Society and government should be recast till they conform to the theory, or, let us say, to its exaggerations.  Men can unmake what they have made.  There is no higher authority anywhere than the will of the majority, no matter what the majority is in intellect and morals.  Fifty-one ignorant men have a natural right to legislate for the one hundred, as against forty-nine intelligent men.

All men being equal, one man is as fit to legislate and execute as another.  A recently elected Congressman from Maine vehemently repudiated in a public address, as a slander, the accusation that he was educated.  The theory was that, uneducated, he was the proper representative of the average ignorance of his district, and that ignorance ought to be represented in the legislature in kind.  The ignorant know better what they want than the educated know for them.  “Their education [that of college men] destroys natural perception and judgment; so that cultivated people are one-sided, and their judgment is often inferior to that of the working people.”  “Cultured people have made up their minds, and are hard to move.”  “No lawyer should be elected to a place in any legislative body.”—­[Opinions of working-men, reported in “The Nationals, their Origin and their Aims,” The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1878.]

Experience is of no account, neither is history, nor tradition, nor the accumulated wisdom of ages.  On all questions of political economy, finance, morals, the ignorant man stands on a par with the best informed as a legislator.  We might cite any number of the results of these illusions.  A member of a recent House of Representatives declared that we “can repair the losses of the war by the issue of a sufficient amount of paper money.”  An intelligent mechanic of our acquaintance, a leader among the Nationals, urging the theory of his party, that banks should be destroyed, and that the government should issue to the people as much “paper money” as they need, denied the right of banks or of any individuals to charge interest on money.  Yet he would take rent for the house he owns.

Laws must be the direct expression of the will of the majority, and be altered solely on its will.  It would be well, therefore, to have a continuous election, so that, any day, the electors can change their representative for a new man.  “If my caprice be the source of law, then my enjoyment may be the source of the division of the nation’s resources.”—­[Stahl’s Rechtsphilosophie, quoted by Roscher.]

Property is the creator of inequality, and this factor in our artificial state can be eliminated only by absorption.  It is the duty of the government to provide for all the people, and the sovereign people will see to it that it does.  The election franchise is a natural right—­a man’s weapon to protect himself.  It may be asked, If it is just this, and not a sacred trust accorded to be exercised for the benefit of society, why may not a man sell it, if it is for his interest to do so?