet entirely overlooked by our legislators. The State has had, thus
far, no scruples in withholding the suffrage even from men, whenever
it has believed that the grant would prove injurious to the nation.

Here we have the whole question clearly defined. The good of society
is the true object of all human government. To this principle suffrage
itself is subordinate. It can never be more than a means looking to
the attainment of good government, and not necessarily its corner-
stone. Just so far is it wise and right. Move one step beyond that
point, and instead of a benefit the suffrage may become a cruel
injury. The governing power of our own country--the most free of all
great nations--practically proclaims that it has no right to bestow the
suffrage wherever its effects are likely to become injurious to the
whole nation, by allotting different restrictions to the suffrage in
every State of the Union. The right of suffrage is, therefore, most
clearly not an absolutely inalienable right universal in its application.
It has its limits. These limits are marked out by plain justice and