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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



more ignorant brethren" — as if free trade, re- 

 ligious equality, abolition of slavery, the factory 

 laws, the trades-union legislation, and all the rest, 

 had been forced on the retrograde masses by the 

 far-sighted generosity of the country gentlemen. 



One is obliged to say forced on the retro- 

 grade masses, because if Lord Arthur admits (as 

 Mr. Grant Duff will have it he must do) that the 

 masses are " teachable," that they give the re- 

 formers their real " steam power," what is there 

 left of his argument ? The whole debate arose 

 out of a proposal to extend the franchise ; and 

 this was opposed on the express ground that the 

 masses are taught evil more easily than good, 

 and that the steam-power they supplied would be 

 destructive rather than useful. In that case they 

 are not " teachable " in any good sense, and will 

 blow up the engine instead of drive it ; and then 

 Lord Arthur is in direct conflict with Mr. Hut- 

 ton as well as Mr. Grant Duff. He says that 

 when the masses are ever right, it is due to the 

 education they receive. But pi - ecisely the same 

 education is open to the cultivated class or any 

 other class. And when he tells us that the ap- 

 peal to the justice of the masses does not always 

 succeed, I do not know that the appeal to the 

 justice of any class is always successful. 



Nor do I see that much is to be made of the 

 Tichborne delusion. It is not a political matter. 

 It was not taken up by the political classes. It 

 has been vigorously opposed by almost all the 

 working-class leaders ; and it was promoted by 

 peers and members of Parliament. All classes 

 are subject to delusions. Spiritualism and other 

 impostures were once in favor with the cultivated 

 classes. At least it was not working-men who 

 paid their guineas to " inquire " of some sleek 

 American swindler, or who thought that the levi- 

 tation of a fat woman might prove the immortal- 

 ity of the soul. It was peers, professors, men of 

 letters, and rising statesmen. 



There is one point on which the first paper 

 refers to me in such a way as might unintention- 

 ally convey a misconception. So far from advo- 

 cating direct government by the people at large, 

 I have uniformly opposed it by every means I 

 could command. I have done far more ; for I 

 have disputed every form of the democratic the- 

 ory, and have published a volume of which that, 

 as I supposed, was the principal feature. So far 

 as the general direction of the Commune is con- 

 cerned, I have exposed its mismanagement and 

 anarchy in words even stronger than Rossel's. 

 In almost every page of the volume referred to I 

 have contended that the direct government by 



the masses is one of the greatest of evils, that 

 the multiplication of ignorance cannot give wis- 

 dom, that all government requires extraordinary 

 special qualities, and that Rousseau's notion 01 

 the instinctive wisdom of the people is danger- 

 ous nonsense. 



I have urged this in a lecture given to the 

 trades unionists of London immediately after 

 the last Reform Act. I repeat a few sentences 

 from that lecture : 



" If pure democracy mean the direct manage- 

 ment of public affairs by the people themselves, 1 

 confess myself no democrat. . . . If I thought 

 that the tendency of recent changes or of future 

 changes was to be to throw the conduct of govern- 

 ment into the hands of the masses, I should regard 

 it as a change for the worse. . . . I tell you plainly 

 that, in my opinion, if the people were to manage 

 their own concerns, they never would be worse man- 

 aged. ... In what way is collective wisdom to 

 result from the accumulation of individual igno- 

 rances ? " And so on, page after page (see " Or- 

 der and Progress," pp. 227-229, etc.). In 1867 I 

 wrote : " Evil is the day for the state when any 

 class has unlimited power, or when the untrained 

 mass usurp the direct functions of government " 

 (Fortnightly Review, March, 1867 ; " Order and 

 Progress," p. 152). 



With regard to the dreadful blundering of the 

 Commune, I have published a condemnation of it 

 even stronger than Rossel's. In January, 1873, 

 I wrote as follows (Fortnightly Review, No. lxxiii., 

 p. 13) respecting the insurrection of Paris of 1871 : 



" Where the mania for democracy did not in- 

 terfere, its services were conducted with complete 

 success. The management of the finances, of the 

 post-office, of the commissariat, and so forth, was 

 marked with singular skill ; and there was enough 

 ability for other services if it had only received a 

 chance. The city did not lack capacity in various 

 forms, and it possessed one or two men who, if 

 fairly trusted with power, were quite competent 

 to direct the movement in a political as well as in 

 a military sense. ... It fell not from want of men 

 or arms, skill, courage, or resolution; it fell from 

 the utter incoherence which the mania for democ- 

 racy had thrown over every military act of its de- 

 fenders. No one who has not personally studied 

 it can conceive the grotesque confusion into which 

 every department of defense, every regiment, every 

 company, was continually being thrown by the in- 

 sane passion for doing everything by votes. . . . 

 A military contest was as hopeless as it would be 

 on the part of the inmates of a madhouse. . . . 

 They remain a monument forever of the ruin which 

 the democratic machinery pushed to the extreme 

 is able to inflict. It was the suicide of the demo- 

 cratic principle which ottered itself up to extinction 



