ter; but, to this end, it is essential that those whom the ballot is to educate should be segregated and surrounded by healthy influences. When extensive districts and, notably, large portions of populous cities are filled by masses of imported ignorance and hereditary ineptitude, the whole ferments together till the evil grows insufferable. The ballot then educates only to mischief. If the voter has a conscience, he votes it away. His teacher is a demagogue who plays on his prejudices or his greed, and out of a bad citizen makes him a worse. Witness the municipal corruptions of New York, and the monstrosities of negro rule in South Carolina.

price of liberty; but it has It demands moderation.

It

It is said that vigilance is the another condition no less essential. must stand on the firm ground, avoid rash theorizing and sweeping generalization, and follow the laws of development that reason and experience point out. It must build its future on its past. When it rushes deliriously after dazzling abstractions, it is rushing toward its ruin. In short, it must be practical, not in the vile sense in which that word is used by political sharpers, but in the sense in which it is used by thoughtful and high-minded men.

There is an illusion, or a superstition, among us respecting the ballot. The means are confounded with the end. Good government is the end, and the ballot is worthless except so far as it helps to reach this end. Any reasonable man would willingly renounce his privilege of dropping a piece of paper into a box, provided that good government were assured to him and his descendants.

The champions of indiscriminate suffrage such of them, that is, as deign to give reasons for their faith-point in triumph to the prosperity which the country has enjoyed till within the last few years, and proclaim it a result of the unlimited power of the masses. This prosperity, however, had been founded and half built up before the muddy tide of ignorance rolled in upon us. It rests on the institutions and habits bequeathed to us by our fathers; and, if until lately the superstructure has continued to rise, it is in spite of a debased suffrage, and not in consequence of it. With still more confidence, and more apparent reason, we are told to look at the great popular uprising of the civil war. Here, indeed, democracy revealed itself in its grandest aspect.

The bayonets did They did what was

The degrading elements had not then reached the volume and force that they have reached to-day. The issue was definite and distinct. The Union was to be saved, and popular government vindicated. There were no doubts and no complications. Victory meant national integrity, and defeat meant national disintegration. Above all, the cause had its visible emblem-the national flag; and thousands and hundreds of thousands of eyes were turned upon it in ardent and loving devotion. We heard a great deal at that time about "thinking bayonets." not think, nor did those who carried them. more to the purpose-they felt. The emergency did not call for thought, but for faith and courage, and both were there in abundance. The political reptiles hid away, or pretended to change their nature, and for a time the malarious air was purged as by a thunder-storm. Peace brought a change. Questions intricate and difficult, demanding brains more than hearts, and discretion more than valor, took the place of the simple alternative, to be or not to be. The lion had had his turn, and now the fox, the jackal, and the wolf, took theirs. Every sly political trickster, whom the storm had awed into obscurity, now found his opportunity. The reptiles crawled out again, multiplied, and infested caucuses, conventions, and Congress. But the people were the saddest spectacle; the same people that had shown itself so heroic in the hour of military trial were now perplexed, bewildered, tossed between sense and folly, right and wrong, taking advice of mountebanks, and swallowing their filthy nostrums. The head of Demos was as giddy as his heart had been strong.

But why descant on evils past cure? Indiscriminate suffrage is an accomplished fact, and cannot be undone. Then why not accept it, look on the bright side, and hope that, "somehow or other," all will be well in the end? Because the recognition of an evil must go before its cure, and because there is too much already of the futile optimism that turns wishes into beliefs, and discourses in every tone of sickly commonplace about popular rights and universal brotherhood. Beneath it all lies an anxious sense of present and approaching evil. Still the case is not yet desperate. The country is full of recuperative force, latent just now, and kept so by the easy and apathetic good-nature which so strangely marks our people. This is not the quality by which

liberty is won and kept, and yet popular orators and preachers do their best to perpetuate it. Prominent among obstacles to reform is this weary twaddle of the optimists.

It is well to be reminded how far we have sundered ourselves from the only true foundation of republics-intelligence and worth. The evil is not to be cured by hiding it, turning away our eyes from it, or pretending that it is a blessing. If it is to be overcome, it must be first looked in the face. All nations. have in them some element of decay. Systems and peoples have perished, and not one was ever saved by shutting the eyes and murmuring that all was for the best. Faith without reason will only beguile us to destruction, and Liberty may elope while we are bragging most of her favors. We believe that our present evils are not past cure, and that, if the sound and rational part of the people can be made to feel that the public wounds need surgery, they will find means of applying it.

Under what shape shall we look for deliverance? It is easy to say where we need not look for it. To dream of a king would be ridiculous. We might set up an oligarchy, or rather an oligarchy might set up itself; but it would be one made up of the "boss," the "railroad king," and the bonanza Croesus-a tyranny detestable and degrading as that of the rankest democracy, with which it would be in league. The low politician is the accomplice of the low plutocrat, and the low voter is the ready tool of both. There are those who call on imperialism to help us; but, supposing this heroic cure to be possible, we should rue the day that brought us to it. Our emperor would be nothing but a demagogue on a throne, forced to conciliate the masses by giving efficacy to their worst desires.

There is no hope but in purging and strengthening the republic. The remedy must be slow, not rash and revolutionary. A debased and irresponsible suffrage is at the bottom of the evil, but the state is sick of diseases that do not directly and immediately spring from this source. Something is due to the detestable maxim that to the victor belong the spoils, and the fatuity that makes office the reward of party service, demands incessant rotation, dismisses the servant of the public as soon as he has learned to serve it well, prefers the interests of needy politicians to the interests of the whole people, sets a premium on trickery and dis

courages faithful industry. When the scraps and marrow-bones of office are flung down to be scrambled for, the dogs are sure to get the lion's share.

Never was there a more damning allegation against popular government than was made unwittingly by the popularity-loving Governor of a certain State, who, talking for reform in one breath and against it in the next, said in substance that good administration might be expected in monarchies, but that with us the conduct of public affairs is in the hands of the people, and that to complain of bad civil service is to arraign democracy itself. Let us emulate this worthy gentleman: sit in smiling and serene despair, banish reflection, and drift placidly down the tide, fishing as we go. It is thus that republics are brought to their. ruin. What the times need are convictions, and the courage to enforce them." The hope lies in an organized and determined effort to rouse the better half of the people to a sense that honest and trained capacity, in our public service, is essential to our wellbeing, and that the present odious and contemptible system is kept up in the interest of the few, and not of the whole. There is much, too, in the organization of legislative and municipal bodies which might be changed in the interest of honesty against knavery, and of ability against artifice, without involving any attack against "inalienable rights." Yet, so long as a debased suffrage retains its present power for mischief, the snake is scotched, not killed. When a majority of the people become convinced that no aggregate of folly can produce sense, and no aggregate of worthlessness can produce honesty, and when they return to the ancient faith that sense and honesty are essential to good government, then it will become possible-not, perhaps, peaceably to abolish a debased suffrage-but to counteract and so far neutralize it that it may serve as a safety-valve and cease to be a danger.

There are prophets of evil who see in the disorders that involve us the precursors of speedy ruin; but complete disruption and anarchy are, we may hope, still far off, thanks to an immense vitality and an inherited conservative strength. The immediate question is this: Is the nation in the way of keeping its lofty promise, realizing its sublime possibilities, advancing the best interests of humanity, and helping to ennoble and not vulgarize the world? Who dares answer that it is?

, and to admire a patrit se dents them. Exam-
is better than schooling; and, arenge humanity is encour-
d in the belief that there is mylly much above
fit will not rise above is om level. A low standard means
low achievement. In every one of the stata into which civilized
society must of necessity be divided there are men capable of a
higher place, and it is injustice to five whom Nature has so fa-
vored not to show them the heights to which they may aspire.
What they do see clearly enough we the factitious heights of
wealth and office; what they need also to see are those of human
mature in its loftiest growth.

A nation is judged by its best products. To stand in the
fmost rank, it must give to the hun race great types of
manhood, and add new thought to the treasury of the world. No
extent of territory, no growth of population, no material prosper-
ino average of intelligence, will ever be accepted as substi-

They may excite fear, wonder, or even a kind of admirafin, but they will never win or deserve the highest place.

Our civilimation is weak in the head, though the body is ro-
bust and full of life. With all the practical vigor and diffused
ill of the American people, our cultivated class is infe-

to that of the leading countries of Europe; for not only does
the Demos think he can do without it, but he is totally
mail to distinguish the sham education from the real one. The
fe of his heart is that deplorable political failure, the "self-
made man whom he delights to honor, and to whom he con-
is the most perplexed and delicate interests, in full faith that,
The travel them, then nobody else can. He thinks that
It needs be a person of peculiar merit and unequaled vigor.

is of what exactitates him is somewhat singular. He com-
self-made the man who picks up a half education at
but if, no matter with what exertion, he makes use of
and efective methods of training and instructing him-
in the view of Demos, he is self-made no longer.
Theral education is at a prodigious disadvantage
te it is only the beginning of a process
though life; of a growth that will bear its
de files of time. Of what avail to nurse and
ift after years are to be spent in a soil