It does not follow that because the object of your reverence is a dead word you will get no oracles from the shrine.  If the sacred People remains impassive, inarticulate, non-existent, there are always the keepers of the shrine who will oblige.  Professional politicians, venal and violent men, will take over the derelict political control, people who live by the book trade will alone have a care for letters, research and learning will be subordinated to political expediency, and a great development of noisily competitive religious enterprises will take the place of any common religious formula.  There will commence a secular decline in the quality of public thought, emotion and activity.  There will be no arrest or remedy for this state of affairs so long as that superstitious faith in the People as inevitably right “in the last analysis” remains.  And if my supposition is correct, it should be possible to find in the United States, where faith in the people is indisputably dominant, some such evidence of the error of this faith.  Is there?

I write as one that listens from afar.  But there come reports of legislative and administrative corruption, of organised public blackmail, that do seem to carry out my thesis.  One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, who dreamt of founding a distinctive American literature, drugged and killed almost as it were symbolically, amid electioneering and nearly lied out of all posthumous respect by that scoundrel Griswold; one thinks of State Universities that are no more than mints for bogus degrees; one thinks of “Science” Christianity and Zion City.  These things are quite insufficient for a Q.E.D., but I submit they favour my proposition.

Suppose there is no People at all, but only enormous, differentiating millions of men.  All sorts of widely accepted generalisations will collapse if that foundation is withdrawn.  I submit it as worth considering.

THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS

Sec. 1

There is a growing discord between governments and governed in the world.

There has always been discord between governments and governed since States began; government has always been to some extent imposed, and obedience to some extent reluctant.  We have come to regard it as a matter of course that under all absolutions and narrow oligarchies the community, so soon as it became educated and as its social elaboration developed a free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it attained to any power of thought and expression at all, would express discontent.  But we English and Americans and Western Europeans generally had supposed that, so far as our own communities were concerned, this discontent was already anticipated and met by representative institutions.  We had supposed that, with various safeguards and elaborations, our communities did, as a matter of fact, govern themselves.  Our panacea for all discontents was the franchise.