St. Tammany Farmer

On the second Tuesday of February, which will be the 8th of that month, the Constitutional Convention, which was called by the people at the election on the second Tuesday of January, will assemble in New Orleans.

The chief topic to be treated by the convention is the revision of the suffrage franchise, in order to take the power to vote out of the hands, first, of the ignorant and shiftless class, and, second, out of the hands of foreigners.

With a negro population embracing quite one-half the total of the people in the State, almost wholly ignorant and as shiftless as mentally benighted, but armed with the ballot, the State is perpetually overshadowed politically by a black and menacing cloud.

Such a situation demands prompt and effectual relief, and it can only be secured by imposing on all voters an intellectual or educational qualification, with the alternative of a property requirement for those who, while unlettered, have exhibited intelligence and thrift sufficient to have accumulated property and to have become payers of taxes direct to the State.

The crying need for the deliverance of Louisiana from the possibility of being dominated by a vast depraved, ignorant and shiftless element, is too imperative to be disregarded.

Francis Bellamy, writing in the Illustrated American, says: "Louisiana at present has the loosest suffrage laws in the Union. You do not have to be a citizen, or even a resident, in order to vote. You may be a subject of a foreign king and on a visit to this hospitable State; you can vote without naturalization and then return home."

This is almost literally true. Any foreigner who has sojourned in the State for one year and who shall declare in form his intention of becoming a citizen may vote in all political State elections, and there is no legal obligation resting on him ever to become a citizen. Doubtless there is a moral obligation, but moral obligations do not count in party politics.

Such a state of things is a monstrous outrage upon all citizenship, for foreigners, with no interest in the State, are placed above natives, who, in order to acquire the rights of citizens, must have lived for twenty-one years under free institutions; while aliens, with no knowledge of free constitutional government, after a brief and temporary residence, may vote without absolving their allegiance to the kings, emperors and other foreign potentates whose subjects they may be.

Such abuses of the principle upon which the entire superstructure of all free government rests must end in its destruction, unless a prompt and effective remedy be applied. Constitutional liberty and free institutions cannot long survive excess of political corruption and a prostitution of the sacred suffrage franchise.

The ballot is not only a means for the upbuilding of free government. It is also a most dangerous weapon for its destruction. The ballot is like dynamite, which, while it may be made a most useful servant in the hands of those who will use it with care and intelligence to secure the best results of which it is capable, becomes in the hands of the ignorant and the vicious classes a most destructive and dangerous element. To place proper restrictions around the use of the ballot is the first duty of the convention.

There are various other matters which will command attention at the hands of the convention. Among these is a reorganization of the judiciary. The abrogation of the present system of the district judges, and the substitution in their places of a judge for each parish or county, seems to embody the best view that has yet been presented for the reform.

The authorizing of cities of the first class in the State to issue bonds and borrow money with which to construct a system of needed public improvements, such as works for drainage, sewerage, paving and the like, is a matter that will also be brought before the convention. It is one which, when adopted, will bring results of the utmost importance to the city.

There are other matters of moment which will be considered by the convention and which will be treated later; but those mentioned are of the first and most imperative urgency, and they demand the first care.-Picayune.