about the annual
average of railroad casualties of the period, and if it provoked comment
it at least led to no reform, for at a later period we find the mortality
even greater. That it was preventable is shown by the fact that in the
same year the railroads of Great Britain, where the speed was greater and
the intervals between vehicles less, killed only one passenger. It was a
difference of government: Great Britain had a government that governed;
America had not. Happily for humanity, the kind of government that does
not govern, self-government, "government of the people, by the people and
for the people" (to use a meaningless paradox of that time) has perished
from the face of the earth.

An inherent weakness in republican government was that it assumed the
honesty and intelligence of the majority, "the masses," who were neither
honest nor intelligent. It would doubtless have been an excellent
government for a people so good and wise as to need none. In a country
having such a system the leaders, the politicians, must necessarily all be
demagogues, for they can attain to place and power by no other method than
flattery of the people and subserviency to the will of the majority. In
all the ancient American political literature we look in vain for a single
utterance of truth and reason regarding these matters. In none of it is a
hint that the multitude was ignorant and vicious, as we know it to have
been, and as it must necessarily be in any country, to whatever high
average of intelligence and morality the people attain; for "intelligence"
and "morality" are comparative terms, the standard of comparison being the
intelligence and morality of the wisest and best, who must always be the
few. Whatever general advance is made, those not at the head are
behind--are ignorant and immoral according to the new standard, and unfit
to control in the higher and broader policies demanded by the progress
made. Where there is true and general progress the philosopher of
yesterday would be the ignoramus of to-day, the honorable of one
generation the vicious of another. The peasant of our time is incomparably
superior to the statesman of ancient America, yet he is unfit to govern,
for there are others more fit.

That a body of men can be wiser than its wisest member seems to the modern
understanding so obvious and puerile an error that it is inconceivable
that any people, even the most primitive, could ever have entertained it;
yet