In politics Wasson was a republican without being a democrat. He hailed
the advent of the republican party in 1856 as indicating an improvement
in our political consciousness. Democracy, he said, led to political
selfishness and disintegration. He pointed out many years before Von
Holst that the secession of the southern states was the legitimate fruit
of democratic principles. He thought that suffrage ought not to be a
right, but a privilege, the privilege of good citizenship. He was also
the first to argue in favor of civil-service reform, and a selection of
officials by competitive examination. He might have found sufficient
arguments from experience, but he was not content with that. He went
back to the first principles of political science as indicated in the
social organization of mankind. He laid down the rule that society is
not more for the benefit of the individual than the individual for the
benefit of society; and our last war sufficiently proved the truth of
this. When he first brought forward these arguments at the Boston
Radical Club in 1879 he was met by a storm of opposition and almost
personal invective. One reason for this was that a large portion of his
audience was composed of what is sometimes called strong-minded women,
who fully expected to acquire the right of suffrage on democratic
principles. His hearers had been accustomed to think of a republic and a
democracy as one and the same thing, and they could not understand
Wasson at all.
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