nd often most
foolish. They were competent to decide an issue selected by the higher
classes, but they were incompetent to do more.

The grave question now is, How far will this peculiar old system
continue and how far will it be altered? I am afraid I must put aside
at once the idea that it will be altered entirely and altered for the
better. I cannot expect that the new class of voters will be at all
more able to form sound opinions on complex questions than the old
voters. There was indeed an idea--a very prevalent idea when the first
edition of this book was published--that there then was an
unrepresented class of skilled artisans who could form superior
opinions on national matters, and ought to have the means of expressing
them. We used to frame elaborate schemes to give them such means. But
the Reform Act of 1867 did not stop at skilled labour; it enfranchised
unskilled labour too. And no one will contend that the ordinary working
man who has no special skill, and who is only rated because he has a
house, can judge much of intellectual matters. The messenger in an
office is not more intelligent than the clerks, not better educated,
but worse; and yet the messenger is probably a very superior specimen
of the newly enfranchised classes. The average can only earn very
scanty wages by coarse labour. They have no time to improve themselves,
for they are labouring the whole day through; and their early education
was so small that in most cases it is dubious whether even if they had
much time, they could use it to good purpose. We have not enfranchised
a class less needing to be guided by their betters than the old class;
on the contrary, the new class need it more than the old. The real
question is, Will they submit to it, will they defer in the same way to
wealth and rank, and to the higher qualities of which these are the
rough symbols and the common accompaniments?

There is a peculiar difficulty in answering this question. Generally,
the debates upon the passing of an Act contain much valuable
instruction as to what may be expected of it. But the debates on the
Reform Act of 1867 hardly tell anything. They are taken up with
technicalities as to the ratepayers and the compound householder.
Nobody in the country knew what was being done. I happened at the time
to visit a purely agricultural and Conservative county, and I asked the
local Tories, "Do you understand this Reform Bill? Do you know that
your Conservative