raised. Honest men are defrauded, and rogues thrive. Debtors outwit their creditors; bankrupts make purses by their failures, and recommence on larger scales; and financial frauds that ruin their thousands go unpunished."
Thus far our impatient friend. And now see how untenable is his position. He actually supposes that it is possible to get government conducted on rational principles! His tacit assumption is that, out of a community morally imperfect, and intellectually imperfect, there may in some way be had legislative regulation that is not proportionately imperfect! He is under a delusion. Not by any kind of government, established after any method, can the thing be done. A good and wise autocrat cannot be chosen or otherwise obtained by a people not good and wise. Goodness and wisdom will not characterize the successive families of an oligarchy, arising out of a bad and foolish people, any more than they will characterize a line of kings. Nor will any system of representation, limited or universal, direct or indirect, do more than represent the average nature of citizens. To dissipate his notion that truly-rational government can be provided for themselves by a people not truly rational, he needs but to read election-speeches, and observe how votes are gained by clap-trap appeals to senseless prejudices, and by fostering hopes of impossible benefits, while votes are lost by. candid statements of stern truths and endeavors to dissipate groundless expectations. Let him watch the process, and he will see that when the fermenting mass of political passions and beliefs is put into the electoral still, there distils over not the wisdom alone, but the folly also—sometimes in the larger proportion. Nay, if he watches closely he may suspect that not only is the corporate conscience lower than the average individual conscience, but the corporate intelligence too. The minority of the wise in a constituency is liable to be wholly submerged by the majority of the ignorant; often ignorance alone gets represented. In the representative assembly, again, the many mediocrities practically rule the few superiorities: the few superior are obliged to express those views only which the rest can understand, and must keep to themselves their best and farthest-reaching thoughts, as thoughts that would have no weight. He needs but to remember that abstract principles are pooh-poohed in the House of Commons, to see at once that, while the unwisdom expresses itself abundantly, what of highest wisdom there may be has to keep silence. And, if he asks an illustration of the way in which the intelligence of the body of members brings out a result lower than would the intelligence of the average member, he may see one in those muddlings of provisions and confusions of language in Acts of Parliament, which have lately been calling forth protests from the judges.
Thus the assumption that it is possible for a nation to get in the shape of law something like embodied reason, when it is not itself pervaded by a correlative reasonableness, is improbable a priori and
