The same thing has been noticed elsewhere,
especially in the emigration of the French Huguenots to Holland,
Germany, England, and Ireland. The immigration of so many
millions from the Old World has, no doubt, given to the American
people much of their bold, energetic, and adventurous character,
and made them a superior people on the whole to what they would
otherwise have been. This has nothing to do with superiority or
inferiority of race or blood, but is a natural effect of breaking
men away from routine, and throwing them back on their own
individual energies and personal resources.
Resistance is offered to negro suffrage, and justly too, till the
recently emancipated slaves have served an apprenticeship to
freedom; but that resistance cannot long stand before the onward
progress of American democracy, which asserts equal rights for
all, and not for a race or class only. Some would confine
suffrage to landholders, or, at least, to property-holders; but
that is inconsistent with the American idea, and is a relic of
the barbaric constitution which founds power on private instead
of public wealth. Nor are property-owners a whit more likely to
vote for the public good than are those who own no property but
their own labor. The men of wealth, the business men,
manufacturers and merchants, bankers and brokers, are the men who
exert the worst influence on government in every country, for
they always strive to use it as an instrument of advancing their
own private interests.
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