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 limited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, the selfish struggle of material interests in a vast and diversified State.

Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to the people in their state of life, and also a test of any general policy once put into operation.  The capacity of the people to judge the event in the long run must be allowed.  But does broad human experience, however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, that right choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedy itself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence?  I am not well assured that it is not so.  The masses have been long in existence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breed that through

    “old experience do attain
    To something like prophetic strain.”

The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than in others the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these are vital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universal conditions, hopes, and energies.  In them, too, intelligence works in precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in other parts of life.  They listen to those