 the aristocracy, no doubt. Men write many fine and plausible
arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man in a
State has a vote, brutal laws are impossible. Arthur's people were of course
poor material for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy;
and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short work of that
law which the king had just been administering if it had been submitted to their
full and free vote. There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's
mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning - the sense and meaning
implied when it is used: that is the phrase which refers to this or that or the
other nation as possibly being capable of self-government; and the implied sense
of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, some time or other, which
wasn't capable of it - wasn't as able to govern itself as some self-appointed
specialists were or would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in
all ages, have sprung, in affluent multitude, from the mass of the nation, and
from the mass of the nation only - not from its privileged classes; and so, no
matter what the nation's intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk
of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it
never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern
itself. Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best
governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best
condition attainable by its people; and that the same is true of kindred
governments of lower grades, all the way down to the lowest.
    King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond my
calculations. I had not supposed he would move in the matter while I was away;
and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining the merits of officers; I
had only remarked that it would be wise to submit every candidate to a sharp and
searching examination; and privately I meant to put together a list of military
qualifications that nobody could answer to but my West Pointers. That ought to
have been attended to before I left; for the king was so taken with the idea of
a standing army that he couldn't wait, but must get about it at once, and get up
as good a scheme of examination as he could invent out of his own
