The new democracies which were to take the place of the old kingdoms had to have some sanction other than the suffrages of the people. Room had to be found in them somewhere for divine right. Those who established the modern system could never have sold self-government to the people as self government. There had to be some miracle about it, something supernatural, like that marvel which turned a mere man into a King and gave him that power of healing by touch which was exercised in Galilee, so that the laying on of his hands cured the king's evil. The miracle was accomplished somewhere in the process through which your opinion and my opinion and Therese's opinion became public opinion. Just as the anointment or the coronation turned a mere human being by a miracle into the chosen of God ruling by divine right, so by some transmutation which does not take place before the eyes, mere human opinion becomes itself the choice of God, ruling by divine right. If you doubt that the founders of modern democracy had to carry over into their systems the old illusions about divine right, read what Thomas Jefferson, more or less a free thinker, quoted by Mr. Walter Lippmann in his _Public Opinion_, has to say about the divine basis for popular government: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire which might otherwise escape from the earth." That "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" was public opinion. Nothing was lost of the sanctions of monarchic government when we changed to popular government. Since the days of Jefferson we have ceased to be an agricultural people and we can no longer derive the authority of our government from the Rousseauist notion that the farmer, being near to nature, thrusting his hands into the soil, was the choice of God and ruled by a kind of divine right. But "aucune religion n'est jamais morte, ni ne mourra jamais." Let us examine the doctrine of Jefferson. Public opinion ruled by divine right because, in this country and in his day, it was the opinion of farmers, who were "the chosen people of God whose breasts He has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." When we ceased to be a nation of farmers did we abandon the basis of our government in divine right? Not in the least. We broadened our ground to cover the added elements of the community and went along further with Rousseau than Jefferson had need to do; we said that the breasts of all men "He has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." The art of uncovering their substantial and genuine virtue, this quality in Therese which drew down upon her universal esteem for her good sense and her sound sentiments, is the art of arriving at public opinion.