This matter has two aspects, it presents itself as two questions; the question first of all of administration, and the question of honour and privilege. What is it that the New Republican idea really requires in these two matters? In the matter of administration it requires that every child growing up in a state should feel that he is part owner of his state, completely free in his membership, and equal in opportunity to all other children—and it also wants to secure the management of affairs in the hands of the very best men, not the noisiest, not the richest or most skilfully advertised, but the best. Can these two things be reconciled? In the matter of honour and privilege, the New Republican idea requires a separation of honour from notoriety; it requires some visible and forcible expression of the essential conception that there are things more honourable than getting either votes or money; it requires a class and distinctions and privileges embodying that idea—and also it wants to ensure that through the whole range of life there shall not be one door locked against the effort of the citizen to accomplish the best that is in him. Can these two things be reconciled also?
I have the temerity to think that in both cases the conflicting requirements can be reconciled far more completely than is commonly supposed.
Let us take, first of all, the question of the reconciliation as it is presented in the administration of public affairs. The days have come when the most democratic-minded of men must begin to admit that the appointment of all rulers and officials by polling the manhood, or most of the manhood, of a country does not work—let us say perfectly—and at no level of educational efficiency does it ever seem likely to work in the way those who established it hoped. By thousands of the most varied