like the famous _Peking Gazette_, for the
dissemination of news, has long ago discovered that people prefer to
obtain their opinions ready-made.

The wise argument we hear being urged in a railway-carriage or at a
dinner-table is merely an intellectual reach-me-down purchased at a
book-stall for the modest price of one penny. If there were only one
newspaper, and consequently only one leading article on a particular
topic, political discussion would die a natural death.

The political opinion to which the majestic alderman or the
classically-trained savant gives such profound utterance is the opinion,
not of himself, but of some poor devil who knows nothing of the
blessings of a university education, but who writes in a garret, or in
a dingy office off Fleet Street, to earn his bread and cheese.

Its value or political insight need not be disparaged on that account. I
would trust it a thousand times rather than I would trust the
opinion--if such a thing should have any existence--of the average
educated man whose brains have been jellified at school or college. The
point is not the value of the humble scribe's opinion, however, but the
fact that a man, of what would be called inferior educational
attainments, has to be engaged to do mental work that cannot be
performed by the brains of people who have enjoyed all the advantages
that a first-rate education is supposed to confer.

The vote of the working-man is scarcely more unintelligently applied at
election times than the vote of the educated man. On the contrary, the
former may be said to think independently, or at least to use an
independent instinct, whilst the latter is contented to believe in the
iniquity of one party or the virtue of another, according to the opinion
of the man in the garret. The working man wants beer, and he knows it.
The China question, the war in South Africa, the housing of the working
classes, the great education controversy--everything is beer to him. It
is the Government who cheapen beer, or who regulate the percentage of
arsenic to be used in brewing, that command his support--not Ministers
who promise to maintain British supremacy in the Far East, or who put
forward an attractive programme of domestic legislation.

The natural consequence of this wholesale production of dummy members of
society is that the strings of government are really pulled by the
intelligent few. Whatever the external constitution of Great Britain may
be, th