hat Burke called "the hoofs of the swinish multitude."
Burke's language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to
its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was
not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended,
in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding
for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and
governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its
self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and
flunkeyism. It is no better to-day and never will be any better: our
very peasants have something morally hardier in them that culminates
occasionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this
aristocracy, which was overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle
class, has come back to power by the votes of "the swinish multitude."
Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted
electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to
parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the
persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular eloquence.
The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits
itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically
and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by
transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship. Well, we
two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well
groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings
golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and
sarspan business as he got his money by." Do you know whether to laugh
or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of
continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of
casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate
our colonies into a world-Power of the first magnitude? Give these
people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest
political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and
they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as
infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch
missionary into crude African idolatry.

I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of
education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show
the way to better