If I may speak of my own experience, I have found audiences made up of the
"common people" quicker to take a point, quicker to understand an
argument, quicker to discern a tendency and to comprehend a principle,
than many a college class that I have lectured to,--not because the
college class lacked the intelligence, but because college boys are not in
contact with the realities of life, while "common" citizens are in contact
with the actual life of day by day; you do not have to explain to them
what touches them to the quick.

There is one illustration of the value of the constant renewal of society
from the bottom that has always interested me profoundly. The only reason
why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the
aristocratic system which then prevailed was that so many of the men who
were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the church,--from
that great religious body which was then the only church, that body which
we now distinguish from other religious bodies as the Roman Catholic
Church. The Roman Catholic Church was then, as it is now, a great
democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a
priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of
Christendom; and every chancellery in Europe, every court in Europe, was
ruled by these learned, trained and accomplished men,--the priesthood of
that great and dominant body. What kept government alive in the Middle
Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and
file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the
priesthood. That, it seems to me, is one of the most interesting and
convincing illustrations that could possibly be adduced of the thing that
I am talking about.

The only way that government is kept pure is by keeping these channels