yesterday would be the ignoramus of to-day, the honorable of one
generation the vicious of another. The peasant of our time is incomparably
superior to the statesman of ancient America, yet he is unfit to govern,
for there are others more fit.

That a body of men can be wiser than its wisest member seems to the modern
understanding so obvious and puerile an error that it is inconceivable
that any people, even the most primitive, could ever have entertained it;
yet we know that in America it was a fixed and steadfast political faith.
The people of that day did not, apparently, attempt to explain how the
additional wisdom was acquired by merely assembling in council, as in
their "legislatures"; they seem to have assumed that it was so, and to
have based their entire governmental system upon that assumption, with
never a suspicion of its fallacy. It is like assuming that a mountain
range is higher than its highest peak. In the words of Golpek, "The early
Americans believed that units of intelligence were addable quantities," or
as Soseby more wittily puts it, "They thought that in a combination of
idiocies they had the secret of sanity."

The Americans, as has been said, never learned that even among themselves
majorities ruled, not because they ought, but because they could--not
because they were wise, but because they were strong. The count of noses
determined, not the better policy, but the more powerful party. The weaker
submitted, as a rule, for it had to or risk a war in which it would be at
a disadvantage. Yet in all the early years of the republic they seem
honestly to have dignified their submission as "respect for the popular
verdict." They even quoted from the Latin language the sentiment that "the
voice of the people is the voice of God." And this hideous blasphemy was
as glib upon the lips of those who, without change of mind, were defeated
at the polls year after year as upon those of the victors.