These arguments were partially successful, and while the ballot was given to every white male citizen who had lived one year in the state and paid a tax or served in the militia, or having lived three years in the state had been assessed to labor on the highways, and had performed that labor or paid the equivalent in money, no negro could vote unless he had lived three years in the state, and owned a freehold worth two hundred and fifty dollars and had paid a tax thereon. In the opinion of Martin Van Buren who was a member of this convention, this extension of suffrage for whites was carried too far. It was practically universal suffrage. He was disposed to go as far as any man in the extension of rational liberty, but he could not consent to undervalue this precious privilege so far as to confer it indiscriminately on every one, black and white, who would be kind enough to condescend to accept it. In Massachusetts a like contest had just taken place. Even in that conservative state the spirit of the age was at work, and the old constitution of 1780, had become, by 1820, so antiquated that a convention was called to revise, amend and modernize it. The great question which the reformers had to answer was, will the rights of property be respected in a state where every man may cast a vote? Is it not a fundamental principle of our system of government, that if representation in one branch of the legislature is based on population, the other should be based on property? How else can you maintain the checks and balances? If you have the right to disfranchise the pauper, the man without one dollar, haven't you the same right to disfranchise the man not worth two hundred and fifty dollars? If suffrage is one of the natural rights of man, then you could not disfranchise a pauper. But the answer to these questions and the contest which followed them is a subject too long to be taken up this afternoon. I will begin with it, therefore, with your permission, tomorrow. LECTURE III. We left the subject at a point where the people of Massachusetts were about to make their second constitution. The ideas of the rights of man had been so generally accepted at that time that there was no question as to whether there should be a religious or property qualification for a voter or for minor officeholders, or for members of the lower house of the general court. But the contest for the rights of property as against the rights of man was waged over the question of qualifications for membership in the senate and for voting in the senate. plan before the convention was that a property qualification should be required for the persons who wished to vote for a senator or wished to be eligible to the senate, the qualification being the same as in the old constitution, the ownership of two hundred dollars' worth of property. The That matter had just been fought out in the constitutional convention in New York, and had resulted in a general franchise for all voters and office-holders except negroes, who were required to have a freehold of two hundred and fifty dollars. The argument made in the convention in Massachusetts was to the effect, that if you can forbid a man who has no money a pauper- to vote, |