He is also used to hearing from those successful people of whom all must speak with reverence--those who have demonstrated their superiority by laying their hands on everything they think worth the getting--that he is a mere "bookish theorist," and that they are much more able to show him the path to success than he to tell them anything to their advantage. Unless he can minister to their comfort or entertainment, or make smooth the royal road to learning, or at the very least help to maintain the patent office, he is told to be content with such treatment as they think good enough for him, and to keep himself to his work of teaching the lower classes to be lowly and reverent to all their betters. I have been much interested of late by two books on certain aspects of modern society. One treats of the dangers which threaten liberal culture and constitutional government, and all the best products of civilization, through the increasing prevalence of the belief that our institutions have been _devised_ by a few for their own selfish ends. So long as men differ in natural endowments the ignorant and the incapable and the unsuccessful must outnumber those whose industry and energy and foresight insure success. As those who have little have always outnumbered those who have much of the desired fruits of civilization, this writer says that one of the great questions of the day is whether, in last resort, the world shall be governed by its ignorance or by its intelligence. He is alarmed by the diffusion of belief that our established institutions do not represent the people, and that they are hostile to the best interest of mankind, and by the prevalence of the opinion that the true way to reform the world and to secure rational progress is to intrust the organization and administration of government and of education and of all matters of public interest and importance to the majority. The danger so clearly pointed out is real, beyond question; but I can not agree with the author that it is exclusively or distinctively modern. If some in our day interpret the belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God, as conviction that the loudest voice is most divine; if they assert that the man with pure and lofty ideals of education and duty and loyalty is a public enemy; we must remember that so wise a man as Aristotle taught, in the day of Athenian democracy, that the man who is virtuous in undue measure is a moral monster, as justly repugnant to his neighbors as one pre-eminent in vice.