Society and government should be recast till they conform to the theory,
or, let us say, to its exaggerations. Men can unmake what they have made.
There is no higher authority anywhere than the will of the majority, no
matter what the majority is in intellect and morals. Fifty-one ignorant
men have a natural right to legislate for the one hundred, as against
forty-nine intelligent men.

All men being equal, one man is as fit to legislate and execute as
another. A recently elected Congressman from Maine vehemently repudiated
in a public address, as a slander, the accusation that he was educated.
The theory was that, uneducated, he was the proper representative of the
average ignorance of his district, and that ignorance ought to be
represented in the legislature in kind. The ignorant know better what
they want than the educated know for them. "Their education [that of
college men] destroys natural perception and judgment; so that cultivated
people are one-sided, and their judgment is often inferior to that of the
working people." "Cultured people have made up their minds, and are hard
to move." "No lawyer should be elected to a place in any legislative
body."--[Opinions of working-men, reported in "The Nationals, their
Origin and their Aims," The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1878.]

Experience is of no account, neither is history, nor tradition, nor the
accumulated wisdom of ages. On all questions of political economy,
finance, morals, the ignorant man stands on a par with the best informed
as a legislator. We might cite any number of the results of these
illusions. A member of a recent House of Representatives declared that we
"can repair the losses of the war by the issue of a sufficient amount of
paper money." An intelligent mechanic of our acquaintance, a leader among
the Nationals, urging the theory of his party, that banks should be
destroyed, and that the government should issue to the people as much