jects.

The greater or the lesser possibility of subsisting without labor is
therefore the necessary boundary of intellectual improvement. This
boundary is more remote in some countries and more restricted in others;
but it must exist somewhere as long as the people is constrained to work
in order to procure the means of physical subsistence, that is to say,
as long as it retains its popular character. It is therefore quite as
difficult to imagine a State in which all the citizens should be very
well informed as a State in which they should all be wealthy; these two
difficulties may be looked upon as correlative. It may very readily be
admitted that the mass of the citizens are sincerely disposed to promote
the welfare of their country; nay more, it may even be allowed that the
lower classes are less apt to be swayed by considerations of personal
interest than the higher orders: but it is always more or less
impossible for them to discern the best means of attaining the end which
they desire with sincerity. Long and patient observation, joined to a
multitude of different notions, is required to form a just estimate of
the character of a single individual; and can it be supposed that the
vulgar have the power of succeeding in an inquiry which misleads the
penetration of genius itself? The people has neither the time nor the
means which are essential to the prosecution of an investigation of this
kind: its conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial inspection
of the more prominent features of a question. Hence it often assents
to the clamor of a mountebank who knows the secret of stimulating its
tastes, while its truest friends frequently fail in their exertions.

Moreover, the democracy is not only deficient in that soundness of
judgment which is necessary to select men really deserving of its
confidence, but it has neither the desire nor the inclination to find
them out. It cannot be denied that democratic institutions have a very
strong tendency to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not
so much because they afford to every one the means of rising to the
level of any of his fellow-citizens, as because those means perpetually
disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken
and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.
This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment
at which it thinks to hold it fast, and "flies," as Pascal says