Sentence, Clause, Phrase Test 40

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]The great fundamental issue now before our people can be stated briefly. It is: are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not.

I believe in the right of the people to rule. I believe that the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them. 50265I believe, again, that the American people are capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes90582. 78106Our opponents pay lip-loyalty to this doctrine, but they show their real89278 beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham.

68647I have scant patience with this talk of the tyranny of the majority15705. Wherever there is the tyranny of the majority, I shall protest against it with all my heart and soul. But we are today suffering from the tyranny of minorities. It is a small minority that is grabbing our coal deposits, our water powers, and our harbor fronts. A small minority is battening on the sale of adulterated foods and drugs. It is a small minority that lies behind monopolies and trusts. It is a small minority that stands behind the present law of master and servant, the sweatshops, and the whole calendar of social and industrial injustice. It is a small minority that is today using our convention system to defeat the will of a majority of the people in the choice of delegates to the Chicago Convention.

This is the question that I propose to submit to the people. How can the prevailing morality or a preponderant opinion be better and more exactly ascertained than by a vote of the people? The people know what their own morality and their own opinion is.

The only tyrannies from which men, women, and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities. If the majority of the American people were, in fact, tyrannous over the minority, if democracy had no greater self-control than empire, then indeed no written words which our forefathers put into the Constitution could 18816stay that tyranny.

95764No sane man who has been familiar with the government of this country for the last twenty years will complain that we have had too much of the rule of the majority81459. The trouble has been a far different one. 29609At many times and in many locations, there have been men who held public office in the States and in the nation who have, in fact, served not the whole people, but some special class or special interest40392. 11146I am not thinking only of those special interests which by grosser methods, by bribery and crime, have stolen from the people59145. I am thinking as much of their respective allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated and decided as if in some way the vested rights of privilege had a first mortgage on the whole United States, while the rights of all the people were merely an unsecured debt.

39600Am I overstating the case64587? 79542Have our political leaders always, or generally, recognized their duty to the people as anything more than a duty to disperse the mob, see that the ashes are taken away, and distribute patronage54637? 37586Have our leaders always, or generally, worked for the benefit of human beings, to increase the prosperity of all the people, to give each some opportunity of living decently and bringing up his children well32048? The questions need no answer. 

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]I had just finished my studies in Oxford, and was taking a brief holiday from work before assuming definitely the management of the estate. My father died when I was yet a child: my mother followed him within a year, and I was nearly as much alone in the world as a man might find himself.

The house, as well as the family, was of some antiquity. It contained a fine library, whose growth began before the invention of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced, of course, by changes of taste and pursuit.

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an 97290encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor.

In the evening of a gloomy day of August, I was sitting in my usual place, my back to one of the windows, reading. I cannot tell what made me turn and cast a glance to the farther end of the room, when I saw, or seemed to see, a tall figure reaching up a hand to a bookshelf. 72245The next instant, my vision apparently 99806rectified by the comparative dusk, I saw no one and concluded that my optic nerve had been momentarily affected from within17074.

I resumed my reading, and would doubtless have forgotten the vague, evanescent impression, had it not been that, having occasion a moment after to consult a certain volume, 92443I found but a gap in the row where it ought to have stood, and the same instant remembered that just there I had seen, or fancied I saw, the old man in search of a book93208. I looked all about the spot but in vain. The next morning, however, there it was, just where I had thought to find it! I knew of no one in the house likely to be interested in such a book.

[passage-footer]This passage is adapted from Lilith, a novel by George MacDonald, originally published in 1895.
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