v SHOOTING NIAGARA Ipl

for the suffrage. An electorate of respectable shopkeepers and
city merchants was poised uneasily on the horns of a dilemma.
It had either to refuse to honour its Benthamite ideals or subject
its security and property to the vote of a, rude multitude of
unlettered toughs—of garrotters, wife-beaters, drunkards, foot-
pads, and ragged, lousy beggars.

Disraeli shared neither the practical fears nor the idealist
hopes of the bourgeois. He had no illusions about the con-
sequences of further extension of the franchise on a numerical
basis. He was not less willing to trust his countrymen—he was
more so—but he knew that in any state which based power
purely on numbers the result must be "the tyranny of one class
and that in the least enlightened."1 For against an unchanging
popular majority, the individual has no appeal. However mildly
exercised, such uniform despotism was bound to destroy
diversity of type and character.

ttl have no apprehension myself that, if you had man*
hood suffrage to-morrow, the honest, brave, and good-
natured people of England would resort to pillage, incendi-
arism, and massacre. Who expects that? But though I
would do as much justice to the qualities of our countrymen
as any gentleman in this House, though I may not indulge in
high-flown and far-fetched expressions with respect to them
like those we have listened to—for the people may have
their parasites as well as monarchs and aristocrats—yet I
have no doubt that, whatever may be their high qualities,
our countrymen are subject to the same political laws that
afifect the condition of all other communities and nations.
If you establish a democracy, you must in due season reap
the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have
great impatience of the public burdens combined in due
season with great increase of the public expenditure. You
will in due season reap the fruits of such united influence.
You will in due season have wars entered into from passion,
and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to
peace ignominously sought and ignominously obtained,
which will diminish your authority aad perhaps endanger
your independence. You will, in due season, with a demo-
cracy find that your property is less valuable and that your

1 Monyp&my and Buckle* //, 146.