of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions.  The first is this:  that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men.  Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.  Man is something more awful than men; something more strange.  The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization.  The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heart-breaking than any music and more startling than any caricature.  Death is more tragic even than death by starvation.  Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy:  that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.  And the second principle is merely this:  that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common.  Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry.  The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry.  It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on.  For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well.  It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one’s own love-letters or blowing one’s own nose.  These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.  I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses.  I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them.  In short, the democratic faith is this:  that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—­the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.  This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand.  I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.  It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.  It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record.  The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy.  He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob.  It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history.  The