affairs about us. Expertness in this might well atone for some of our
awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. The
best claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase
in which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what
I said: it should enable us to _know a good man when we see him_.

That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact
that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like
ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it is
this line more than any other. "The people in their wisdom"--this is
the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its
trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about
us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but
are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its
critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the
inferior. So it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be
world without end. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing
everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our
irremediable destiny; and the picture-papers of the European continent
are already drawing Uncle Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his
heraldic emblem. The privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with
all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human
quality, and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring
traditions. But when democracy is sovereign, its doubters say,
nobility will form a sort of invisible church, and sincerity and
refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and favor, will have to
vegetate on sufferance in private corners. They will have no general
influence. They will be harmless eccentricities.

Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of
democracy? Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly
rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on
the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not
to admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the noblest exercise of
human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down
fatalistically before the croaker's picture. The best of us are filled
with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error
till its institutions glow with justice and its custom