Excerpt from Jacob Shumate, Vol. 1 of 2: Or the People's March; A Voice From the Ranks But further, Democratic critics are keen to point out that mental power has too often been unfriendly to the early efforts of reformers on behalf of causes that all men admit now to be righteous. They ask, Did intellect lead the way in abolishing slavery, spreading education, mitigating the horrors of the early factory system, or the cruelty of the penal code? In the United States, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, who were beyond question the most intellectual statesmen of the Union, all three, as late as the middle of the last century, gave the best of their talents not only to defend slavery, but to maintain that odious feature of it, the claim by the Southern States to have their escaped slaves hunted down in the Free States and returned to them. All the time, thousands of plain, uneducated men were denouncing the thing as a national crime. We can scarcely wonder, then, that the Democracy of our times uses intellect as a servant, not as a master. It takes its help to justify and sound the praises of what the sovereign people themselves determine to do. But where its teaching runs counter to the general inclination, it quietly pushes it aside. Mckinley, the chosen ruler of seventy millions of men, declared that he would rather take his political economy from the puddler or the potter than from the professor. Bryan, his antagonist, for whom men voted, announced that the men on the carpenter's bench knew more of the Currency question than did all Lombard Street. Two ideas have thus taken hold of the popular mind with dominating force. One is a presumption in favour of every forward movement because it is new; the other a distrust of intellectual conclusions as a safe guide in politics, and a confidence in the unlettered wisdom of peoples. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.