Do we give him a
master of the history of the other nations to guide the nation's
dealings with them? Do we give him a master of war to educate admirals
and generals? Do we give him a master of the sciences to direct the
pursuit of knowledge, and a master of character-building to supervise
the bringing up of boys and girls to be types of a noble life? It would
serve the nation's turn to have such men. They are among us, and to find
them we should only have to look for them. It would be no harder than to
pick apples off a tree. But we never dream of looking for them. We have
a wonderful plan of choosing our leaders, the plan which we call an
election. Five hundred men assemble in a hall and listen to a speech
from a partisan, while five hundred others in a hall in the next street
are cheering a second partisan who declaims against the first. There is
no test of either speaker, except that he must be rich enough to pay
the expenses of an "election." The voters do not even listen to both
partisans in order to judge between them. Thus we choose our members of
Parliament. Our Government is a committee of some twenty of them. Its
first business is to keep its authority against the other party, of
which in turn the chief function is to make out that everything the
Government does is wrong.
Pages:
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111