When they speak of the People they certainly mean something more than the whole mass of individuals in a country lumped together.  That is the people, a mere varied aggregation of persons, moved by no common motive, a complex interplay.  The People, as the believer understands the word, is something more mysterious than that.  The People is something that overrides and is added to the individualities that make up the people.  It is, as it were, itself an individuality of a higher order—­as indeed, its capital “P” displays.  It has a will of its own which is not the will of any particular person in it, it has a power of purpose and judgment of a superior sort.  It is supposed to be the underlying reality of all national life and the real seat of all public religious emotion.  Unfortunately, it lacks powers of expression, and so there is need of rulers and interpreters.  If they express it well in law and fact, in book and song, they prosper under its mysterious approval; if they do not, it revolts or forgets or does something else of an equally annihilatory sort.  That, briefly, is the idea of the People.  My modest thesis is that there exists nothing of the sort, that the world of men is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the collective action is just the algebraic sum of all individual actions.

How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk to intelligent Americans or read the contemporary literature of the first French Revolution to understand.  I find, for example, so typical a young American as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the People to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name of Shakespeare from the ruck of his contemporaries and the passage in which this assertion is made is fairly representative of the general expression of this sort of mysticism.  “One must keep one’s faith in the People—­the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers—­else of all men the artists are most miserable and their teachings vain.  Let us admit and concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times....  But in the end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate between it and the false.”  And then he resorts to italics to emphasise:  “In the last analysis the People are always right.”

And it was that still more typical American, Abraham Lincoln, who declared his equal confidence in the political wisdom of this collective being.  “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”  The thing is in the very opening words of the American Constitution, and Theodore Parker calls it “the American idea” and pitches a still higher note:  “A government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; a government of all the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God."