is equally obvious. Your boast, says
the Conservative, that you please the masses, is in effect a confession
that you truckle to the mob. You mean that your doctrines spread in
proportion to the ignorance of your constituents. You prove the merits
of your theories by showing that they disgust people the more they
think. The Liberalism of a district, it has been argued, varies with the
number of convictions for drunkenness. If it be easy to denounce our
ancestors, it is also easy to show how they built up the great empire
which now shelters us; and how, if they had truckled, as you would have
us truckle, to popular whims, we should have been deprived of our
commerce, our manufactures, and our position in the civilised world. And
then it is easy to produce a list of all the base demagogues who have
misled popular impatience and ignorance from the days of Cleon to those
of the French Convention, or of the last disreputable "boss" bloated
with corruption and the plunder of some great American city. This is the
result, it is suggested, of pandering to the mob, and generally
ostracising the intelligent citizen.

I merely sketch the familiar arguments which any journalist has ready
at hand, and, by a sufficient spice of references to actual affairs,
can work up into any number of pointed leading articles. I will only
observe that such arguments seem to me to illustrate that curious
unreality of political theories of which I have spoken. It seems to be
tacitly assumed on both sides, that votes are determined by a process
of genuine reasoning. One side may be ignorant and the other
prejudiced; but the arguments I have recapitulated seem to imply the
assumption that the constituents really reflect upon the reasons for
and against the measures proposed, and make up their minds accordingly.
They are spoken of as though they were a body of experts, investigating
a scientific doctrine, or at least a jury guided by the evidence laid
before them. Upon that assumption, as it seems to me, the moral would
be that the whole system is a palpable absurdity. The vast majority of
voters scarcely think at all, and would be incapable of judging if they
did. Hundreds of thousands care more for Dr. Grace's last score or the
winner of the Derby than for any political question whatever. If they
have opinions, they have neither the training nor the knowledge
necessary to form any conclusion whatever. Consider the state of mind
of the average voter--o