citizens to the right of voting. In our own day, before the great
extension of woman suffrage, the number of persons voting
approximated twenty per cent of the population, but after the
Revolution less than five per cent of the white population voted.
There were many limitations upon the exercise of the suffrage,
but the small number of voters was only partially due to these
restrictions, for in later years, without any radical change in
suffrage qualifications, the proportion of citizens who voted
steadily increased.

The fact is that many of the people did not care to vote. Why
should they, when they were only registering the will or the
wishes of their superiors? But among the relatively small number
who constituted the governing class there was a high standard of
intelligence. Popular magazines were unheard of and newspapers
were infrequent, so that men depended largely upon correspondence
and personal intercourse for the interchange of ideas. There was
time, however, for careful reading of the few available books;
there was time for thought, for writing, for discussion, and for
social intercourse. It hardly seems too much to say, therefore,
that there was seldom, if ever, a people-certainly never a people
scattered over so wide a territory-who knew so much about
government as did this controlling element of the people of the
United States.

The practical character, as well as the political genius, of the
Americans was never shown to better advantage than at the
outbreak of the Revolution, when the quarrel with the mother
country was manifesting itself in the conflict between the
Governors, and other appointed agents of the Crown, and the