When, in 1853, Amasa Walker's committee begged to be excused from considering so novel a proposition as woman suffrage, probably no white woman had ever seen that region of our country now called Wyoming. It was organized as a territory in 1868, and upon its admission into the Union, twenty-one years later, it declared, in its bill of rights, that—

"Since equality in the enjoyment of natural and civil rights is made sure only through political equality, the laws of this state affecting the political rights and privileges of its citizens shall be without distinction of race, color, sex, or any circumstance or condition whatsoever other than individual incompetency or unworthiness duly ascertained by a court of competent jurisdiction"; and in its article on the franchise:

"The rights of the citizens of the state of Wyoming to vote and hold office shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex. Both male and female citizens of this state shall equally enjoy all civil, political, and religious rights and privileges.

These constitutional provisions received an administrative definition in a concurrent resolution passed unanimously by the Wyoming house of representatives, just before adjourning in 1893,* a resolution which is the very ecstasy of propagandism. These resolutions declared that the possession and the exercise of the suffrage by the women of Wyoming for a quarter of a century had wrought no harm, but had done great good in many ways. It had largely aided in banishing crime, pauperism, and vice from the state, and had accomplished this without any violent or oppressive legislation; it had secured peaceful and orderly elections, good government, and a remarkable degree of civilization and public order. After twenty-five years of woman suffrage, the legislature pointed with pride to the facts that not a county in Wyoming had a poorhouse, that its jails were almost empty, and that crime, except that committed by strangers in the state, was almost unknown. As the result of this experience, every civilized community was urged to enfranchise its women without *Broadside copy of the resolution, 1893.

1789-1900]

WOMAN SUFFRAGE

553

delay. A copy of the resolutions was sent to the governor of the state, to the legislature of every state and territory in this country, and to every legislative body in the world. The press in every country was requested to call the attention of its readers to the resolutions.

One of the three Republican presidential electors of Wyoming in 1896 was a woman. The woman suffrage agitators in New England and New York in 1846 had not anticipated so much as this. A few women who began the woman suffrage movement survived the half-century of agitation. Rarely has so significant a social and political change occurred within the lifetime of those who first demanded it.

The objections to woman suffrage and the arguments for it in Mississippi in 1890, and the concurrent resolutions of the Wyoming legislature in 1893, are perhaps equally suggestive of the character of the whole struggle for the franchise in this country, which in the nineteenth century, won two imperial domains-the extension of the franchise "to all persons, irrespective of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; and the extension of the franchise to women." The first was done by the nation as an act of justice and of military necessity, "to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom"; the second was done by the commonwealths as a necessary political recognition of an economic condition.

Some one may inquire whether the enthusiastic resolution of the Wyoming legislature on woman suffrage was a new voice in the world, or only the echo of similar resolutions in political platforms of a generation earlier, when negro suffrage was the propagandism of political optimists. Has negro suffrage solved the race problem? Will woman suffrage solve the social problem? Experience has not yet answered. The franchise device has not been suffered to work perfectly in all parts of the country.

During the struggle for the franchise, from the Revolution to the compromise of 1850, religious and property qualifications were nearly all abolished; the time required to gain a legal residence to vote was the time required to make a declaration of intention to vote; educational and

poll-tax qualifications did not meet with popular approval; registration for voting was inaugurated.

The basis of government by public consent shifted from property to persons. Jefferson's ideas of manhood suffrage steadily gained ground. Hamilton's idea of identifying the interests of the citizens with the interests of the national government preserved the Union, as it had made the Union possible. Webster's great speeches placed American institutions for the first time in the world's literature. Experience demonstrated Franklin's wisdom in affirming that the test of a government is its administration.

The struggle for the franchise was one for the more perfect union, inasmuch as it justly increased the sovereign American electorate. The fact of the nation rested on the recognition of universal suffrage.

And what meant universal suffrage? That every person of sound mind, and of the age which common custom fixes as the time test of responsibility, should freely, fully, potently express his ideas for his own and for the general welfare. To enfranchise man is to give liberty to the mind, and to let the world have the benefit of ideas. Nations rest upon men; men upon ideas. The franchise is a political device by which ideas may be known, counted, weighed, and applied. In the evolution of government we are now in the franchise process. The device is practicable, and when fairly used, serves a large purpose in democracy. the last analysis it is only a device. The grand purpose in the struggle for the franchise is not to win a piece of political mechanism, but to win freedom of thought and political morality-to establish the republic of ideas. The device itself is the political compliment which in the evolution of democracy is paid to the thoughtless. The apology for the device declares that its extension tends to make men and women thoughtful. While the laws regulating the elective franchise were becoming more liberal, the subjects of these laws, the people, were overspreading the country and transforming it into a settled area. Their migration had much to do with the forms of local government set up. In the next chapter we will follow them in their migration.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE HUNDRED YEARS' MIGRATION

1800-1900

The history of men is largely of their migrations, which in ancient times were of tribes and nations; in modern, of individuals and ideas. No undiscovered countries remain; nations, like the Teutons of old, no longer forsake their ancestral homes to make new ones in the wilderness, or in a conquered country. Henceforth it is ideas that migrate. Systems of thought, political concepts, laws, municipal rules, customs, and constitutions, wander as it were, from commonwealth to commonwealth, and less frequently and less obviously, from nation to nation. Though the world is now mostly private property, ideas migrate more freely than ever before. Peace and progress are gradually reducing the tariff on ideas.

The migrations of tribes and races in early times in Europe have long been the study of sociologists; similar migrations in America have scarcely attracted attention, though these afford abundant and authentic data for our consideration. Perhaps the neglect of them by sociologists is another illustration that human institutions which are most remote and obscure are easiest understood. An exhaustive census, made by national and state authorities for a hundred years, supplemented by a vast mass of county, municipal, and private records, and the records of many institutions and societies, are material for the study of the social and political institutions of this country. If such a mass of evidence existed for primitive or medieval times. in Europe and Asia, it would be cherished and pondered by sociologists as part of the choicest inheritance of the ages. Within our own country there has been presented, within the short space of a hundred years, a spectacle unparalleled in history. A composite population, increasing from less

than four millions to more than seventy, took up the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande, and at the close of the century entered upon the exploitation of Alaska; an area of operations extending over nearly four millions of square miles of territory.

They swiftly displaced and nearly obliterated the native races, which, unsurpassed in fighting qualities, at the time when the migration of the conquering race began twice exceeded in numbers the voting population of the United States. They organized forty-five commonwealths, each governed by a written constitution and written laws. Of one hundred and fifty-two constitutions proposed, thirtyeight were rejected by the people. During this century of migration, the laws accumulated in more than three thousand printed volumes, and also a body of interpretation, in an equal number of judicial reports. At the beginning of this migration, one person in thirty dwelt in a city; a century later, one in three dwelt there. More than fifteen millions, alien-born, merged with the native stock, and at the close of the century this alien accession comprised oneseventh of the population. An unparalleled political enfranchisement extended the right to vote, which in 1796 reposed in only one-twentieth of the population, but a century later, in one-sixth of it-the nearest approach to universal suffrage in history. At the beginning of this migration, one-sixth of the population consisted of a race stolen from another continent and held in slavery; a century later this race constituted one-sixth of the population, and by the supreme law of the land was entitled to all the civil and political rights and immunities of citizens; a change unique in human experience. Nor were these changes all. The lines of migration, which for the greater part of the century ran only east and west, changed their course during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, till they ran freely from state to state in all directions. No longer was migration to be under political duress; the courses of thought and travel and trade were to run unvexed. Native and foreign born alike at last had the country before them wherein to choose their homes. This