It is unavoidable that a collective wisdom distinct from any individual and personal one is intended in these passages.  Mr. Norris, for example, never figured to himself a great wave of critical discrimination sweeping through the ranks of the various provision trades and a multitude of simple, plain burgesses preferring Shakespeare and setting Marlowe aside.  Such a particularisation of his statement would have at once reduced it to absurdity.  Nor does any American see the people particularised in that way.  They believe in the People one and indivisible, a simple, mystical being, which pervades and dominates the community and determines its final collective consequences.

Now upon the belief that there is a People rests a large part of the political organisation of the modern world.  The idea was one of the chief fruits of the speculations of the eighteenth century, and the American Constitution is its most perfect expression.  One turns, therefore, inevitably to the American instance, not because it is the only one, but because there is the thing in its least complicated form.  We have there an almost exactly logical realisation of this belief.  The whole political machine is designed and expressed to register the People’s will, literature is entirely rewarded and controlled by the effectual suffrages of the bookseller’s counter, science (until private endowment intervened) was in the hands of the State Legislatures, and religion the concern of the voluntary congregations.

On the assumption that there is a People there could be no better state of affairs.  You and I and everyone, except for a vote or a book, or a service now and then, can go about our business, you to your grocery and I to mine, and the direction of the general interests rests safe in the People’s hands.  Now that is by no means a caricature of the attitude of mind of many educated Americans.  You find they have little or nothing to do with actual politics, and are inclined to regard the professional politician with a certain contempt; they trouble their heads hardly at all about literature, and they contemplate the general religious condition of the population with absolute unconcern.  It is not that they are unpatriotic or morally trivial that they stand thus disengaged; it is that they have a fatalistic belief in this higher power.  Whatever troubles and abuses may arise they have an absolute faith that “in the last analysis” the People will get it right.

And now suppose that I am right and that there is no People!  Suppose that the crowd is really no more than a crowd, a vast miscellaneous confusion of persons which grows more miscellaneous every year.  Suppose this conception of the People arose out of a sentimental idealisation, Rousseau fashion, of the ancient homogeneous peasant class—­a class that is rapidly being swept out of existence by modern industrial developments—­and that whatever slender basis of fact it had in the past is now altogether gone.  What consequences may be expected?