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.