f nine men out of ten, say, whom you meet in the
Strand. Ask yourselves honestly what value you would attach to his
opinion upon any great question--say, of foreign politics or political
economy. Has he ever really thought about them? Is he superficially
acquainted with any of the relevant facts? Is he even capable of the
imaginative effort necessary to set before him the vast interests often
affected? And would the simple fact that he said "Yes" to a given
question establish in your mind the smallest presumption against the
probability that the right answer would be "No"? What are the chances
that a majority of people, of whom not one in a hundred has any
qualifications for judging, will give a right judgment? Yet that is the
test suggested by most of the conventional arguments on both sides; for
I do not say this as intending to accept the anti-democratic
application. It is just as applicable, I believe, to the educated and
the well-off. I need not labour the point, which is sufficiently
obvious. I am quite convinced that, for example, the voters for a
university will be guided by unreasonable prejudices as the voters for
a metropolitan constituency. In some ways they will be worse. To find
people who believe honestly in antiquated prejudices, you must go to
the people who have been trained to believe them. An ecclesiastical
seminary can manage to drill the pupils into professing absurdities
from which average common sense would shrink, and only supply logical
machinery for warring against reason. The reference to enlightened
aristocracies is common enough; but I cannot discover that, "taken in a
lump," any particular aristocracy cannot be as narrow-minded,
short-sighted, and selfish, as the most rampant democracy. In point of
fact, we all know that political action is determined by instinct
rather than by reason. I do not mean that instinct is opposed to
reason: it is simply a crude, undeveloped, inarticulate form of reason;
it is blended with prejudices for which no reason is assigned, or even
regarded as requisite. Such blind instincts, implying at most a kind of
groping after error, necessarily govern the majority of men of all
classes, in political as in other movements. The old apologists used to
argue on the hypothesis that men must have accepted Christianity on the
strength of a serious inquiry into the evidences. The fallacy of the
doctrine is sufficiently plain: they accepted it because it suited them
on the