of an improvement in our politics, and, in the end,
in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligent
grappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is
almost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, not
in proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible,
but in proportion a she excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases,
and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences against
them. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins;
the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright at
a new one and electing some mountebank to lay it. For a hundred years
past the people of the United States, the most terrible existing
democratic state, have scarcely had apolitical campaign that was not
based upon some preposterous fear--first of slavery and then of the
manumitted slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of
the old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they
are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily
into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to
snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that would
cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off mobocracy and
safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this sniffing. What
we need--and in the end it must come--is a sniff so powerful that it
will call a halt upon the navigation of the ship from the forecastle,
and put a competent staff on the bridge, and lay a course that is
describable in intelligible terms.

The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democracies
before the extension of the suffrage were, usually chosen, not for
their competence but for their mere talent for idiocy; they reflected
accurately thymol weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental
and feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what happened in a salient
case. Every four years the male voters of the United States chose from
among themselves one who was put forward as the man most fit, of all
resident men, to be the first citizen of the commonwealth. He was
chosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were thoroughly
canvassed; very large powers and dignities were put into his hands.
Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman? We
found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man
of n