“No worse nonsense is talked than what we are told as to the requisites for the elective franchise.  To listen to some people, it is almost as solemn a function as to be a trustee of the British Museum.  What you want in a body of electors is a rough, shrewd eye for men of character, honesty, and purpose.  Very plain men know who wish them well, and the sort of thing which will bring them good.  Electors have not got to govern the country; they have only to find a set of men who will see that the Government is just and active....  All things go best by comparison, and a body of men may be as good voters as their neighbours without basing the type of the Christian hero.

“So far from, being the least fit for political influence of all classes in the community, the best part of the working class forms the most fit of all others.  If any section of the people is to be the paramount arbiter in public affairs, the only section competent for this duty is the superior order of workmen.  Governing is one thing; but electors of any class cannot or ought not to govern.  Electing, or the giving an indirect approval of Government, is another thing, and demands wholly different qualities.  These are moral, not intellectual; practical, not special gifts—­gifts of a very plain and almost universal order.  Such are, firstly, social sympathies and sense of justice; then openness and plainness of character; lastly, habits of action, and a practical knowledge of social misery.  These are the qualities which fit men to be the arbiters or ultimate source (though certainly not the instruments) of political power.  These qualities the best working men possess in a far higher degree than any other portion of the community; indeed, they are almost the only part of the community which possesses them in any perceptible degree."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Order and Progress, pp. 149-54, and again at p. 174.]

The worst of it is that, if Sir Henry Maine is right, we have no more to hope from other classes than from roughs and clowns.  He can discern no blue sky in any quarter.  “In politics,” he says, “the most powerful of all causes is the timidity, the listlessness, and the superficiality of the generality of minds” (p. 73).  This is carrying criticism of democracy into an indictment against human nature.  What is to become of us, thus placed between the devil of mob ignorance and corruption, and the deep sea of genteel listlessness and superficiality?  After all, Sir Henry Maine is only repeating in more sober tones the querulous remonstrances with which we are so familiar on the lips of Ultramontanes and Legitimists.  A less timid observer of contemporary events, certainly in the land that all of us know best and love best, would judge that, when it comes to a pinch, Liberals are still passably prudent, and Conservatives quite sufficiently wide-awake.

Another of the passages in Sir Henry Maine’s book, that savours rather of the party caricaturist than of the “dispassionate student of politics,” is the following:—­