So far nothing could be better. But it is a narrow form of democratic sentiment which they hold, for they are only half-educated, or rather (for who is completely educated or even well educated?), because they have only received a rudimentary education. Rudimentary education may perhaps make us capable of having one idea, it certainly renders us incapable of having two. The man of rudimentary education is always the man of one single idea and of one fixed idea. He has few doubts. Now the wise man doubts often, the ignorant man seldom, the fool never. The man of one idea is more or less impermeable to any process of reasoning that is foreign to this idea. An Indian author has said: "You can convince the wise; you can convince, with more difficulty, the ignorant; the half-educated, never." Now no one ever convinces the elementary schoolmaster. He is confirmed in his convictions by defending, and still more by discussing them. He is the slave of his opinion. He does not possess it always quite clearly, but it possesses him. He loves it with all his soul, as a priest his religion, because it is the truth, because it is beautiful, because it has been persecuted, and because it means the salvation of the world. He would enjoy its triumph but he yearns still more to be a martyr in its cause. He is a convinced democrat and a sentimental democrat. His conviction forms a solid basis for his sentiment, and his sentiment kindles to a white heat his conviction. His conviction makes him turn a deaf ear to every objection, his sentiment inspires him with hatred for his adversary. For him the man who is not a democrat is wrong, and further, to him an object of hatred. In his eyes the distance between himself and the aristocrat is as the distance between truth and error, nay between good and evil, between honour and dishonour. The schoolmaster is the fanatic vassal of democracy. Then, as he is a man of one idea, he is single-minded, narrowly logical, and logical to the utmost extreme. He goes straight forward where his argument leads. An idea which admits neither qualification nor question can go far in a very short space of time. And the schoolmaster drives all his democratic principles to their natural and logical conclusion. He develops these principles and all that they imply by the sheer force of what he calls his "reasoning reason," and it appears to him to be not only natural but salutary to seek their realisation. Everything of which the principle is good is good itself, and no one but Montesquieu could ever believe that an institution could be ruined by the excess of the principle in which its merit consists. The schoolmaster, therefore, deduces their logical consequences from the two great democratic principles, the sovereignty of the nation, and equality; he deduces them rigorously, and arrives at the following conclusions.