squalify a man for purveying to the literary needs of a
taste less exacting--a proposition obviously absurd, for an exacting
taste is nothing but the intelligent discrimination of a judgment
instructed by comparison and observation. There is, in fact, no pursuit
or occupation, from that of a man who blows up a balloon to that of
the man who bores out the stove pipes, in which he that has talent and
education is not a better worker than he that has either, and he than
he that has neither. It is a universal human weakness to disparage
the knowledge that we do not ourselves possess, but it is only my own
beloved country that can justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum
of the impotents and incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge
whatsoever. It was an American Senator (Logan) who declared that he
had devoted a couple of weeks to the study of finance, and found the
accepted authorities all wrong. It was another American Senator (Morton)
who, confronted with certain ugly facts in the history of another
country, proposed "to brush away all facts, and argue the question on
considerations of plain common sense."

Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
the _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that
ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we
attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here
as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to
make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds
general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over
again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity
suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.

One of the disadvantages of our social system, which is the child of our
political, is the tyranny of public opinion, forbidding the utterance of
wholesome but unpalatable truth. In a republic we are so accustomed
to the rule of majorities that it seldom occurs to us to examine their
title to dominion; and as the ideas of might and right are, by our
innate sense of justice, linked together, we come to consider public
opinion infallible and almost sacred. Now, majorities rule, not because
they are right, but because they are able to rule. In event of collision
they would conquer, so it is expedient for minorities to submit
beforehand to save trouble. In fact, majorities, embracing, as they
do the m