ose
tastes and sympathies and station connect him with the highest class,
and to whom contact with the uneducated and unrefined brings with it a
sense of personal discomfort and often of disgust, should avow his
belief in the political rights of those socially inferior, should be
unwilling to deny them privileges which he claims for himself, is
something so appalling to many that their minds strive vainly to grasp
it. But this feeling was so thoroughly wrought into Cooper's (p. 083)
nature that he almost disliked those of his countrymen whom he found not
to share in it. "I confess," he wrote at the time when he was generally
denounced as an aristocrat, "that I now feel mortified and grieved when
I meet with an American gentleman who professes anything but liberal
opinions as respects the rights of his fellow-creatures." He went on to
explain that by liberal opinions he meant "the generous, manly
determination to let all enjoy equal political rights, and to bring
those to whom authority is necessarily confided under the control of the
community they serve." He despised the cant that the people were their
own worst enemies. So far from it, he believed in widening the
foundations of society by making representation as real as possible, and
thereby giving to every interest in the state its fair measure of power;
for no government, in his eyes, could ever be just or pure in which the
governors have interests distinct from those of the governed. These
opinions he put sometimes in an extreme form. "I have never yet been in
a country," he said, "in which what are called the lower orders have not
clearer and sounder views than their betters, of the great principles
which ought to predominate in the control of human affairs." At the same
time his belief in democracy was not in the least one of unmixed
admiration. He was far from looking upon it as a perfect form of
government. It was only the one that, taking all things into
consideration, was attended with fewer evils and greater advantages than
any other. It had faults and dangers peculiar to itself. His liberal
opinions, he took frequent care to say, had nothing in common with the
devices of demagogues who teach the doctrine, that the voice of (p. 084)
the people is the voice of God; that the aggregation of fallible parts,
acting, too, with diminished responsibilities, forms an infallible whole.

Along with this clear understanding of the advantages and disadvantages