transformed into capable citizens. Such a phrase gives us a painful
glimpse of the accurate knowledge of their countrymen that is
possessed by eminent men who write about them from the dim and distant
seclusion of college libraries and official bureaux. If Sir Henry
Maine could spare a few evenings from dispassionate meditations on
popular government in the abstract, to the inspection of the governing
people in the concrete, he would be the first to see that to dispatch
an audience of skilled artisans as an assembly of roughs is as
unscientific, to use the mildest word, as the habit in a certain
religious world of lumping all the unconverted races of the earth
in every clime and age in the summary phrase, the heathen. A great
meeting of artisans listening to Mr. Arthur Balfour or Sir Henry
Roscoe at Manchester, to Sir Lyon Playfair at Leeds (the modern
democrat, at any rate, does not think the Republic has no need of
chemists), or to anybody else in a great industrial centre anywhere
else, is no more an assemblage of roughs than Convocation or the
House of Lords. Decidedly, an enemy of the unverified assumptions of
democracy ought to be on his guard against the unverified assumptions
of pedantocracy.

As for the particular bit of sycophancy which educated men wickedly
dangle before roughs and clowns, we should like to be sure that the
proposition is correctly reported. If the educated man tells his
roughs (if that be the right name for the most skilful, industrious,
and effective handicraftsmen in the world) that they have as much
of the information necessary for shaping a sound judgment on the
political issues submitted to them, as an equal number of average
Masters of Arts and Doctors of Laws, then we should say that the
educated man, unless he has been very unlucky with his audience, is
perfectly right. He proves that his education has not confined itself