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.
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