which was freehold; in North Carolina, one thousand pounds freehold; and in South Carolina, ten thousand pounds freehold.  A state senator in Massachusetts had to be the owner of a freehold worth three hundred pounds or personal property worth six hundred pounds; in New Jersey, one thousand pounds’ worth of property; in North Carolina, three hundred acres of land; in South Carolina, two thousand pounds freehold.  For members of the lower house of the legislature lower qualifications were required.

In most of the states the suffrage or office holding or both were further restricted by religious provisions.  No single sect was powerful enough to dominate after the Revolution, but, for the most part, Catholics and Jews were either disfranchised or excluded from office.  North Carolina and Georgia denied the ballot to any one who was not a Protestant.  Delaware withheld it from all who did not believe in the Trinity and the inspiration of the Scriptures.  Massachusetts and Maryland limited it to Christians.  Virginia and New York, advanced for their day, made no discrimination in government on account of religious opinion.

=The Defense of the Old Order.=—­It must not be supposed that property qualifications were thoughtlessly imposed at the outset or considered of little consequence in practice.  In the beginning they were viewed as fundamental.  As towns grew in size and the number of landless citizens increased, the restrictions were defended with even more vigor.  In Massachusetts, the great Webster upheld the rights of property in government, saying:  “It is entirely just that property should have its due weight and consideration in political arrangements....  The disastrous revolutions which the world has witnessed, those political thunderstorms and earthquakes which have shaken the pillars of society to their deepest foundations, have been revolutions against property.”  In Pennsylvania, a leader in local affairs cried out against a plan to remove the taxpaying limitation on the suffrage:  “What does the delegate propose?  To place the vicious vagrant, the wandering Arabs, the Tartar hordes of our large cities on the level with the virtuous and good man?” In Virginia, Jefferson himself had first believed in property qualifications and had feared with genuine alarm the “mobs of the great cities.”  It was near the end of the eighteenth century before he accepted the idea of manhood suffrage.  Even then he was unable to convince the constitution-makers of his own state.  “It is not an idle chimera of the brain,” urged one of them, “that the possession of land furnishes the strongest evidence of permanent, common interest with, and attachment to, the community....  It is upon this foundation I wish to place the right of suffrage.  This is the best general standard which can be resorted to for the purpose of determining whether the persons to be invested with the right of suffrage are such persons as could be, consistently with the safety and well-being of the community, intrusted with the exercise of that right.”