But is this so? or if there be some truth in
the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and
reconciled with it? And, to begin with, is education, in the special
sense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffrage
makes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be the
case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and
sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of
society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of
view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and
bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or
deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those
wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and
the facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally,
a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not
its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect
human life is their political significance. On the broad scale, who is a
better judge of their own material condition and the modifications of it
from time to time, of what they receive and what they need from
political agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by what
is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the masses?
Experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universally
diffused.
Pages:
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222