Burke’s answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat.  He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low.  He thought of the people—­it was obviously a generalization from his time—­as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of ancient habit.  Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude.  “My observation,” he said in his Speech on the East India Bill, “has furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of government.”  We can go further than that sober caution.  We know that there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that is the training of the mass of men to interest in it.  We know that no State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without representation.  Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of the eighteenth century would supply it.  Few would deny that statesmen are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a part of the State from sharing in its guidance.  Nor did Burke remember his own wise saying that “in all disputes between the people and their rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people”; and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully’s which traces popular violence to popular suffering.  No one can watch the economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too intolerable to be borne.  Burke himself, as his own speeches show, knew little or nothing of the pain involved in the agrarian changes of his age.  The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the people from power but their participation in it.  The popular sense of right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of statesmen.  It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run, neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.

This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground.  For the case against Burke’s aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal.  He did not inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors of a whole people.  Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent.  Once it is admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect institutional room must be found for its expression.  The State is morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped.  There is something curious here in Burke’s inability to suspect deformity in a system which gave his talents but partial