THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. lgl 



raised. Honest men are defrauded, and rogues thrive. Debtors out- 

 wit their creditors ; bankrupts make purses by their failures, and re- 

 commence on larger scales ; and financial frauds that ruin their thou- 

 sands go unpunished." 



Thus far our impatient friend. And now see how untenable is his 

 position. He actually supposes that it is possible to get government 

 conducted on rational principles ! His tacit assumption is that, out of a 

 community morally imperfect, and intellectually imperfect, there may 

 in some way be had legislative regulation that is not proportionately 

 imperfect ! He is under a delusion. Not by any kind of government, 

 established after any method, can the thing be done. A good and 

 wise autocrat cannot be chosen or otherwise obtained by a people not 

 good and wise. Goodness and wisdom will not characterize the suc- 

 cessive families of an oligarchy, arising out of a bad and foolish peo- 

 ple, any more than they will characterize a line of kings. Nor will 

 any system of representation, limited or universal, direct or indirect, 

 do more than represent the average nature of citizens. To dissipate 

 his notion that truly-rational government can be provided for them- 

 selves by a people not truly rational, he needs but to read election- 

 speeches, and observe how votes are gained by clap-trap appeals to 

 senseless prejudices, and by fostering hopes of impossible benefits, 

 while votes are lost by. candid statements of stern truths and endeav- 

 ors to dissipate groundless expectations. Let him watch the process, 

 and he will see that when the fermenting mass of political passions 

 and beliefs is put into the electoral still, there distils over not the wis- 

 dom alone, but the folly also sometimes in the larger proportion. 

 Nay, if he watches closely he may suspect that not only is the corpor- 

 ate conscience lower than the average individual conscience, but the 

 corporate intelligence too. The minority of the wise in a constituency 

 is liable to be wholly submerged by the majority of the ignorant ; 

 often ignorance alone gets represented. In the representative assem- 

 bly, again, the many mediocrities practically rule the few superiorities: 

 the few superior are obliged to express those views only which the 

 rest can understand, and must keep to themselves their best and far- 

 thest-reaching thoughts, as thoughts that would have no weight. He 

 needs but to remember that abstract principles are pooh-poohed in the 

 House of Commons, to see at once that, while the unwisdom expresses 

 itself abundantly, what of highest wisdom there may be has to keep 

 silence. And, if he asks an illustration of the way in which the intelli- 

 gence of the body of members brings out a result lower than would 

 the intelligence of the average member, he may see one in those mud- 

 dlings of provisions and confusions of language in Acts of Parliament, 

 which have lately been calling forth protests from the judges. 



Thus the assumption that it is possible for a nation to get in the 

 shape of law something like embodied reason, when it is not itself 

 pervaded by a correlative reasonableness, is improbable a priori and 



