Page:Meda - a tale of the future.djvu/127

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A TALE OF THE FUTURE.
123

"All people, both men and women, got the right conferred on them to vote for members for parliament without any educational or other qualification save their manhood. The consequence was that the more numerous or uneducated classes had all the power in their hands, while they were not intellectually endowed with sufficient judgment to enable them to select even the more educated of their own classes as their representatives, although there must have been plenty of good, honest, intelligent men amongst them that would have made much better representatives than the noisy, self-asserting, ignorant men that forced themselves on them.

"Politics became a trade; a race of mountebanks that could rant and influence the people by bombast were returned as representatives of the country, while the better educated and intellectually strong minority were thrown out of all share of the responsible government of their country. As a natural, nay, an inevitable, consequence of such a state of matters, the