Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/216

204 them, and while one continues a laborer, the other may become a great light, a Laplace or a Faraday. Your equal instruction has freed the latent forces of superiority. The same is the case in the political field. Joined to a universal instruction, the effect of the equal right of suffrage will be, not to suppress the directive power of the whole, the superior authority, but to constitute it by an intelligent selection. While universal suffrage still leaves the door open for natural superiorities, these in their turn finally bring about a new equality with the level higher than before. This is the principal difference between the struggle for existence in the animal kingdom and competition in the human kingdom. The animal, which, by selection, has acquired a better dentary system, transmits its superiority to its own line, but not to other animals. It produces a kind of aristocracy. With mankind, however, a discovery made by one people is finally spread to other peoples. The error of demagogism and socialism consists in their not asking whether the present inequality, which raises certain superior individuals or classes above the crowd, when it is natural and not factitious, may not be the germ of an equal advancement in the future for all. True democracy aims at universal elevation, not universal depression, and to make power accessible to all superiorities, whoever may be the man or whatever class may have produced him. If our people receive such a superior instruction as we have proposed, we shall have Chambers composed of men versed in political economy, politics, history, and jurisprudence. We can not in this matter rely upon the spontaneity of individuals, any more than upon primary instruction. At present, the more easy classes are almost as deficient in true social and political knowledge as the masses. We complain of the incontestable mediocrity of our governments. It comes much more from the governors than from the governed. It is due to the defective education of those who have the duty of directing, to our poverty in superior men. But they say democracy is jealous. Envy is a vice of aristocracy as well as of democracy. Has democracy in France ever held out long against genius and talents when they have manifested themselves? Did it repel M. Thiers while he was living? Where to-day are any great political talents to which universal suffrage has refused its commission? Knowledge, justice, and truth, exercise a natural and inevitable ascendency over all peoples who are not composed of barbarians. Individuals and the masses only ask to obey whenever a natural authority exists and manifests itself. Wherever superior forces do not govern, it is because they do not exist; where ignoramuses make the law, it is most frequently because no men versed in politics are at hand. Where vice is the master, it is because the civic virtues described by Montesquieu are rare or have disappeared. If universal suffrage supposes men at the base capable of choosing, it still more supposes men at the top fit to be chosen.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.