to all other children--and it also wants to secure the management of
affairs in the hands of the very best men, not the noisiest, not the
richest or most skilfully advertised, but the best. Can these two
things be reconciled? In the matter of honour and privilege, the New
Republican idea requires a separation of honour from notoriety; it
requires some visible and forcible expression of the essential
conception that there are things more honourable than getting either
votes or money; it requires a class and distinctions and privileges
embodying that idea--and also it wants to ensure that through the whole
range of life there shall not be one door locked against the effort of
the citizen to accomplish the best that is in him. Can these two things
be reconciled also?

I have the temerity to think that in both cases the conflicting
requirements can be reconciled far more completely than is commonly
supposed.

Let us take, first of all, the question of the reconciliation as it is
presented in the administration of public affairs. The days have come
when the most democratic-minded of men must begin to admit that the
appointment of all rulers and officials by polling the manhood, or most
of the manhood, of a country does not work--let us say perfectly--and
at no level of educational efficiency does it ever seem likely to work
in the way those who established it hoped. By thousands of the most
varied experiments the nineteenth century has proved this up to the
hilt. The fact that elections can only be worked as a choice between
two selected candidates, or groups of candidates, is the unforeseen and
unavoidable mechanical defect of all electoral methods with large
electorates. Education has nothing to do with that. The elections for
the English University members are manipulated just as much as the