ce nor virtue of
the people they governed. And, as a matter of historical experience, a
class in power has always sought its own benefit rather than that of the
whole people. Lunacy, extraordinary stupidity, and crime aside, a man is
the best guardian of his own liberty and rights.

The English critics, who say we have taken the government from the
capable few and given it to the people, speak of universal suffrage as a
quack panacea of this "era of progress." But it is not the manufactured
panacea of any theorist or philosopher whatever. It is the natural result
of a diffused knowledge of human rights and of increasing intelligence.
It is nothing against it that Napoleon III. used a mockery of it to
govern France. It is not a device of the closet, but a method of
government, which has naturally suggested itself to men as they have
grown into a feeling of self-reliance and a consciousness that they have
some right in the decision of their own destiny in the world. It is true
that suffrage peculiarly fits a people virtuous and intelligent. But
there has not yet been invented any government in which a people would
thrive who were ignorant and vicious.

Our foreign critics seem to regard our "American system," by the way, as
a sort of invention or patent right, upon which we are experimenting;
forgetting that it is as legitimate a growth out of our circumstances as
the English system is out of its antecedents. Our system is not the
product of theorists or closet philosophers; but it was ordained in
substance and inevitable from the day the first "town meeting" assembled
in New England, and it was not in the power of Hamilton or any one else
to make it otherwise.

So you must have education, now you have the ballot, say the critics of
this era of progress; and this is another of your cheap inventions. Not
that we undervalue book knowledge. Oh, no! but it really seems to us that
a good trade, with the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments back of it,
would be the best thing for most of you. You must work for a living
anyway; and why, now, should you unsettle your minds?

This is such an astounding view of human life and destiny that I do not
know what to say to it. Did it occur to Mr. Froude to ask the man whether
he would be contented with a good trade and the Ten Commandments? Perhaps
the man would like eleven commandments? And, if he gets hold of the
eleventh, he may want to know something more about his fellow-men, a