have gone on in his deadly work. We all equally well know that the man, even the politician or the statesman, who had suggested a solution of that problem by a count of noses would have been effaced with ridicule. Even the most simple minded would have rejected that method of reaching a result. Yet the ills of the body politic, too, are complicated. Indeed, far more intricate in their processes and more deceitful in their aspects, they more deeply affect the general well-being and happiness than any ill or epidemic which torments the physical being, even the mosquito malaria. Yet the ills of the body politic, the complications which surround us on every side,—for these the unfailing panacea is said to lie in universal suffrage, that remedy which is immediately and of course laughed out of court if suggested in case of the simpler ills of the flesh.
This, I submit, is demonstration. The true remedy is not to be sought in that direction in the one case any more than the other.
There is a considerable element of truth, though possibly a not inconsiderable one of exaggeration, in this statement from a paper I recently chanced upon in the issue of the sober and classical Edinburgh Review for October last,—a paper entitled "Democracy and Liberalism":—"History testifies unmistakably and unanimously to the passion of democracies for incompetence. There is nothing democracy dislikes and suspects so heartily as technical efficiency, particularly when it is independent
