itical conception the Electoral College was a legitimate product.
The "Fathers" didn't _mean_ that the people should decide between the
merits of the candidates for the Presidency. They thought--and shall we
therefore decry their wisdom?--that a small body of intelligent and well
educated men, men of character and social position, accustomed to the
study of public affairs, was better fitted to choose such an officer as
the President of the United States than the whole mass of the people.
Moreover, the people themselves have changed, and have become in
substance and in condition something that the "Fathers" did not dream
of. States in which the vote of the mass of the citizens should be in
the hands of negroes or of emigrants from the peasant class of Europe
were not among the political conditions for which their foresight
provided.

--The great controlling fact in our politics is this one, so little
regarded not only by the general public, but by men in active political
life--the thorough change which has taken place in our society and in
the attitude of the people toward the Government. As a consequence of
this change, political power has passed almost entirely out of the hands
of the class of men to whom the framers of our Constitution intended to
commit the administration of the Government which they called into
being. It has fallen into those of men generally much inferior in
cultivation and in position. And as we have already said, the very
substance of the political constituency has changed. A suffrage
practically universal and a controlling vote in one part of the country
of emancipated negro slaves and in the other of uneducated foreign
emigrants was not the political power to which Franklin, and Jefferson,
and Hamilton and Adams, and their co-workers, supposed they were
required to adapt their frame of government. And now no small part of
our difficulty arises from the failure of a very large portion of our
people, North as well as South, to perceive or at least fully to
appreciate this change and its inevitable consequences. It is agreed by
all students of political history, that the weakness of a written
constitution lies in its inflexibility; and the error of many of our
political managers lies in their failure to appreciate this truth and
their assumption that the country is to be governed now just as it was
in the days of Washington. But the fact is that such a condition of
political affairs as now exist