counsellors, settle the programme of their party--the "platform," as
the Americans call it, on which they and those associated with them
are to take their stand for the political campaign. It is by that
programme, by a comparison of the programmes of different statesmen,
that the world forms its judgment. The common ordinary mind is quite
unfit to fix for itself what political question it shall attend to;
it is as much as it can do to judge decently of the questions which
drift down to it, and are brought before it; it almost never settles
its topics; it can only decide upon the issues of those topics. And
in settling what these questions shall be, statesmen have now
especially a great responsibility if they raise questions which will
excite the lower orders of mankind; if they raise questions on which
those orders are likely to be wrong; if they raise questions on
which the interest of those orders is not identical with, or is
antagonistic to, the whole interest of the State, they will have
done the greatest harm they can do. The future of this country
depends on the happy working of a delicate experiment, and they will
have done all they could to vitiate that experiment. Just when it is
desirable that ignorant men, new to politics, should have good
issues, and only good issues, put before them, these statesmen will
have suggested bad issues. They will have suggested topics which
will bind the poor as a class together; topics which will excite
them against the rich; topics the discussion of which in the only
form in which that discussion reaches their ear will be to make them
think that some new law can make them comfortable--that it is the
present law which makes them uncomfortable--that Government has at
its disposal an inexhaustible fund out of which it can give to those
who now want without also creating elsewhere other and greater
wants. If the first work of the poor voters is to try to create a
"poor man's paradise," as poor men are apt to fancy that Paradise,