ge. In fact, education has
entered with beneficent effect into political life with the more power,
in proportion as it has become a common and not a special endowment, and
the enfranchisement of education, if I may use the term, is rather a
democratic than an aristocratic trait. Education, high education even,
is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the
older systems. But in a democracy it remains true, that so far as
education deserves weight, it will secure it by its own resources, and
enter into political results, as property does, with a power of its own.
There, least of all, does it need privilege. Education is one inequality
which democracy seems already dissolving.

What suffrage records, in opposition it may be to educated opinion, as
such, is the mental state of the people, and their choices of the men
they trust with the accomplishment of what is to be done. If the
suffrage is exposed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dulness and
ignorance, which I by no means admit, the remedy lies not in a
guardianship of the people by the educated class, but in popular
education itself, in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general
information which, in conjunction with sound morals, is all that is
required for the comprehension of the great questions decided by
suffrage, and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisions
into effect. The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred of
such schools and such means for the spread of political information as
have grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many other
than political ways. No force has been so great, except the discussion
of religious dogma and practice under the Reformation in northern
nations, in establishing a mental habit throughout the community. The
suffrage also has this invaluable advantage, that it brings about a
substitution of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as the
normal mode of dealing with important differences of view in State
affairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech and the
preservative of that great element of liberty, and progress under
liberty, which is not otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also a
continuous thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as they
arise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing too great an
accumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, containing in itself
the right of revolution in a peaceable form under law.