SUFFRAGE (Lat. suffragium, derivation uncertain), a right to vote, and more par ticularly the right possessed by the citizen of a state where representative government exists to vote for a member of the legislative body.
The idea that the universal enjoyment of political suffrage is a right by natural law, is grounded on the fiction that the obligations of municipal law arise out of a social con tract express or implied. In opposition to this notion it is argued that the true, purpose for which government exists is the general welfare of the nation; and it is the duty of state to consider whether the suffrage may be more beneficially exercised by the many or the few. Infants, minors, idiots, and insane persons have everywhere been excluded from the suffrage, on the ground that sound judgment is necessary for its exercise. Persons convicted of crimes have been excluded, as a security to society; and also almost universally women, for reasons based on their relation to society and to the oppo site sex. Like considerations of expediency, it is argued, are a ground for withholding the suffrage from those whose circumstances and station in life render it unlikely that they should form a sound judgment on political questions. It is the intelligence and
enlightenment of the country that an elective legislature should represent; and in any large extension of the suffrage there is obviously a risk of the intelligence of a constitu ency being swamped by its mere numerical majority. A widely extended suffrage has, however, been advocated as a valuable means of educating the people to self-dependence; and several philosophical politicians of the present day, who are favorable to a large extension of the electoral qualification, propose to obviate what they regard as its other wise inevitable evils by graduating the suffrage, so as to give each individual elector a number of votes corresponding as much as possible to his property, education, or social position. Schemes for this end, differing in detail, have been proposed by Mr. J. Stuart Mill, in his Considerations on Representative Government (1851); and by prof. Lorimer in his Political Progress not necessarily Democratic (1857), and Constitutionalism of the Future (1863). See REFORM, REPRESENTATION, BALLOT.