To the patriot, to the lover of republican institutions, to the advocate of unrestricted individual suffrage, this fact is appalling. But it is none the less a fact that should be known. Nor may the advocates of monarchical systems of government and of restricted suffrage take comfort from that fact. That the deciding ballot in our political contests may be an ignorant one does not prove the evil or folly of unrestricted suffrage. Not at all. Cancer in the breast does not prove the folly of life. Nor is a jammed finger necessarily fatal. These simply remind us that in the one case the knife, and in the other the lotion, should be quickly and efficiently used. So with the ignorant ballot. Its existence merely proves the absolute necessity of prompt and vigorous action to enlighten it—of educating him who casts it—of taking counsel from the past and present and providently guarding the future. It teaches us that while we are properly horrified at any desecration of the sacred right of suffrage—whether by bulldozing, ballot-box stuffing, false counting, or other methods of intimidation or of fraud—it is high time to arouse ourselves to a state of facts existing around us and under our very noses, constituting a sacrilege only differing from these others in degree; to realize, in time to remedy it, that at every election we witness, at almost every voting precinct in the land, a constant, never-failing, almost winked-at desecration by power-clad ignorance of that right; to realize the great dangers from this source that we have thus far happily escaped; to properly apprehend the possible perils thus stored up for us in the bosom of the future, and by timely, energetic and sufficient action to arrest them. Thus the very knowledge that one in every five of our voters exercises ignorantly this undue and prodigious power must nerve a free and enlightened people to make immediate and adequate provision both to aid and to make obligatory the elementary education of those who in due time will inherit from us the right of suffrage.
It can not be too often or too strongly urged, under the light of this revelation from the census returns, that an ignorant ballot is a dangerous ballot, because it may be at once heedless, and easily deceived; that an educated ballot is, to the degree of education, an enlightened ballot—possibly wrong-headed or mistaken at times, but as a rule careful, brave and pure; and that, as the ballot is placed in the hands of all Americans, education—the means by which they may discriminatingly cast that ballot—should be open and free to all.