“Tut! Tut! The People!” exclaimed the Colonel contemptuously. “How much had they to say in the matter! The power of the People is one of those cant phrases, founded on a popular delusion, which have always existed. In theory, the power of the People is supreme; in reality, a myth. Take it during the past two thousand years. In all these centuries the great masses of the people have been poor, hardworking; their lives replete with stint and suffering. The Few have been rich, pampered, over-indulged and contented. Do you think the masses of the People were really satisfied with this order of things? Do you not believe that they, both as individuals and as a mass, would infinitely have preferred a more even distribution of the good things of this world? At any time and in any country, these masses, had they been organized and united in purpose, could in a day have changed the conditions and brought about this coveted distribution. But they never have been so organized and united, and the special class has ever governed the masses. True, there were your labor unions and your great strikes. Contractors and employers, great and small, were bullied and at times even beaten in the various struggles which ensued, but this really amounted to nothing. Whenever the People really began to grow dangerous and to threaten the existing order of things, the soldiers came forth--soldiers, mark you, drawn from the masses--and the trouble was promptly put an end to.” “But how about the popular vote?” inquired the Professor. “The popular vote,” echoed the Colonel with a sneer. “Another delusion! One set of professional politicians set up a platform against another platform devised by another set of professional politicians and both invite the popular vote. The good people would vote for the one, or for the other; but how much was the popular interest, or the popular will, really represented by either? It is true that from time to time reformers sprang up and sought to create new parties and new issues more closely representative of the popular weal and the popular will. How much headway did they make? Defeat by the trained political organizations, commanding ample means and patronage, was invariably the ultimate fate of any such efforts. The really able man preferred to accept the existing conditions and make the best of them. He realized the futility of such undertakings and understood that the rôle of Reformer and the rôle of Martyr were only too closely allied.” “But in a supreme question,” objected the Professor, “such as the overthrow of the Republic, I should have thought that a naturally free, assertive people, such as the people of the United States, would have made their power felt.”