Class legislation

“ The abolition of class legislation, and of special privileges in the government, and the adoption of equal suffrage and eligibility to office, without distinction of race, religious creed, property, or sex. ”

“ Class legislation scarcely exists today in any civilized country; it disappeared with the permanent classes of former days and is now merely a tradition of a gone-by period when no doubt the system of fixed classes served a necessary purpose. But even if we choose to consider the different occupations of men, or their pecuniary circumstances from time to time as class divisions, there is no possibility of unequal legislation affecting them, because it is so difficult as to be practically impossible to separate their interests so as to make such legislation profitable to any special interest. ”

“ Class legislation, discriminating against some and favoring others, is prohibited; but legislation which, in carrying out a public purpose, is limited in its application, if within the sphere of its operation it affects alike all persons similarly situated, is not within the amendment. ”

“ He might mention that all classes of all communities, of all professions, all trades, all combinations of individuals, such as anti-vaccinationists and so forth, had invariably used their utmost pressure in defense of their [Pg 12] interests and views upon members of the House....”
The problem of government in every country—irrespectively of the form which the political institutions may take in any given country—is to avoid class legislation, and to make it impossible for any one class to exploit the others. ”

“ It is not too much to say that substantially all the industrial legislation, demanded by the "people" both here and abroad and passed in the popular interest, has been based essentially on class discrimination. ”

“ If Complete Suffrage is ever to be obtained by peaceful means, it must be through the co-operation of the middle classes; and the light which has been thrown upon the practical bad working of Class Legislation is fast opening the eyes of the latter to the conviction of the radical defects in our present system of representation. ”

“ To do equal justice to all classes, the legislation of a country ought, therefore, to keep steadily in view their relative importance, not only as regards numbers, but also their powers of production, and the proportion which they severally bear of the national burdens. Unless this is the governing principle, it strikes at the root of their prosperity, and the injury inflicted on a class is evinced in the gradual decay of the whole community. ”

“ Legislation in behalf of the general welfare and of the industrially dependent classes becomes less frequent and more guarded; and judicial decisions in matters that involve class antagonisms are more frequently given to the dominant class. ”

“ Since the Industrial Revolution and rise of the press, the middle-class has become more and more the real law-maker. The poor have voted legislators into power; the upper class in the main has formally made the laws; but the engineering of legislation has been, and is, the work of the middle class. ”

“ The great desideratum in all benign legislation is to sustain the class which has no property, against the social depression and physical suffering to which they always tend. That there will always be such a class, at least till the millennium, is certain, for reasons already stated. Now all civilized communities exhibit a natural law which tends to depress the physical condition of those who have no property, who are, usually, the laboring classes. That law is the tendency of population to increase. ”

“ Being elected to serve the people and not to promote selfish interests [Pg 291] or support class legislation, the people, before supporting any candidate for a legislative office, should demand of him a pledge to labor for and support only such measures as will tend to a restoration of the rights that have been taken from and denied to them, and by special charters and grants conferred upon corporations and other monopolies. ”

“ That the demand for such legislation is for the most part a pure class-crowd phenomenon, designed to enhance the self-feeling and economic interests of the "reformers," by keeping the poor from having a good time, is I think, rather obvious. ”

“ Certainly it has been apparent throughout all the discussions today that the scholar and the working-man are uniting in a demand for social legislation, and it may well be possible that the amelioration which we all hope is thus being inaugurated will result in a further lessening of the class conflict. ”

“ If, then, the majority of members chosen by the middle class oppose Domestic Legislation, the middle class is suspected of not being truly national—the sincerity of the People is made doubtful—an impediment is opposed to Repeal, which the Repeal Association properly strive to upset. ”

“ It was not less proper, that every class of citizens should have an opportunity of making their rights be felt and understood in the public councils. The three principal classes into which our citizens were divisible, were the landed, the commercial, and the manufacturing. The second and third class bear, as yet, a small proportion to the first. The proportion, however, will daily increase. ”

“ The leaders in politics and political philosophy in the eighteenth century were not far removed from that frank recognition of class rights which characterized English society, and they were not under the necessity of obscuring - at least to the same extent as modern partisan writers - the essential economic antagonisms featuring in law and constitution making. ”

“ Instead of a number of classes in society, especially instead of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, there must be but one class, which works directly or indirectly for the state, and receives as wages what the state decides to give to them. ”

“ If it put a yoke of subjection on the necks of other classes, it was because the organisation which society required in order that it might exist at all, implied such a differentiation into classes, with political and economic inequalities, and consequently with opportunities to prey upon the mass and use power for personal and class ends. ”

“ When the interest of this part of the community is pursued, the public good is pursued, because the body of every nation consists of this class, and because the interest of both the rich and the poor are involved in that of the middling class. No burden can be laid on the poor but what will sensibly affect the middling class. ”

“ Every effort has been made by the defenders of the old system to find some means of justifying and maintaining class rule—a task which is becoming more and more difficult with the growing belief in democracy. At the present time we are in a transition stage. The divine theory of the state, which was the foundation and support of the old system of class rule, is no longer accepted by intelligent people in any civilized country. But class rule still has its advocates, even in the countries that have advanced farthest in the direction of popular government. ”

“ He thought that when the legislature no longer represented a class interest, it would aim at the general interest, honestly and with adequate wisdom; since the people would be sufficiently under the guidance of educated intelligence, to make in general a good choice of persons to represent them, and having done so, to leave to those whom they had chosen a liberal discretion. ”

“ A regulation which, instead of the equality nature ordains, creates an odious distinction between members of the same community ... and vests in a favored class, not in consideration of their public services but of their private possessions, the highest of all privileges. ”

“ Nothing that will sustain examination, when people can once be induced to bestow any real examination upon a new thing. Those indeed, if any such there be, who, under pretense of equal justice, aim only at substituting the class ascendancy of the poor for that of the rich, will of course be unfavorable to a scheme which places both on a level. ”

“ It can be said also in this connection that if Government has one business more peculiarly her own than another, it is to look after the class that most needs looking after; and that not simply from the interest of the class itself, which would rarely supply a basis for governmental interference, but in the interests of society at large—of the State itself. ”

“ But although the change effected by the Reform Bill at first sight appears to have been political, it was in fact social. It was the introduction of a wholly new class of society into the duties of Government. The aristocratic classes, which had hitherto had the monopoly of power, were forced to admit to an equality with themselves the middle class, which the progress of society, and the wonderful advance of material improvement during the last half century, had raised to a position so important that its claims could no longer be withstood. Its victory had been secured by a twofold alliance. ”

“ Then, again, this system of class privilege has behind it the power of a government that, though mainly ineffective in itself, yet controls a further system of right by might—the Law Courts and police and military, all of which things, with a fine show of judicial balance, can be and are employed not to develop society but to uphold establishments, the chief of which is this very privilege and inequality. ”

“ Such constitutions may secure harmony between the dispositions and the station of individuals through the fact that the separate life spheres are relatively broad, and their demands and opportunities are extensive enough to offer appropriate places for the individuals, diverse as they may be from variations of heredity, education, and example. A class constitution, consequently, provides for a preëstablished harmony between the qualities or dispositions of the individual and his position in the social whole. ”

“ But even in this democracy, absolute power, if they chose to exercise it, would rest with the numerical majority, and these would be composed exclusively of a single class, alike in biases, prepossessions, and general modes of thinking, and a class, to say no more, not the most highly cultivated. The constitution would therefore still be liable to the characteristic evils of class government ”

“ Can we blame an elector of the poorer classes, who has only the choice among two or three rich men, for requiring from the one he votes for a pledge to those measures which he considers as a test of emancipation from the class interests of the rich? ”

“ The idea of an actual representation of all classes of the people, by persons of each class, is altogether visionary. Unless it were expressly provided in the Constitution, that each different occupation should send one or more members, the thing would never take place in practice. ”

“ That's why I want Congress to adopt what I call the middle class bill of rights, four new ideas to help middle class Americans build a future that lives up to their dreams. Like the GI bill of rights after World War II, the middle class bill of rights will help people go to college, raise their children, and build a future. ”

“ The task of constitutional government is to devise institutions which shall come into play at the critical periods to prevent the abusive control of the powers of a state by the controlling classes in it. The ruling classes in mediæval society were warriors and ecclesiastics, and they used all their power to aggrandize themselves at the expense of other classes. Modern society is ruled by the middle class. In honor of the bourgeoisie it must be said that they have invented institutions of civil liberty which secure to all safety of person and property. ”

“ Anything, therefore, which savors of narrowness or illiberality in defining the class, among those residing in the Territory in those early days, and partaking of the hardships which the act was intended to reward, who shall be entitled to its benefits, is at variance with the manifest purpose of Congress. ”

“ Each of these two classes is relieved of its degradation; no class is burdened by taxation or by the conscription beyond its due; all persons and all property find in the government, in the administration, in the tribunals, in the gendarme, the same reliable protection.—So much for equity and the true spirit of equality.—Let us now turn around and consider envy and the bad spirit of equality. ”

“ In a word, the new settlement of English life upon the basis of class government, the exclusion of the mass of the people from public affairs, the decay (if you will) of a lively public opinion, the presence of that hopeless disinherited class which now forms the majority of our industrial population; the organisation of the universities, of justice, of the legislature, of the executive, as parts of one social class ”

“ This it is, gentlemen, which must be called the working man's idea of the State, his conception of the object of the State, which, as you see is just as different from the bourgeois conception of the object of the State, as the principle of the working class, of the claim of all to direct the will of the State, or universal suffrage, is different from the principle held by the Bourgeoisie, the census. ”

“ Taking the class to whom the law awards the suffrage,—the men of some modest property qualification and intelligence,—is it well for the community that they should be indifferent to questions of taxation, of law-making, of courts and schools and roads and bridges? ”