An inherent weakness in republican government was that it assumed the honesty and intelligence of the majority, “the masses,” who were neither honest nor intelligent.  It would doubtless have been an excellent government for a people so good and wise as to need none.  In a country having such a system the leaders, the politicians, must necessarily all be demagogues, for they can attain to place and power by no other method than flattery of the people and subserviency to the will of the majority.  In all the ancient American political literature we look in vain for a single utterance of truth and reason regarding these matters.  In none of it is a hint that the multitude was ignorant and vicious, as we know it to have been, and as it must necessarily be in any country, to whatever high average of intelligence and morality the people attain; for “intelligence” and “morality” are comparative terms, the standard of comparison being the intelligence and morality of the wisest and best, who must always be the few.  Whatever general advance is made, those not at the head are behind—­are ignorant and immoral according to the new standard, and unfit to control in the higher and broader policies demanded by the progress made.  Where there is true and general progress the philosopher of yesterday would be the ignoramus of to-day, the honorable of one generation the vicious of another.  The peasant of our time is incomparably superior to the statesman of ancient America, yet he is unfit to govern, for there are others more fit.

That a body of men can be wiser than its wisest member seems to the modern understanding so obvious and puerile an error that it is inconceivable that any people, even the most primitive, could ever have entertained it; yet we know that in America it was a fixed and steadfast political faith.  The people of that day did not, apparently, attempt to explain how the additional wisdom was acquired by merely assembling in council, as in their “legislatures”; they seem to have assumed that it was so, and to have based their entire governmental system upon that assumption, with never a suspicion of its fallacy.  It is like assuming that a mountain range is higher than its highest peak.  In the words of Golpek, “The early Americans believed that units of intelligence were addable quantities,” or as Soseby more wittily puts it, “They thought that in a combination of idiocies they had the secret of sanity.”

The Americans, as has been said, never learned that even among themselves majorities ruled, not because they ought, but because they could—­not because they were wise, but because they were strong.  The count of noses determined, not the better policy, but the more powerful party.  The weaker submitted, as a rule, for it had to or risk a war in which it would be at a disadvantage.  Yet in all the early years of the republic they seem honestly to have dignified their submission as “respect for the popular verdict.”  They even quoted from the Latin language the sentiment that “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”  And this hideous blasphemy was as glib upon the lips of those who, without change of mind, were defeated at the polls year after year as upon those of the victors.