fe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the
country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push
of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called
government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while
before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand,
too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit
at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the leading
journals, so thoroughly is everything debated before the authorized and
responsible debaters get on their legs. And what shall we say of
government by a majority of voices? To a person who in the last century
would have called himself an Impartial Observer, a numerical
preponderance seems, on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth
as could well be devised, but experience has apparently shown it to be a
convenient arrangement for determining what may be expedient or advisable
or practicable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a different
face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were
agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason,
perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at
the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but
that she is far better-looking than he had imagined.

The arguments against universal suffrage are equally unanswerable.
"What," we exclaim, "shall Tom, Dick, and Harry have as much weight in
the scale as I?" Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And yet
universal suffrage has not been the instrument of greater unwisdom than
contrivances of a more select description. Assemblies could be mentioned
composed entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity which have
sometimes shown traces of human passion or prejudice in their votes.
Have the Serene Highnesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the
business of Mankind so well, then, that there is no use in trying a less
costly method? The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are
likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to
vote makes a safety-valve of every voter, and that the best way of
teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For
the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man
the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive
whole c