As long as periodic free elections survive, no set of people can deny the right to vote to any other set. In the maintenance of free elections rests the complete and the enduring safety of our form of government.

And remember that no dictator in history has ever dared to run the gauntlet of a really free election.

These fundamental truths have been stated so often that they are perhaps commonplace among Americans, but it is well constantly to keep them in mind in order to understand what has happened in other lands. A decade ago, for example, in 1930, the people of Germany, the people who lived in the Reich despaired of the processes of their democracy, which were based on the free use of the franchise. They were willing to lend ear to a new cult called “Nazism”—a minority group which professed extraordinary patriotism, and offered bread and shelter and better government through the rule of a handful of persons boasting of special aptitude for government. In those days loudly professed emphasis was placed by that special group on their own purity of purpose. Nothing was ever said by them about abolishing free elections. Many people of large business affairs, influenced by several factors, and dissatisfied with the democratic system, as it was working out, formed political and economic alliances with this new small group.

You and I know the subsequent history of Germany. The right of free elections and the free choices of heads of government were suddenly wiped out by a new regime, still professing the same purity of purpose. It is a travesty on fact to claim that there is any free choice of public officials in Germany today, or that there ever has been one since 1933.

What Jefferson prophesied might happen in this country, if the philosophy of the restricted vote and of government by special class were adopted, did actually happen in Germany before our very eyes.

Many years ago, speaking in San Francisco, I pointed out that new conditions imposed new requirements on government and upon those who conducted government. As Jefferson wrote a long time ago:“I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind… As new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”

We must follow that rule today as readily as then, always with the condition that any change in institutions or in economic methods must remain within the same old framework of a freely elected democratic form of government.

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