The object of popular government is no more to find and elevate the hero, the man of special and exceptional endowment, into power, than the object of agriculture is to take the prizes at the agricultural fairs. It is one of the things to be hoped for and aspired to, but not one of the indispensables. The success of free government is attained when it has made the people independent of special leaders, and secured the free and full expression of the popular will and conscience. Any view of American politics, based upon the failure of the suffrage always, or even generally, to lift into power the ablest men, is partial and unscientific. We can stand, and have stood, any amount of mediocrity in our appointed rulers; and perhaps in the ordinary course of events mediocrity is the safest and best. We could no longer surrender ourselves to great leaders, if we wanted to. Indeed, there is no longer a call for great leaders; with the appearance of the people upon the scene, the hero must await his orders. How often in this country have the people checked and corrected the folly and wrong-headedness of their rulers! It is probably true, as Carlyle says, that "the smallest item of human Slavery is the oppression of man by his Mock-Superiors;" but shall we accept the other side of the proposition, that the grand problem is to find government by our Real Superiors? The grand problem is rather to be superior to all government, and to possess a nationality that finally rests upon principles quite beyond the fluctuations of ordinary politics. A people possessed of the gift of Empire, like the English stock, both in Europe and in America, are in our day beholden very little to their chosen rulers. Otherwise the English nation would have been extinct long ago. "Human virtue," Carlyle wrote in 1850, "if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun." This may well offset his more pessimistic statement, that "there are fools, cowards, knaves, and gluttonous traitors, true only to their own appetite, in immense majority in every rank of life; and there is nothing frightfuller than to see these voting and deciding." If we "went down to the roots of it," this statement is simply untrue. "Democracy," he says, "is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business, and gives, in the long run, a net result of _zero_." Because the law of gravitation is uncompromising, things are not, therefore, crushed in a wild rush to the centre of attraction. The very traits that make Carlyle so entertaining and effective as a historian and biographer, namely, his fierce, man-devouring eyes, make him impracticable in the sphere of practical politics. Let me quote a long and characteristic passage from Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets, one of dozens of others, illustrating his misconception of universal suffrage:--