compulsion could be resorted to by the people. Would it, then, not be wise on the one hand to leave it optional with each county to adopt compulsory school education, and on the other hand to establish the educational test for the right of voting throughout the state?

The optional principle regarding certain laws has been, of late, adopted with good effect in several countries; and no valid reason can be given against an educational test of suffrage in a polity founded on universal suffrage by ballot, and not by word of mouth.

The same lack of logic which was pointed out in another section of these pages pervades our present suffrage. The case stands thus:

We insist on universal suffrage;

Because we think the people at large sufficiently intelligent, or we take the means to make them sufficiently intelligent to vote understandingly;

Our ideas of individual independence demand the voting by ballot and not by open word of mouth;

Yet we allow every one to vote, whether he can read the ballot which he drops into the urn or not; that is to say, whether he knows for whom or what he is voting or not; so that after all we do not care for the individual independence of the voter or an intelligent vote.

The educational test, which only demands the very minimum of education, is especially requisite where universal suffrage exists; and a man who cannot read his own vote, and cannot read his journal, or reports on public affairs, is so separated from public opinion, public discussion, and public progress, in a time when public information is not obtained in the public market as it was in Athens, that there is no wrong whatever in withholding from him the vote.

In the Swiss republics, each voter must write his ballot at the polling-place before the election officers.

No injustice would be done if we adopt the reading and writing test, especially if it were settled that such a test should go into operation three years from the day of the ratification

of the new constitution. A man who cannot learn to read and write in three years had better stay away from the polls.

It seems incumbent, therefore, on the convention, to consider the propriety of introducing a clause in the revised constitution which allows each county to introduce compulsory school attendance, and which makes the test of reading and writing, to be proved, in cases of challenge at the polling-place-the latter by writing the ballot, or a portion of it—a requisite for the exercise of the right of voting, from the beginning of the fourth year after the adoption of the new fundamental law of this state.

Two subjects will require the attention of the convention— namely, the impossibility of doing all the legislative business. of a community of four millions within one hundred days, and the impropriety as well as inconvenience of allowing every judge and magistrate, however limited his sphere may be, to pronounce on the constitutionality of a law according to his fancy; but these subjects will undoubtedly induce the framers of our fourth constitution to weigh them well, and to provide remedies where they are found necessary.

FRAGMENTS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

ON

NATIONALISM

AND

INTERNATIONALISM.

A nation without a national government is an awful spectacle.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

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The following pages (p. 225, et seq.), contain what I believe to be the latest and fullest revision of an essay on "Nationalism and Internationalism," which was dedicated to General U. S. Grant on the eve of his first election to the presidency (New York, 1868).

Those who are interested in tracing the development of a thought may compare with the fuller essay the following earlier and briefer fragment.-G.

NATIONALISM.

THE NATIONAL POLITY IS THE NORMAL TYPE OF MODERN GOVERNMENT.

A FRAGMENT BY FRANCIS LIEBER.

As the city-state was the normal type of free communities in antiquity, and as the feudal system was one of the normal types of government in the Middle Ages, so is the national polity the normal type of our own epoch-not indeed centralism.

Large nations have been formed out of the fragmentary peoples on the continent of Europe, England alone dating the blessing of a national polity over a thousand years back; others are in the act of forming; others, already existing, are carrying out more distinctly or establishing more firmly the national elements of their polities. For this reason, and because the existence of many nations deeply influences our civilization, the present period will be called the National Period. It began plainly when so many other great things began—in the middle of the fifteenth century; but the process of nationalization concerning the languages and the literature of the different countries commenced at an earlier time. The three main characteristics of the political development which mark the modern epoch are:

The national polity;

The general endeavor to define more clearly, and to extend more widely, human rights and civil liberty;

And the decree which has gone forth that many leading nations shall flourish at one and the same time, plainly distinguished from one another, yet striving together, with one public opinion, under the protection of one law of nations, and in the bonds of one common moving civilization.

The universal monarchy, whether purely political or coupled with the papacy; a single leading nation; confederacies of petty sovereigns; a civilization confined to one spot, or one portion of the globe-all these are obsolete, insufficient for

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