Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political

The freedom and purity of the RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE is a principle interwoven with the very basis of our political system, and as essential to the preservation of that system, in its original form, as is the soul to the existence of the body. It is to be regretted therefore that the prostitution of this right is becoming so frequent and alarming throughout the union, as to excite the most serious apprehension that the elective franchise, once so justly considered the pride of Americans, and the palladium of their liberties, may at no very distant day be converted into a political engine to promote the ambitious projects of knaves and usurers.

I shall be happy to find that my fears on this subject are groundless—but I am sorry that facts leave but too many reasons to believe that they will be realized, unless the rapid strides which they are at present making in this road towards our national ruin, should be speedily and effectually regarded.

Foreigners, not yet naturalized or whose naturalization has been prematurely and fraudulently procured, men without proper qualifications in point of property, transient persons who may be here to-day and gone to-morrow, and youths whose years do not yet entitle them to the privileges of freemen, are all crowded forward to the polls upon the day of an election; and if one of them can manage to slip in a vote, undetected, it is hailed by the favored party as a lucky circumstance. On the eve of an election, the most shameless lies are put in circulation (and sometimes sworn to!) in order to gull the ignorant out of their votes by awakening their fears or alarming their prejudices: and if this is not sufficient, means still more detestable are frequently resorted to. Those who are wicked enough, are bribed, and those whose stubborn virtue would disdain such contamination are, many of them, either induced by the personal flatteries or frightened by the personal threats of some one of their superiors, to vote as he chooses to direct. Even the horrors of a jail are sometimes threatened by an unprincipled creditor to a helpless debtor, in order to compel the latter to give up his political rights to the control of the former:

So common and so little odious have some of these practices become, that nothing is more usual in common parlance than to hear it said that A or B can command a certain number of votes; in other words, that he can make his tenants or his dependants vote as he pleases. And are such things to be tolerated in a land of freemen? Rather let the right of suffrage perish entirely and at once, than thus permit it to be made an instrument in the hands of the knavish and the ambitious to enslave and to control the honest and the undesigning.

Virginia Patriot.