l decisions which the suffrage
makes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be the
case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and
sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of
society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of
view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and
bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or
deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those
wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and
the facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally,
a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not
its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect
human life is their political significance. On the broad scale, who is a
better judge of their own material condition and the modifications of it
from time to time, of what they receive and what they need from
political agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by what
is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the masses?
Experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universally
diffused. Education, too, is a word that will bear interpretation. It is
not synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native in men,
and, though increased by education, not conditioned upon it.
Intelligence, in the limited sphere in which the unlearned man applies
it, in the things he knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating,
comprehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically educated man;
for he is educated by things, and especially in those matters which
touch his own interests, widely shared. The school of life embodies a
compulsory education that no man escapes. If politics, then, be in the
main a conflict of material interests broadly affecting masses of men,
the people, both individually and as a body, may well be more competent
to deal with the matter in hand intelligently than those who, though
highly educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pressure of
things, and feel results and also conditions, even widely prevalent, at
a less early stage and with less hardship, and at best in very mild
forms. Besides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains that are
required to diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. The
sphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is really
limite