The instructed minority would, in the actual voting, count only for
their numbers, but as a moral power they would count for much more, in
virtue of their knowledge, and of the influence it would give them
over the rest. An arrangement better adapted to keep popular opinion
within reason and justice, and to guard it from the various
deteriorating influences which assail the weak side of democracy,
could scarcely by human ingenuity be devised. A democratic people
would in this way be provided with what in any other way it would
almost certainly miss-leaders of a higher grade of intellect and
character than itself. Modern democracy would have its occasional
Pericles, and its habitual group of superior and guiding minds.
With all this array of reasons, of the most fundamental character,
on the affirmative side of the question, what is there on the
negative? Nothing that will sustain examination, when people can
once be induced to bestow any real examination upon a new thing. Those
indeed, if any such there be, who, under pretence of equal justice,
aim only at substituting the class ascendancy of the poor for that
of the rich, will of course be unfavourable to a scheme which places
both on a level. But I do not believe that any such wish exists at
present among the working classes of this country, though I would
not answer for the effect which opportunity and demagogic artifices
may hereafter have in exciting it.
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