ry carelessness about the name, and concern about
the substance of popular government, this skill in getting the best out
of things as they are, in utilizing all the motives which influence men,
and in giving one direction to many impulses, that has been a principal
factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an
unwritten Constitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work of
their own hands, whereas they are more willing to let time and
circumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance have made. All
free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by
public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that
their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify
the element from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of
democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere
may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious
levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing.
Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air.
Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epigrammatic terseness, bids you educate
your future rulers. But would this alone be a sufficient safeguard? To
educate the intelligence is to enlarge the horizon of its desires and
wants. And it is well that this should be so. But the enterprise must
go deeper and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and wants in
so far as they are legitimate. What is really ominous of danger to the
existing order of things is not democracy (which, properly understood, is
a conservative force), but the Socialism, which may find a fulcrum in it.
If we cannot equalize conditions and fortunes any more than we can
equalize the brains of men--and a very sagacious person has said that
"where two men ride of a horse one must ride behind"--we can yet,
perhaps, do something to correct those methods and influences that lead
to enormous inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enormous. It
is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George and to prove him mistaken in his
political economy. I do not believe that land should be divided because
the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may this not be said?
_A fortiori_, we might on the same principle insist on a division of
human wit, for I have observed that the quantity of this has been even
more inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an inequit