Carroll Free Press

THE STATESMAN ANSWERED BY A LOCOFOCO.

There appeared a Doughfaced echo of the Virginia Richmond Enquirer, in the Statesman of the 28th, about a case of "most shameless and impudent pipe-laying." The practice complained of is one which the Locofoco landholders of Virginia practised exclusively in 1840, to carry their State against Harrison, but nothing was said in condemnation of it then, because it was all in their favor. The process of making voters in "Democratic" Virginia, is described below, in an article which we copy from the N. York Morning News of the 24th February, a thorough going Texas Locofoco paper, and we unite in denouncing it as anti-Republican and Aristocratic. But what better can be expected of a State where property in Slaves is made a basis of representation - and why should the Doughfaced Statesman complain, while it is raising its voice for an increase of this kind of representation in Florida and Texas? The great Democratic party of Slaveholders are unwilling that the poor man should vote who has no land, although they are very willing to vote for their Slaves, and the Statesman says it is right and the privileges should be extended. Here follows the article copied from the Morning News:

-O. S. Journal.

Manufacturing Votes. - One Angus McDonald, an aspiring Whig lawyer in Hampshire county, Virginia, is engaged, as we learn from the Richmond Enquirer, in manufacturing votes for the Spring election, by a process which the present unwise property qualification in that State renders easy, and what is worse than that, legal. He, with some other Whigs, has made deeds conveying immense tracts of wild, mountain land, in the most rugged and sterile parts of Hampshire, to a number of grantees, thus giving them the privilege of voting. According to the practice in Virginia, a man may vote in every county where he holds property. Two hundred and ten of these grantees are residents in the neighboring strong Whig county of Hardy: and, at the next election, having deposited their votes in that, they will flock over to Hampshire, and probably overcome the Democratic majority there. In Hampshire, also, it seems that some eighty-seven votes have been in this way manufactured.

The worst of the matter is, that whilst the evidences of this dishonest fraud are irresistible, there's no way of avoiding the operation, because it is covered by the law. Let that law then, creating a property qualification for the right of suffrage, be repealed. Let the State of Virginia, which in the olden days of our republic, was the guide of the Union, now follow the example which the Empire State has set her, of removing from the most sacred right of freemen these odious restrictions, inconsistent as they are with the fundamental doctrines of our constitutional Union, and with the teachings of her Jefferson. Will not the Democracy of Virginia undertake the good work!