To [Edmund] Burke, the working people who set up political societies modeled on the Jacobins were “the swinish multitude” or the “unwashed masses.” They responded in kind. When 5,000 workers marched through Sheffield to celebrate the victory of the French army at Valmy in November 1792, they carried an effigy of Burke riding on a pig. One fifth of the electorate, he told Parliament, and the majority of the unenfranchised were “pure Jacobins; utterly incapable of amendment; objects of eternal vigilance.” Burke’s lobbying set in motion a sequence of repression—newspapers were banned, meetings outlawed, organisations proscribed, political activists arrested, deported and executed—that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819.
—Ann Talbot, "Citizen of the world: a brief survey of the life and times of Thomas Paine (1737-1809)"

Burke was a friend of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and The American Crisis. Thomas Paine was the one who wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls...” And Paine was a friend of Washington and Jefferson, as well.

About the time of the framing of the Constitution there was an extended discussion of how the vote should be handled. One writer writes about Jefferson:

Because arms and sovereignty were so bound together, Jefferson argued that property ownership should not be the sole basis for voting rights. Anyone who served in the militia deserved the vote: "Let every man who fights or pays, exercise his just and equal right in their election." (Letter to Samuel Kercheval. July 12, 1816.)
—Dave Kopel, "Thomas Jefferson Forever"

John Adams advocated excluding women, children, and the poor from the vote. His view was the common one at the time of the American Revolution and at the framing of the Constitution, a document that did not even address the right to vote.

Benjamin Franklin said about suffrage:

Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers — but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?

I close with this:

Government is our second most important problem. It is superseded only by survival itself.

To survive, people must control nature. Then they must turn almost immediately to the problem of living with each other. Some say this happens because human beings are innately good and prefer to live in society. Some say it is because human being are innately bad and must associate with each other because the consequences of going it alone are so much worse. But human nature is hardly the essential problem if in either case we end up living our lives regularly in association with others. People who are innately bad may govern themselves differently from people who are innately good. But government—not human nature—seems to be the thing people have in common, and it seem to be what people do least well for themselves.
—Theodore Lowi, American Government: Incomplete Conquest (Dryden Press,1976)

So we went from defining the world in terms to the word clean to the founding fathers' views on voting rights to the question of government. Hope the trip wasn't too long and you found something interestng along the way.

Journal entry dated 09 Jan 2006