Book description
NOTES ON DEMOCRACY by H. L. MENCKEN JONATHAN. Contents include: I
DEMOCRATIC MAN 1 HIS APPEARANCE IN THE WORLD 9 2 VARIETIES OF HOMO
SAPIENS 15 3 THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 21 POLITICS UNDER DEMOCRACY 29 5 THE
ROLE OF THE HORMONES 35 6 ENVY AS A PHILOSOPHY 42 Jx LIBERTY AND
DEMOCRATIC MAN 51 THE EFFECTS UPON PROGRESS 58 9 THE ETERNAL MOB 7 2 II
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 1 THE TWO KINDS OF DEMOCRACY 79 2 THE POPULAR WILL
85 3 DISPROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION 97 4 THE POLITICIAN UNDER DEMOCRACY
1 07 5 UTOPIA 115 6 THE OCCASIONAL EXCEPTION 124 7 THE MAKER OF LAWS 131
8 THE REWARDS OF VIRTUE 139 9 FOOTNOTE ON LAME DUCKS 148 5 CONTENTS PAGE
III DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY 1 THE WILL TO PEACE 157 2 THE DEMOCRAT AS
MORALIST 1 62 3 WHERE PURITANISM FAILS 1 77 4 CORRUPTION UNDER DEMOCRACY
187 IV CODA 1 THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 2O7 2 LAST WORDS 2l8. DEMOCRATIC
MAN: HIS APPEARANCE IN THE WORLD. DEMOCRACY came into the Western World
to the tune of sweet, soft music. There was, at the start, no harsh
bawling from below there was only a dulcet twittering from above.
Democratic man thus began as an ideal being, full of ineffable virtues
and romantic wrongs in brief, as Rous seaus noble savage in smock and
jerkin, brought out of the tropical wilds to shame the lords and masters
of the civilized lands. The fact continues to have important
consequences to this day. It remains impossible, as it was in the
eighteenth century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that
there is a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in
the man at the bottom of the scale - that inferiority, by some strange
magic, becomes a sort of superiority - nay, the superiority of
superiorities. Everywhere on earth, save where the enlightenment of the
modern age is confessedly in transient eclipse, the move ment is toward
the completer and more enamoured enfranchisement of the lower orders.
Down there, one hears, lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of
righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege.
What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a
sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure they alone are
capable of a perfect patriot ism in them is the only hope of peace and
happi ness on this lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy
is more democracy This notion, as I hint, originated in the poetic fancy
of gentlemen on the upper levels - senti mentalists who, observing to
their distress that the ass was over-laden, proposed to reform trans
port by putting him into the cart. A stale Chris tian bilge ran through
their veins, though many of them, as it happened, toyed with what is now
called Modernism. They were the direct ancestors of the more saccharine
Liberals of to-day, who yet mouth their tattered phrases and dream their
pre posterous dreams. I can find no record that these phrases, in the
beginning, made much impression upon the actual objects of their
rhetoric. Early democratic man seems to have given little thought to the
democratic ideal, and less veneration. What he wanted was something
concrete and highly materialistic - more to eat, less work, higher
wages, lower taxes. He had no apparent belief in the acroamatic virtue
of his own class, and certainly none in its capacity to rule. His aim
was not to exterminate the baron, but simply to bring the baron back to
a proper discharge of baronial busi ness. When, by the wild shooting
that naturally accompanies all mob movements, the former end was
accidentally accomplished, and men out of the mob began to take on
baronial airs, the mob itself quickly showed its opinion of them by
butchering them deliberately and in earnest. Once the pikes were out,
indeed, it was a great deal more dangerous to be a tribune of the people
than to be an ornament of the old order...
