“The People” is a phrase of physiology, not of politics. It is an abstruse name for a multitude; it ignores temperament and will. Stripped of its high sound, its “Sovereignty” means government by miscellany, the censorship of the census. Its political bearings are as purely arithmetical as are the corresponding ethical bearings of the Utilitarian creed; for they both disregard the many-sided nature of man. Although derived from the speculations of some late seventeenth-century republicans in England, the French application of the theory--Burke’s “Wisdom told by the Head”--was entirely new. It was not republicanism, the government by qualified members of ordered classes: it was a despotism by the crowd as crowd. Such a “Democracy” has never been the permanent scheme of government in any nation, although “Liberal opinion” has relied too often on its simplicity. “One man, one vote,” quantity instead of quality is in truth no principle at all; and this attempt to confuse the Book of Wisdom with the Book of Numbers is a feat reserved for modern periods alone. All earlier systems of democracy were more or less discriminate, for no indiscriminate state can cohere, and both freedom and order are based on discrimination. The Attic Democracy demanded a degraded class of unleisured, unemancipated slaves. The American Republic, which has freed serfs and abolished leisure, possesses a peculiar stability, which will outwear its occasional corruption because it exists through a landed democracy--one impossible in overcrowded Europe--as we shall find Disraeli emphasising in my American chapter. In a word, the logical outcome of the “Sovereignty of the People” is the tyranny of plebiscite. But a “plebiscite” dispenses with the very principle of representation, for where all decide equally, why should any be represented? Political power exercisable by _all_ can only arise when all are sufficiently qualified. But it is always the _some_, never the _all_, who are competent. Even in their proper sphere of merely personal choice, how false and fatal most plebiscites have proved!--“Not this man, but Barabbas.” _Vox populi_ is only _vox Dei_ through the gradual institutions that nations create; not through the wayward moods and momentary clamours of “the people.” The whole problem is how at once to range and to raise public opinion--the popular conscience; how to preserve moral, without retarding material, progress; how to inspire “progress” itself with the conviction that it consists in following the highest leadership; how, again, to ensure such leadership by the constant association of duty with privilege, and responsibility with power; how to recruit it by every means that the spread of enlightenment can furnish. “On man alone the fate of man is placed,” sang Disraeli, in the _Revolutionary Epick_; and of “opinion”-- “Physical strength and moral were united, And I, the pledge of their true love was born.”