in. It acknowledges as its secondary
electors--as the choosers of its government--an educated minority, at
once competent and unresisted; it has a kind of loyalty to some
superior persons who are fit to choose a good government, and whom no
other class opposes. A nation in such a happy state as this has obvious
advantages for constructing a Cabinet government. It has the best
people to elect a legislature, and therefore it may fairly be expected
to choose a good legislature--a legislature competent to select a good
administration.

England is the type of deferential countries, and the manner in which
it is so, and has become so, is extremely curious. The middle
classes--the ordinary majority of educated men--are in the present day
the despotic power in England. "Public opinion," nowadays, "is the
opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus." It is NOT
the opinion of the aristocratical classes as such; or of the most
educated or refined classes as such; it is simply the opinion of the
ordinary mass of educated, but still commonplace mankind. If you look
at the mass of the constituencies, you will see that they are not very
interesting people; and perhaps if you look behind the scenes and see
the people who manipulate and work the constituencies, you will find
that these are yet more uninteresting. The English constitution in its
palpable form is this--the mass of the people yield obedience to a
select few; and when you see this select few, you perceive that though
not of the lowest class, nor of an unrespectable class, they are yet of
a heavy sensible class--the last people in the world to whom, if they
were drawn up in a row, an immense nation would ever give an exclusive
preference.

In fact, the mass of the English people yield a deference rather to
something else that to their rulers. They defer to what we may call the
THEATRICAL SHOW of society. A certain state passes before them; a
certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a
wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed, and they are
coerced by it. Their imagination is bowed down; they feel they are not
equal to the life which is revealed to them. Courts and aristocracies
have the great quality which rules the multitude, though philosophers
can see nothing in it--visibility. Courtiers can do what others cannot.
A common man may as well try to rival the actors on the stage in their
acting, as the aristocracy in THEIR