And yet if there were no evidence at all to support our faith in human goodness, our faith, however vigorous at first, would soon decline, and hope and courage might utterly desert us. If men on nearer acquaintance turned out to be, as some pessimists have represented them to be, hard egotists, ingrates, slanderers, backbiters, envious, incapable of generous admirations, sodden in sensuality, knaves devoid of scruple; if experience indeed bore out this sweeping impeachment, if especially the so-called masses of mankind were hopelessly delivered over to the sway of brutal instincts, of superstition and folly; the faith of which I speak might justly be termed mere fatuousness, and the rule of acting on the assumption that men are better than they appear would turn out a blind delusion. But the striking fact is, that as soon as we act on the principle of looking for the latent good in others, we are rewarded by finding far more than we had any reason to expect. Take as an instance the masses of the poor and ignorant, upon whom we are so apt to pass sweeping judgments, as Carlyle did when he said that the population of England was forty millions-- mostly fools. The experience of those who have had to do with popular education does not corroborate this rash condemnation. There is hardly a child in our public schools that is not found to possess mental power of some sort, if only we possess the right method of calling it out. The new education is new and significant just because it has succeeded in devising methods for gaining access to the latent mental power, and thus reaching what had been supposed to be non-existent. Every so-called educational campaign in the field of politics brings out the same truth. The capacity for hard thinking and sound judgment which resides in the working class is surprising to us, only because in our preposterous pride we had supposed them to be baked of different clay than we are. In the matter of artistic endowment, too, what wonderful discoveries do we constantly make among poor children, even among children that come from the lowest dregs of society! What fine fancy, what prompt response to the appeal of the beautiful, in spite of all the debasing inheritance!