VOTES FOR THE UNBORN AND THE DEAD!

A Marginalia of Electoral Hygiene, by Mrs. Begonia Contretemp, European Correspondent, C-of-C-C Newsletter.

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My Fellow Englishmen — heirs of cathedrals, graveyards, and ledger books — permit me a word before you squander the franchise as if it were pocket change,

In Great Britain, the fashionable chatter has lately been to lower the voting age to sixteen. Progress, they call it. Inclusion, they call it. Sentimental rot, I call it. Adolescence is a pathology, not a qualification. Civilization is not upheld by enthusiasms but by endurance, and endurance is not learned on TikTok.

Chesterton’s Democracy of the Dead

If reform is needed, let us reform upward, not downward. Chesterton was correct: tradition is the democracy of the dead. Those who went before us deserve a voice, for they paid dearly for the institutions we inherit. And the unborn, silent as they are, embody the only true stake in tomorrow. To silence the unborn and the dead, while granting suffrage to hormonal apprentices, is not democracy—it is dereliction.

The Earned Franchise

Voting is not sacred because it is given. It becomes sacred only when it is earned. And it must be weighted toward those who demonstrate responsibility, continuity, and ethical conduct.

Who, then, should vote?

Two-Parent Households with a Long Lineage in the Land. Parents who maintain the discipline of a family, rooted in a lineage of their nation’s soil, have proven their stake. They should be granted additional votes: one for each unborn child carried, and one for each living child up to the age of 21. Such households bear the cost of continuity; let them also wield the franchise for it.

Earners, not Dependents. No one on public assistance should vote. Charity is not sovereignty, and dependency is not a qualification for ruling others.

The Tested Living. Those who show probity, service, and competence: who balance their accounts, who tend to graves, who keep obligations without spectacle.

Thus, suffrage ceases to be a participation trophy and becomes a covenant consecrated by merit.

A Necessary Digression on Churchill

Permit me a moment of gall. That English bulldog, Mr. Churchill, quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” A clever shrug, yes—but one he wielded while democratically convening the decision to carpet-bomb German residential quarters. Not barracks. Not armories. Homes, hearths, and nurseries.

And here lies the mordant comedy: the bombs were distributed with scrupulous democratic fairness. Rich and poor, clerk and cobbler, aristocrat and washerwoman—all were rendered equal under the firestorm. You wanted equality? Churchill gave it to you in incendiary rations.

Thus, democracy becomes both excuse and executioner: worst of governments, indeed, but with the peculiar genius of laundering atrocity as policy. If democracy can justify firestorms over Dresden, do not prattle to me that it is sacred because it is popular.

Vote-Bombing in Britain Today

And now, observe how the pattern repeats in subtler guise. The established political order, unwilling to defend its own continuity, inundates its electorate with migrants. To be precise: Britain is not yet America. There are hurdles—residency requirements, naturalisation processes, “good character” tests, even the technicalities of parental status. It is not an open border where citizenship drips down like rain.

But the end result, given time, is the same. Migrants become naturalised, their children claim automatic citizenship, and soon the ballots swell with voices untethered from the long memory of the land. The demographic time bomb ticks as surely as any air raid clock.

This is a new kind of bombing campaign—less fiery, more insidious. Call it cultural carpet bombing. The policy does not drop explosives; it drops outsiders into the civic fabric, one planeload after another, until the native citizenry feels itself surrounded, disoriented, and demoralized. Equality under the bomb in Dresden; equality under the ballot in Dover. In both cases, the rubble is real.

“A polity can survive bombs on its cities, but not bombs in its ballot box.”

Covenant, Not Loot

Voting must be weighty again. A covenant on behalf of the unborn and the dead, executed only by those among the living who have earned it through fidelity, service, and continuity. Sacred things are meant to be heavy. A light vote is a cheap vote, and cheap votes destroy democracies from within.

If this feels severe, it is because we have mistaken democracy for therapy, and suffrage for charity. The vote is not a selfie. It is not a welfare benefit. It is a consecrated trust—and only the proven should bear it.

—Mrs. Begonia Contretemp, who still votes with a fountain pen dipped in history