it is worth while to state the main items in the charge.

1. Whatever may be truly said about the good sense of a democracy during
a great crisis, at ordinary times it does not bring the best men to the
top. Professor Hearnshaw, in his admirable 'Democracy at the
Crossroads,' collects a number of weighty opinions confirming this
judgment. Carlyle, who proclaimed the merits of silence in some thirty
volumes, blames democracy for ignoring the 'noble, silent men' who could
serve it best, and placing power in the hands of windbags. Ruskin,
Matthew Arnold, Sir James Stephen, Sir Henry Maine, and Lecky, all agree
that 'the people have for the most part neither the will nor the power
to find out the best men to lead them.' In France the denunciations of
democratic politicians are so general that it would be tedious to
enumerate the writers who have uttered them. One example will suffice;
the words are the words of Anatole Beaulieu in 1885:

The wider the circle from which politicians and
state-functionaries are recruited, the lower seems their
intellectual level to have sunk. This deterioration in the
personnel of government has been yet more striking from the
moral point of view. Politics have tended to become more
corrupt, more debased, and to soil the hands of those who
take part in them and the men who get their living by them.
Political battles have become too bitter and too vulgar not
to have inspired aversion in the noblest and most upright
natures by their violence and their intrigues. The élite of
the nation in more than one country are showing a tendency
to have nothing to do with them. Politics is an industry in
which a man, to prosper, requires less intelligence and
knowledge than boldness and capacity for intrigue. It has