of any superiority of judgment it may allege.  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.  It is, moreover, a school into which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable of receiving great masses of men and accustoming them to political thought, free and efficient action in political affairs, and a civic life in the State, breeding in them responsibility for their own condition and that of the State.  It is the voice of the people always speaking; nor is it to be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, that the questions which come before the suffrage