the napkin of death, and in the corner near her poor hand is the well worn 

 handle of a mop never again to be toiled with by her. On a broken chair near 

 the foot of the bed sits a stony-eyed, haggard man, looking upon her, and be- 

 yond her into vacancy. Every line in his iron face is chiseled by despair. He 

 holds between his knees a pallid, ragged girl, whose eyes seem washed out by 

 tears, and a little boy with trembling knees, who, timidly touching his father 

 and sobbing with hunger and heartache together, is feebly supplicating him for 

 bread. Two smaller children, crouching by their father's chair, are crying 

 themselves to sleep in each other's arms. The only face not poignarded with 

 misery is that of the pale dead woman gone to rest, all else is anguish and des- 

 pair. Something coiled up on the shadows of the floor attracts the eye; and 

 following its serpent-like trail up and on the wall, you see the dim outline of 

 a mocking, triumphant, fiendish face, bending over the laborer's head, breath- 

 ing into hi-s very hair and glaring with bate and joy. It is horribly smiling as 

 if the supreme moment of the devil's own power had come. With one hand he 

 presents a shadowy firebrand, and with the other he points out the neighboring 

 farmer's rich haystacks and cornricks which are visible through the open lattice 

 of the hovel. The picture is entitled "The Rickburner's Home." 



Such a picture is suggestive in this republic and at the present hour when 

 men in the cities are starving for a pint of meal. We have tried an experiment 

 in government, which has never been tried on an almighty scale before. We 

 have given votes and muskets to all the people, rich and poor, industrious and 

 idle, good and bad alike, that they may support and defend constitutional lib- 

 erty. We have given to every man, powers, conservative or destructive as 

 his temper and his interests may direct. Let us recollect that rick owners are 

 noi Hck burners. Let us encourage agriculture and small farms, and home- 

 stead ownerships. There is no security for the nation like that of having the 

 hearts of its immense majority, the laborers of the nation, bound up with 

 motherland by a little homestead in her soil. Only on this condition that con- 

 servative interests shall be possessed by the majority, to which we have given 

 the destructive poiuers latent in the ballot and the bayonet, can we predict a 

 successful republic. But one in forty of the population voted in the most splen- 

 did age of the Athenian republic. Power rested in and was intended to rest 

 in the hands of those whose interests and whose education induced them to pro- 

 mote the stability and welfare of their state. In England, until lately, only 

 one in twenty was a voter. In Sparta, two thirds of the free males being gen- 

 erally excluded, the voting list finally numbered only about seven hundred. It 

 was never forgotten that the ballot is a tremendous engine of safety or of ruin. 

 The wisdom of ancient time never dared to place it in hands whose interests 

 could be destructive. 



The New England settlements presented the first great example of liberal 

 franchise. The old New England town meeting is an example of pure demo- 

 cratic government. Under such a system, Venice subsisted one hundred and 

 fifty years, before she commenced her thousand years of empire. In all prim- 

 itive republican societies, the interests of men are nearly equal, and the men 

 are purely patriotic. But when commerce, manufactures, speculative vast en- 



