SLIDING DOWN HILL

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 12, 1860

SLIDING DOWN HILL

Is a very common amusement for boys in the winter when the sleighing is good, but when individuals, or states, or nations begin to slide down hill, in a moral sense the case is very different.

Every discerning person must have observed the down hill tendency of affairs in our government for the last thirty years; but at present this downward tendency is evidently being much accelerated as we approach the foot of the hill.

The growing feuds between freedom and slavery, and the internal dissensions and discontents, the distant mutterings of the volcano that wakes itself, even by those who desire to view only the brightest side of the picture, the frequent financial and social and civil and ecclesiastical and national disasters, the railroad accidents &c., are now beginning to be felt; and as railroad and other stocks are shifted about in the market for a trifle, and as the confidence in men and corporations is almost extinguished, thoughtful, political economists are looking about them for some remedy which they fondly but vainly imagine will be a means of radical reform.

In so doing they ignore the great principles of right and wrong, and the great magna charta of American liberty. Our bill of right is forgotten in the general alarm. Our constitutional rights, the most sacred of them, have already been trampled in the dust, and still they meditate further mischief, as will be seen by the following from the N. Y. Tribune. Truly we may ask, Whither are we drifting?

Jos. CLARKE.

THE Albany Argus has a candid and forcible leader on the use of money in elections, deprecating the extravagant length to which it is said to have been carried, and insisting on a radical reform. We heartily second the motion, and proceed to point out the steps through which we believe it may be attained. These are:

1. A constitutional provision making the exercise of the right of suffrage obligatory on every legal voter. At present, while every rowdy, loafer, drunkard, blackguard or gambler is certain to be found at the polls, and often to stay there all day, a large proportion of our quiet, thrifty, orderly, law abiding citizens absent themselves, or only come forward to vote at seasons of high political excitement, or when some candidate is running in whose success they take a special interest. This is wrong, unpatriotic, perilous. The right of suffrage is not a personal privilege, but a high public trust to be exercised for the good of the community. No elector has any more moral right to refuse or neglect to vote than he has to refuse to serve on juries or pay his taxes. A constitutional requirement that every elector shall vote, under penalty of a fine of $3 and an addic of ten per. cent. to his next tax bill, would go very far toward remedying the evil justly complained of. For we presume money is very rarely spent to buy over voters from one party to the other. It is mainly used, we believe, to bring out voters who would otherwise remain at home. Make voting obligatory and this fountain of electioneering expenditure would be dried up.