If they are not in a majority, certain political objects may be gained (without giving the non-capitalist masses any real power) by allowing them all to vote, by removing undemocratic constitutional restrictions, and by introducing direct legislation, the recall, and similar measures.

If they are a majority, it is generally agreed that it is unsafe to allow them an equal voice in government, as they almost universally fail to rest satisfied with the benefits they secure from collectivist capitalism and press on immediately to a far more radical policy.
So in agricultural communities like New Zealand, Australia, and some of our Western States, where there is a prosperous property-holding majority, the most complete political democracy has come to prevail.
Judging everything by local conditions, the progressive small capitalists of our West sometimes even favor the extension of this democracy to the nation and the whole world, as when the Wisconsin legislature proposes direct legislation and the recall in our national government.

But they are being warned against this "extremist" stand by conservative progressive leaders of the industrial sections like Ex-President Roosevelt or Governor Woodrow Wilson.
This latter type of progressive not only opposes the extension of radical democracy to districts like our South and East, numerically dominated by agricultural or industrial laborers, but often wants to restrict the ballot in those regions.

Professor E.A.Ross, for example, writes in _La Follette's Weekly_ that "no one ought to be given the ballot unless he can give proof of ability to read and write the English language," which would disqualify a large part, if not the majority, of the working people in many industrial centers; while Dr.Abbott concluded a lengthy series of articles with the suggestion that the Southern States have "set an example which it would be well, if it were possible, for all the States to follow." "Many of them have adopted in their constitutions," Dr.Abbott continues, "a qualified suffrage.

The qualifications are not the same in all the States, but there is not one of those States in which every man, black or white, has not a legal right to vote, provided he can read and write the English language, owns three hundred dollars' worth of property, and has paid his taxes.