great responsibility if they raise
questions which will excite the lower orders of mankind; if they raise
questions on which those orders are likely to be wrong; if they raise
questions on which the interest of those orders is not identical with,
or is antagonistic to, the whole interest of the State, they will have
done the greatest harm they can do. The future of this country depends
on the happy working of a delicate experiment, and they will have done
all they could to vitiate that experiment. Just when it is desirable
that ignorant men, new to politics, should have good issues, and only
good issues, put before them, these statesmen will have suggested bad
issues. They will have suggested topics which will bind the poor as a
class together; topics which will excite them against the rich; topics
the discussion of which in the only form in which that discussion
reaches their ear will be to make them think that some new law can make
them comfortable--that it is the present law which makes them
uncomfortable--that Government has at its disposal an inexhaustible
fund out of which it can give to those who now want without also
creating elsewhere other and greater wants. If the first work of the
poor voters is to try to create a "poor man's paradise," as poor men
are apt to fancy that Paradise, and as they are apt to think they can
create it, the great political trial now beginning will simply fail.
The wide gift of the elective franchise will be a great calamity to the
whole nation, and to those who gain it as great a calamity as to any.

I do not of course mean that statesmen can choose with absolute freedom
what topics they will deal with and what they will not. I am of course
aware that they choose under stringent conditions. In excited states of
the public mind they have scarcely a discretion at all; the tendency of
the public perturbation determines what shall and what shall not be
dealt with. But, upon the other hand, in quiet times statesmen have
great power; when there is no fire lighted, they can settle what fire
shall be lit. And as the new suffrage is happily to be tried in a quiet
time, the responsibility of our statesmen is great because their power
is great too.

And the mode in which the questions dealt with are discussed is almost
as important as the selection of these questions. It is for our
principal statesmen to lead the public, and not to let the public lead
them. No doubt when statesmen live by publ