Notes on Democracy

by H.L. Mencken

Everywhere on earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly in transient eclipse, the movement 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.

A stale Christian 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 preposterous dreams.

The Paris proletariat, having been misled into killing its King in 1793, devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled it, and by the middle of 1796 it had another King in fact, and in three years more he was King de jure, with an attendant herd of barons, counts, marquises and dukes, some of them new but most of them old, to guard, symbolize and execute his sovereignty.

Democratic man, contemplating himself, was suddenly warmed by the spectacle.

By 1828 in America and by 1848 in Europe the doctrine had arisen that all moral excellence, and with it all pure and unfettered sagacity, resided in the inferior four-fifths of mankind.

But it would certainly be going beyond the facts to say that the underlying democratic dogma has been abandoned, or even appreciably overhauled. To the contrary, it is now more prosperous than ever before.

Everywhere its fundamental axioms are accepted: (a) that the great masses of men have an inalienable right, born of the very nature of things, to govern themselves, and (b) that they are competent to do it. Are they occasionally detected in gross and lamentable imbecilities?

The central aim of all the Christian governments of to-day, in theory if not in fact, is to further their liberation, to augment their power, to drive ever larger and larger pipes into the great reservoir of their natural wisdom. That government is called good which responds most quickly and accurately to their desires and ideas. That is called bad which conditions their omnipotence and puts a question mark after their omniscience.

there is actually no more evidence for the wisdom of the inferior man, nor for his virtue, than there is for the notion that Friday is an unlucky day. There was, perhaps, some excuse

There are men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who are naturally stupid and cannot.

Here, of course, I flirt with the so-called intelligence tests, and so bring down upon my head that acrid bile which they have set to flowing. My plea in avoidance is that I have surely done my share of damning them: they aroused, when they were first heard of, my most brutish passions,

experience have won me to them, for the evidence in favor of them slowly piles up, pedagogues or no pedagogues. In...

Physically, they become men, and sprout beards, political delusions, and the desire to propagate their kind. But mentally they remain on the level of schoolboys.

Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata.

The thinking of what Charles Richet calls Homo stultus is almost entirely in terms of palpable nonsense.

This complex of prejudices is what is known, under democracy, as public opinion. It is the glory of democratic states.

Her contribution is the discovery that the lower orders of men, though they seem

It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something.

The demagogue himself, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman, usually comes ignominiously to grief, as the cases of Bryan, Roosevelt and Wilson dramatically demonstrate.

That program had the capital defect of being highly technical, and hence almost wholly unintelligible to all save a small minority; so it took on a sinister look, and caused a shiver to go down the democratic spine.

Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm. Its processes are most beautifully displayed at times when they stand most naked—for example, in war days.

no democratic state as populous as the United States had ever gone to war before.

force. For every Richard Roe in the conscript camps there were a dozen John Does thus safely at home, with wages high and the show growing enjoyable.

His vast capacity for illusion, his powerful thirst for the not true, embellishes his anthropoid appetite without diminishing it, and he begins to toy with sentiment, even with a sort of poetry. If you want to discover the content of that poetry go look at any movie, or listen to any popular song. At its loftiest, it is never far from the poetry of a rooster in a barnyard.

In a previous work I have adverted to the appalling development of this wolfishness among peasants. They may be safely assumed, I believe, to represent the lowest caste among

civilized men.

They are based frankly upon the theory that every man who dissents from the barnyard theology is a scoundrel, and devoid of civil rights. That theory was put very plainly by the peasant attorney-general during the celebrated Scopes trial, to the visible satisfaction of the peasant judge.

But when things are running against him he believes that the city man should be taxed to make up his losses: this is the alpha and omega of all the brummagem progressivism that emanates from the farm.

The yokel hates everyone who is not a yokel—and is afraid of everyone.

The yokel has room in his head for only one. That is the idea that God regards him fondly, and has a high respect for him—that all other men are out of favour in heaven and abandoned to the devil.

Drinking

cider in the barn is so lonely as to be a sort of onanism.

Such yellow-backs as "Night Life in Chicago" have done more, I believe, to propagate "idealism" in the corn-and-hog belt than all the eloquence of the Pfeffers and Bryans. The yokels, reading them in secret, leave them full of a passionate conviction that such Babylonish revels must be put down, if Christianity is to survive—that it is obviously against the will of God that a Chicago stockbroker should have five wives and fifty concubines, and an Iowa swineherd but one—and that one a strictly Christian woman, even at the purple moments when

In the cities, as everyone knows, women move toward antinomianism: it is a scandal throughout Christendom.

I am told by experts that it is still a sort of marvel, as it was in the youth of Abraham Lincoln, to find a farm-wife who has definitely renounced the theology of the local pastors.

Keep in mind the fact that at least six millions of them are forced to live in unmitigated monogamy with wives whose dominant yearning is to save the heathen hordes in India from hell fire, and you will begin to get some grasp of the motives behind such statutes as the celebrated Mann Act.

The sea-sick passenger on the ocean liner detests the "good sailor" who stalks past him a hundred times a day, obscenely smoking large, greasy, gold-banded cigars. In precisely the same way democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time of it in this world. Such,

The proletarian, in his office as father, is now reduced by it to the simple biological function of a boar in a barn-yard.

From the moment the fertilized ovum attaches itself to the decidua serotina he is free to give himself whole-heartedly to politics, drink and the radio.

Once she has become a mother her benefits only increase. If she wants to get rid of her child it is taken off her hands, and eager propagandists instruct her in the science of avoiding another.

The proletarian is so artfully relieved of the elemental gnawings which constantly terrorize the peasant and so steadily distracted from all sober thinking that his natural envy of his betters is sublimated into a sort of boozy contentment, like that of a hog in a comfortable sty. He escapes boredom, and with it, brooding.

The rustic, alone upon his dung-hill, has time to nurse his grievances; the city moron is diverted from them by the shows that surround him.

He is himself, of course, unable to roar about the country in a high-powered car, accompanied by a beautiful coloured girl of large gifts for the art of love, but when he reads of the

scions of old Knickerbocker families doing it he somehow gets a touch of the thrill.

Under the festive surface, of course, envy remains: the proletarian is still a democrat.

All the revolutions in history have been started by hungry city mobs. The

When the city mob fights it is not for liberty, but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end. And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians. If Thomas Jefferson had been living in Paris in 1793 he would have made an even narrower escape from the guillotine than Thomas Paine made.

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind.

Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without.

Liberty is unfathomable to him. He can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour. What he mistakes for it, nine times out of ten, is simply the banal right to empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors. He is an ox whose last proud, defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.