Notes on Democracy

by H.L. Mencken

Are the poor charitable? Then it is only to the poor.

democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time of it in this world. Such, indeed, is the origin of democracy. And such is the origin of its twin, Puritanism.

Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him.

The world gets nothing from him save his brute labour, and even that he tries to evade.

That is to say, he proposes to set up the recall, the initiative and referendum, or something else of the sort, and so convert the representative into a mere clerk or messenger.

Most of the so-called constitutional checks, in fact, have yielded, at one time or other, to its pressure.

"its": antecedent- the pressure of the democratic element within our government