There is a base democracy just as there is a base aristocracy, the swaggering, aggressive disposition of the vulgar soul that admits neither of superiors nor leaders.  Its true name is insubordination.  It resents rules and refinements, delicacies, differences and organization.  It dreams that its leaders are its delegates.  It takes refuge from all superiority, all special knowledge, in a phantom ideal, the People, the sublime and wonderful People.  “You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” expresses I think quite the quintessence of this mystical faith, this faith in which men take refuge from the demand for order, discipline and conscious light.  In England it has never been of any great account, but in America the vulgar individualist’s self-protective exaltation of an idealized Common Man has worked and is working infinite mischief.

In politics the crude democratic faith leads directly to the submission of every question, however subtle and special its issues may be, to a popular vote.  The community is regarded as a consultative committee of profoundly wise, alert and well-informed Common Men.  Since the common man is, as Gustave le Bon has pointed out, a gregarious animal, collectively rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow, the practical outcome of political democracy in all large communities under modern conditions is to put power into the hands of rich newspaper proprietors, advertising producers and the energetic wealthy generally who are best able to flood the collective mind freely with the suggestions on which it acts.

But democracy has acquired a better meaning than its first crude intentions—­there never was a theory started yet in the human mind that did not beget a finer offspring than itself—­and the secondary meaning brings it at last into entire accordance with the subtler conception of aristocracy.  The test of this quintessential democracy is neither a passionate insistence upon voting and the majority rule, nor an arrogant bearing towards those who are one’s betters in this aspect or that, but fellowship.  The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet and are one in feeling themselves parts of one synthesis under one purpose and one scheme.  Both realize that self-concealment is the last evil, both make frankness and veracity the basis of their intercourse.  The general rightness of living for you and others and for others and you is to understand them to the best of your ability and to make them all, to the utmost limits of your capacity of expression and their understanding and sympathy, participators in your act and thought.

3.23.  On debts of honour.