ate the degree of
political harm which could be done in a few years by an interested and
deliberately dishonest agitation on some question too technical for the
personal judgment of the ordinary voter. Suppose, for instance, that our
Civil Service were either notoriously inefficient or believed to be
dominated by party influence, and that an organised and fraudulent
'currency agitation' should suddenly spring up. A powerful press
syndicate brings out a series of well-advertised articles declaring that
the privileges of the Bank of England and the law as to the gold reserve
are 'strangling British Industry.' The contents bills of two hundred
newspapers denounce every day the 'monopolists' and the 'gold-bugs,' the
'lies and shams' of the Bank Returns, and the 'paid perjurers of
Somerset House.' The group of financiers who control the syndicate stand
to win enormous sums by the creation of a more 'elastic' currency, and
subscribe largely to a Free Money League, which includes a few sincere
paper-money theorists who have been soured by the contempt of the
professional economists. A vigorous and well-known member of
parliament--a not very reputable aristocrat perhaps, or some one loosely
connected with the Labour movement--whom everybody has hitherto feared
and no one quite trusted, sees his opportunity. He puts himself at the
head of the movement, denounces the 'fossils' and 'superior persons' who
at present lead Conservative and Liberal and Labour parties alike, and,
with the help of the press syndicate and the subscription fund of the
'Free Money League,' begins to capture the local associations, and
through them the central office of the party which is for the moment in
opposition, Can any one be sure that such a campaign, if it were opposed
only by counter-electioneering, might not succeed, even although its
proposals were wholly fraudulent and its leaders so ignorant or so
criminal that they could only come into power by discrediting two-thirds
of the honest politicians in the country and by replacing them with
'hustlers' and 'boodlers' and 'grafters,' and the other species for whom
American political science has provided names? How is the ordinary
voter--a market-gardener, or a gas-stoker, or a water-colour painter--to
distinguish by the help of his own knowledge and reasoning power between
the various appeals made to him by the 'Reformers' and the 'Safe Money
Men' as to the right proportion of the gold reserve to the n