Taxation and Voting
Thomas Allen
In The United States Unmasked: A Search into the Causes of the Rise and Progress of These States, and an Exposure Of Their Present Material and Moral Condition (London, Ontario: J. H. Vivian, 1878), pages 129 –131, G. Manigault explains why suffrage needs to be limited to people who pay a minimum amount of direct taxes:
The colonies quarrelled with the mother country because they were taxed by its parliament in which they were not represented, “No taxation without representation!” This sounds like a safeguard to one’s rights; yet it is but a half truth, valueless and deceptive until you add the suppressed half to it. “No representation without taxation!”
Government is a necessary agency. Society cannot do without it. But it is a costly and burdensome agent; and moreover one whose powers have often been grossly abused and perverted from their true objects. Yet its powers must be entrusted to some person, or persons, or class of persons. The only class of persons to whom the ultimate control over the government can be entrusted with reasonable hope of good results, is that which furnishes the means of supporting the government, and feels the burden of its costly maintenance. This class are the tax-payers, the holders of visible, tangible property, which cannot hide itself from taxation. This class has a direct and obvious interest in watching the government and the officials who administer its powers—in checking extravagance and enforcing economy and honesty in government expenditure; for they furnish the means. They have every motive for watching that the operations of government are directed to the protection of the rights and the redress of the wrongs of individuals, and the safety of the community — and not perverted to purposes for which it was not created. For this class have not only personal and social rights, like other people, but they possess vast acquired and vested rights peculiarly apt to suffer from the neglect or abuses, or perversion of government; rights, on the protection and security of which the welfare and civilization of the country depend. This class may be very numerous, or may consist of comparatively few, according to the circumstances of the particular country. But in every civilized country it forms but a minority, and usually a small minority of the people in it. Yet their right to be intrusted with the ultimate control over the government and its officials will not be hard to see when we have considered two other suppositions. 1st, That of one man being the imposer, collector, and expender of taxes. 2nd, That while the property-holders pay the taxes, those who hold no property and pay no taxes, should impose them. Do not say that this is an impossible case. But it is certain to prove a ruinous arrangement. These imposers of the taxes have no motive for enforcing on the government economy and honesty in its expenditures. They may become interested in its extravagance, its dishonesty, and in the perversion of its powers. Is not this what has happened in the United States?
The individual States originally had in their political organization this safe-guard against the extravagance, dishonesty, and perversion of their governments. We believe that in every one, certainly in nearly all of them the franchise was limited to the freeholder, a basis of political power wide enough to secure attention to the protection of the personal and social rights of every citizen, choice enough to secure that all who ultimately controlled the government and its officials, should have a direct interest in preserving that government from corruption, and the perversion of its powers. Accordingly these State governments were, for many years, efficient without becoming burdensome or corrupt.
Thus, when the privilege of voting and holding public office is limited to people who pay a minimum amount of direct taxes, governments are frugal and prudent. They are limited and kept within tight bounds. As a result, liberty is protected and flourishes. However, when suffrage is nearly universal as it is today, governments grow without bounds, taxes become exceedingly burdensome, debts explode to unpayable heights, and liberty fades.
Copyright © 2026 by Thomas Coley Allen
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