is,
or ascertain what _it_ does really want: no easy matter, in most
cases. St. Edmundsbury, in that Candlemas season of the year
1182, is a busily fermenting place. The very clothmakers sit
meditative at their looms; asking, Who shall be Abbot? The
_sochemanni_ speak of it, driving their ox-teams afield; the old
women with their spindles: and none yet knows what the days will
bring forth.

The Prior, however, as our interim chief, must proceed to work;
get ready 'Twelve Monks,' and set off with them to his Majesty at
Waltham, there shall the election be made. An election, whether
managed directly by ballot-box on public hustings, or indirectly
by force of public opinion, or were it even by open alehouses,
landlords' coercion, popular club-law, or whatever electoral
methods, is always an interesting phenomenon. A mountain
tumbling in great travail, throwing up dustclouds and absurd
noises, is visibly there; uncertain yet what mouse or monster it
will give birth to.

Besides it is a most important social act; nay, at bottom, the
one important social act. Given the men a People choose, the
People itself, in its exact worth and worthlessness, is given. A
heroic people chooses heroes, and is happy; a valet or flunkey
people chooses sham-heroes, what are called quacks, thinking them
heroes, and is not happy. The grand summary of a man's spiritual
condition, what brings out all his herohood and insight, or all
his flunkeyhood and horn-eyed dimness, is this question put to
him, What man dost thou honour? Which is thy ideal of a man; or
nearest that? So too of a People: for a People too, every
People, _speaks_ its choice,--were it only by silently obeying,
and not revolting,--in the course of a century or so. Nor are
electoral methods, Reform Bills and such like, unimportant. A
People's electoral methods are, in the long-run, the express
image of its electoral _talent;_ tending and gravitating
perpetually, irresistibly, to a conformity with that: and are,
at all stages, very significant of the People. Judicious
readers, of these times, are not disinclined to see how
Monks elect their Abbot in the Twelfth Century: how the St.
Edmundsbury mountain manages its midwifery; and what mouse or
man the outcome is.

Chapter VIII

The Election

Accordingly our Prior assembles us in Chapter; and, we adjuring
him before God to do justly, nominates, not by our selection, yet
with our assent, Tw