guments in support of monarchy, but
the fact remains that where every man in a State has a vote, brutal
laws are impossible. Arthur's people were of course poor material
for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy;
and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short
work of that law which the king had just been administering if it
had been submitted to their full and free vote. There is a phrase
which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come
to seem to have sense and meaning--the sense and meaning implied
when it is used; that is the phrase which refers to this or that or
the other nation as possibly being "capable of self-government";
and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation
somewhere, some time or other which _wasn't_ capable of it--wasn't as
able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or
would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all
ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation,
and from the mass of the nation only--not from its privileged
classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade
was; whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long
ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day
that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself.
Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best
governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still
behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the
same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way
down to the lowest.

King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond
my calculations. I had not supposed he would move in the matter
while I was away; and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining
the merits of officers; I had only remarked that it would be wise
to submit every candidate to a sharp and searching examination;
and privately I meant to put together a list of military qualifications
that nobody could answer to but my West Pointers. That ought
to have been attended to before I left; for the king was so taken
with the idea of a standing army that he couldn't wait but must
get about it at once, and get up as good a scheme of examination
as he could invent out of his own head.

I was impatient to see what this was; and to show, too, how much
more admirable was the one which I should display to the Examini