hands of the wise few.
We hear the corruptions of the times attributed to universal suffrage.
Yet these corruptions certainly are not peculiar to the United States: It
is also said here, as it is in England, that our diffused and somewhat
superficial education is merely unfitting the mass of men, who must be
laborers, for any useful occupation.

This argument, reduced to plain terms, is simply this: that the mass of
mankind are unfit to decide properly their own political and social
condition; and that for the mass of mankind any but a very limited mental
development is to be deprecated. It would be enough to say of this, that
class government and popular ignorance have been tried for so many ages,
and always with disaster and failure in the end, that I should think
philanthropical historians would be tired of recommending them. But there
is more to be said.

I feel that as a resident on earth, part owner of it for a time,
unavoidably a member of society, I have a right to a voice in determining
what my condition and what my chance in life shall be. I may be ignorant,
I should be a very poor ruler of other people, but I am better capable of
deciding some things that touch me nearly than another is. By what logic
can I say that I should have a part in the conduct of this world and that
my neighbor should not? Who is to decide what degree of intelligence
shall fit a man for a share in the government? How are we to select the
few capable men that are to rule all the rest? As a matter of fact, men
have been rulers who had neither the average intelligence nor virtue of
the people they governed. And, as a matter of historical experience, a
class in power has always sought its own benefit rather than that of the
whole people. Lunacy, extraordinary stupidity, and crime aside, a man is
the best guardian of his own liberty and rights.

The English critics, who say we have taken the government from the
capable few and given it to the people, speak of universal suffrage as a
quack panacea of this "era of progress." But it is not the manufactured
panacea of any theorist or philosopher whatever. It is the natural result
of a diffused knowledge of human rights and of increasing intelligence.
It is nothing against it that Napoleon III. used a mockery of it to
govern France. It is not a device of the closet, but a method of
government, which has naturally suggested itself to men as they have
grown into a feeling of self-reliance and