4. All editors, journalists, authors of books and plays, except as special
provision might be provided for individuals.
5. All persons engaged in occupations which a competent tribunal decided to
classify as non-essential or non-productive.
Any serious attempt to introduce such restrictions and limitations of the
right of suffrage in America would provoke irresistible revolt. It would be
justly and properly regarded as an attempt to arrest the forward march of
the nation and to turn its energies in a backward direction. It would be
just as reactionary in the political world as it would be in the industrial
world to revert back to hand-tool production; to substitute the ox-team for
the railway system, the hand-loom for the power-loom, the flail for the
threshing-machine, the sickle for the modern harvesting-machine, the human
courier for the electric telegraph.
Yet we find a radical like Mr. Max Eastman giving his benediction and
approval to precisely such a program in Russia as a substitute for
universal suffrage. We find him quoting with apparent approval an article
setting forth Lenine's plan, hardly disguised, to disfranchise every farmer
who employs even a single hired helper.
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