affect the general well-being and happiness than any ill or epidemic
which torments the physical being, even the mosquito malaria. Yet the
ills of the body politic, the complications which surround us on every
side,--for these the unfailing panacea is said to lie in universal
suffrage, that remedy which is immediately and of course laughed out of
court if suggested in case of the simpler ills of the flesh.

This, I submit, is demonstration. The true remedy is not to be sought in
that direction in the one case any more than the other.

There is a considerable element of truth, though possibly a not
inconsiderable one of exaggeration, in this statement from a paper I
recently chanced upon in the issue of the sober and classical _Edinburgh
Review_ for October last,--a paper entitled "Democracy and
Liberalism":--"History testifies unmistakably and unanimously to the
passion of democracies for incompetence. There is nothing democracy
dislikes and suspects so heartily as technical efficiency, particularly
when it is independent of the popular vote." But to-day, what is
politically proposed by our senatorial charlatans and the mountebanks of
the market-place? The Referendum, the constant and easy Recall, the
everlasting Initiative are dinned into our ears as the cure-alls of
every ill of the body politic. On the contrary, I submit that, while in
the absence of any better method as yet devised and accepted, the
process of reaching results by a count of the "majority told by the
head" of the citizens then present and voting has certain political
advantages, yet, for all this, as a final, scientific, political
process, it is unworthy of consideration. A passing expedient, it in no
degree reflects credit on twentieth-century intelligence.

And now I come to the crux of my discussion. Thus rejecting results