The Ballot and the Dream

Hurrah for Grote, hugging his ballot box, cried the poet, Wordsworth. But the cry was not his; he put it into the mouth of Secrecy, conferring with Cowardice, Fraud, Falsehood, and Treachery.' More precious than the ostrakon, scarcely to be reverenced less than the pyx, the ballot box today, even where it has been displaced by machines more sophisticated, does not expect ridicule, much less the detestation of poets and dreamers who counted themselves friends of democracy. May we not look now for more little machines to abolish the other cardinal virtues? The Reverend Sydney Smith, author of Peter Plymley's Letters, advocate of parliamentary reform, spoke against the box more lucidly than the aging poet but disliked it no less.2 Men entitled to be called democrats have not all dreamed the same dreams. In recalling these enemies of the ballot box we bring to mind dreams of what government by the people might become which have not prevailed. Ironically it is in the work of Grote himself, lifelong champion of the secret ballot, that we find in a footnote more than an idle dream, less than a blueprintan insight, no less, into the proper interdependence of those two great public goods, democracy and education, which the rulers

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