The whole people can make bad mistakes; but so can all the separate people, by whatever process you select them. Select the smallest and most instructed coterie on earth, and, left to itself, it will exhibit every vice that could be exhibited by the vastest of human mobs....There is one perfectly certain rule, which, when understood, disposes of all these anti-democratic arguments. Whenever the uneducated men are mad, the educated men are madder....Take any crime alleged of any crowd, and you will find the most cultured men of the age shaken like reeds by the same passions...There has never been a case in which the democracy was wrong when the aristocracy was not wrong too. There was a somewhat famous occasion when the democracy was very wrong indeed; when the mob cried first "Hosanna!" and then "Crucify!" But in that instance, again, there was not a shade of difference between the learned scribes and the world-travelled warriors, the sublime priest of Jehovah and the master of the eagles of Rome. Or, rather, there was a difference. The difference is that the princes and priests had never cried "Hosanna!" at all.

-July 12, 1913, Illustrated London News