Not that he would always succeed; men are men. But it is reasonable to expect that men working under these conditions would be considerably more impartial than the average newspaper. Again, who is as impartial as the scientist? One cannot do much in science without a stern control of the personal equation; to describe protozoa, for example, as one would like them to be, is no very clever way of attaining repute in protozoölogy. This is not so true in the social as in the physical sciences, though even in this new field scientific fairness and accuracy are rapidly increasing. One can get more reliable and impartial reports of an industrial situation,--_e.g._, of the Colorado troubles,--from the scientific investigators than from either side to the controversy. The very deficiencies of the student type--incapacity for decisions or for effective methods in action--involve a compensatory grasp of understanding and impartiality of attitude. Our best guarantee against dishonesty is not virtue but intelligence, and our Society is supposed to be a sort of distilled intelligence.
That the scheme savors of aristocracy is not to its discredit. We need aristocracy, in the sense of better methods for giving weight to superior brains; we need a touch of Plato in our democracy. After all, the essence of the plan, as we have said, is the democratization of Plato and Nietzsche and Carlyle; the intelligent man gets more political power, but only through the mechanism of democracy. His greater power comes not by his greater freedom to do what he pleases despite the majority, but by improved facilities for enlightening and converting the majority. Democracy, ideally, means only that the aristocracy is periodically elected and renewed; and this is a plan whereby the aristocrats--the really best--shall be more clearly seen to be so. Furthermore, the plan avoids the great defect of Plato's scheme,--that philosophers are not fitted for executive and administrative work, that those skilled to see are very seldom also able to do. Here the philosopher, the man who gets at the truth, rules, but only indirectly, and without the burdens of office and execution. And indeed it is not the philosopher who rules, but truth. The liberator is made king.