from their long possession; the trained mind, the accumulated capital, and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its most intense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, and would appropriate to themselves in the structure of government a representation not based on individual manhood but on other grounds.  If it be still allowed that all men should have a share in a self-government, it is yet maintained that a share should be granted, in addition, to educated men and owners of property, and to descendants of such men who have founded permanent families with an inherited capacity, a tradition, and a material stake.  Yet these three things, education, property, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those inequalities in human conditions which democracy would minimize.  They embody past custom and present results which are a deposit of the past; they plead that they found men wards and were their guardians, and that under their own domination progress was made, and all that now is came into being; but they must show farther some reason in present conditions under democracy now why such potent inequalities and breeders of inequality should be clothed with governing power.

Universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argument against it is twofold.  It is said that, though much in the theory of democracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at large lack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also that they control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own.  The operation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiring knowledge and skill, and it has no limits.  In state affairs education should have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests, especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popular control; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnify the representatives of education and property to such a degree that they will retain deciding power.  But is this so? or if there be some truth in the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and reconciled with it?  And, to begin with, is education, in the special sense, so important in the fundamental 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