ploys the professions is not dismayed by this attitude
of the professional class; and so things tend to that equality of
charlatanry to which democracy instinctively tends. Democracy does not
respect efficiency, but it soon will have no opportunity to respect it;
for efficiency is being destroyed and before long will have disappeared
altogether. There will soon be no difference between the judge and the
suitor, between the layman and the priest, the sick man and the
physician. The contempt which is felt for efficiency destroys it little
by little, and efficiency, accepting the situation, outruns the contempt
that is felt for it. The end will be that we shall all be only too much
of one opinion.

CHAPTER XI.

ATTEMPTED REMEDIES.

We have sought very conscientiously, and democrats themselves have
sought very conscientiously, to find remedies for this constitutional
disease of democracy. We have preserved certain bodies, relatively
aristocratic, as refuges, we would fain believe, of efficiency. We have
preserved for instance a Senate, elected by universal suffrage, not
directly, but in the second degree. We have preserved also a Parliament
(a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies), a floating aristocracy which is
continually being renewed. This is, however, in a sense an aristocracy
inasmuch as it stands between us and a direct and immediate government
of the people by the people.

These remedies are by no means to be despised, but we recognise that
they are very feeble, for the reason that democracy always eludes them.
By the care it takes to exclude efficiency, it has made the Chamber of
Deputies (with some few exceptions) a body resembling itself with
absolute fidelity both in respect of the superficial character of its
knowledge and the violence of its prejudices; with the result in my
opinion that the crowd might just as well govern directly and, without
the intervention of representatives, by means of the plebiscite.

The same thing applies to the Senate, though perhaps in a more direct
fashion. The Senate is chosen by the delegates of universal suffrage.
These delegates, however, are not chosen by a general universal suffrage
where each department would choose four or five hundred delegates, but
by the town councillors of each commune or parish. In these communes,
especially in the rural communes, the municipal councillors who are by
far the most numerous and, with regard to elections, the most
influential,