Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/212

200 suffrage should be organized so as to prepare for this result. It should be the object of democracy to accord the right of deliberation to all the constitutional parties in proportion to their strength, and to lodge the right of making a decision in the progressive liberal, counterpoised by the conservative liberal element. It is, however, not easy to achieve a practical realization by mathematical processes of the ideal of proportional representation; and the separation of the power of deliberation and the power of decision is hardly practicable under existing constitutions, by which the same assembly deliberates and decides. Philosophers should, nevertheless, continue to point out the end to be sought.

Besides the opposition of the majority and the minority bringing about a conflict of the constitutional parties, universal suffrage embodies another antinomy no less disquieting—that of the number and the quality of the votes. The problem of reconciling numerical superiority with mental superiority is a squaring of the circle for democracy. As approximative solutions, it has been proposed to express intellectual superiority by a numerical valuation, and allow a plural vote to the educated man; and so to instruct and enlighten the whole mass that the number of the suffrages shall, on the whole, coincide with their quality. John Stuart Mill has insisted upon the former method, or "plural suffrage," but the system is not without its dangers. It opens the door to arbitrary selections. Particular classes, assuming too many votes for themselves, would finally become oligarchies, the more probably because the educated classes are also those in easier circumstances. The only case in which a plurality of suffrages would be, in our view, at all admissible, would be that in which the individual really represented several persons, as the father of a family, who might, in virtue of his wife and children, have two votes. The best means of resolving, in part if not entirely, the antinomy of right and capacity is, in our view, education; but its character should be rightly understood.

By the theory of universal suffrage, the mass of the citizens should desire the general good rather than their particular interests, and they should have a sufficient discernment of it to impress good direction on their policy. Education should, then, develop, as the two essential qualities of the citizen, moral disinterestedness and political sense. Our present system of education does not seem to respond, in any of its departments, to this double requirement. We owe much to the mathematical and physical sciences that are now held in so much honor, but we have no reason for believing that they arc competent to make citizens morally disinterested or politically capable. Purely scientific instruction has proved no better for this than that which is purely grammatical. Criminal statistics has not shown that any great advantage accrues even to those who simply know how to read, write, and reckon; but it has revealed more criminality among working-men