legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane.  The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.  Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant.  It will not do for us.  If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.  Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.  Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.  It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.  All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.  Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.  I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea.  We will have the dead at our councils.  The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones.  It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was always a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition.  Before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content to allow for that personal equation; I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong.  I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside.  I would always trust the old wives’ fables against the old maids’ facts.  As long as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases.

Now, I have to put together a general position, and I pretend to no training in such things.  I propose to do it, therefore, by writing down one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which I have found for myself, pretty much in the way that I found them.  Then I shall roughly synthesise them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion; then I shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had been discovered before.  It had been discovered by Christianity.  But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount in order, the earliest was concerned with this element of popular tradition.  And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear.  As it is, I do not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.