Notes on Democracy

by H.L. Mencken

Turn to any treatise on the causes of the French Revolution, and you will find the French peasant of 1780 but little removed, in legal rights and daily tasks, from the fellahin who built Cheops' pyramid.

America was settled largely by slaves, some escaped but others transported in bondage. The Revolution was imposed upon them by their betters, chiefly, in New England, commercial gents in search of greater profits, and in the South, country gentlemen ambitious to found a nobility in the wilderness.

Thus the lower orders of men, however grandiloquently they may talk of liberty to-day, have actually had but a short and highly deceptive experience of it.

He not only doesn't long for liberty; he is quite unable to stand it. What he longs for is something wholly different, to wit, security. He needs protection. He is afraid of getting hurt. All else is affectation, delusion, empty words.

So it looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to be mere buncombe and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse oppressions.

The city workman, oppressed by Prohibition, mourns the loss of his beer, not the loss of his liberty.

It takes quite as long to breed a libertarian as it takes to breed a race-horse.

The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses. The notion that their clamour brought about all the governmental and social reforms of the last century, and that those reforms were delayed by the superior minority, is sheer nonsense; even Liberals begin to reject it as absurd. Consider,

When John Adams, during his presidency, proposed to set up a Weather Bureau, he was denounced as an idiot and a scoundrel, as Henry Adams has set forth in the introduction to "The Decay of Democratic Dogma."

What happened in Los Angeles when a vaccination ordinance was submitted to a popular referendum is typical of what would happen anywhere under the same circumstances. The ordinance was rejected, and smallpox spread in the town, The proletariat, alarmed, then proceeded against it by going to Christian Scientists, osteopaths and chiropractors.

Turn now to Germany, a country lately delivered from despotism by the arms of altruistic heroes. The social legislation of that country, for more than half a century, afforded a model to all other countries. All the workingmen's insurance, minimum wage, child labour and other such acts of the United States are bald imitations of it, and in England, before the war, the mountebank Lloyd-George borrowed his whole bag of tricks from it. Well, Dr. Hans Delbriick, in his "Regierung und Volkswille," tell us that this legislation was fought step by step at home, and with the utmost

ferocity, by the beneficiaries of it. When Bismarck formulated it and essayed to get it through the Reichstag he was opposed by every mob-master in the Empire, save...

"Universal suffrage," he goes on, "would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power loom. It would certainly have forbidden the threshing-machine. It would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar;

His search is always for short cuts, simple formulæ, revelation. All superstitions are such short cuts, whether they issue out of the African jungle or out of Little Bethel.

is logically nonsensical, but to him the nonsensical, in the sciences as in politics, has an irresistible fascination. So he accepts the Word with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

yet he knows no more about chemistry than a cow and no more about biology than its calf.

His knowledge of astronomy is confined to a few marvels, most of which he secretly doubts.

Greek, to him, is only a jargon spoken by bootblacks, and Wagner is a retired baseball player. He has never heard of Euripides, of Hippocrates, of Aristotle, or of Plato. Or of Vesalius, Newton, and Roger Bacon. The fine arts are complete blanks to him.

A Feinschmecker of pornography, he is unaware of Freud.

The peasants of Georgia, getting wind of the fact that grand operas were being played in Atlanta, demanded that the State Legislature discourage them with a tax of $1000 a performance.

Everywhere in America galleries of paintings are under suspicion, and in most States it is impossible for them to display works showing the female figure below the clavicle.

Much of the best literature of the world, indeed, is forbidden to the Bostonian, heir though he may be to Emerson and Thoreau. If he would read it, he must procure it by stealth and read it behind the door, as a Kansan (imagining that so civilized a one exists) procures and consumes Clos Vougeot.

Beauty fevers and enrages him for another and quite different reason. He cannot comprehend it, and yet it somehow challenges and disturbs him.

If he could snore through good music he would not object to it; the trouble with it is that it keeps him awake.

He was in favour of Nero and Torquemada by instinct, and he was against Galileo and Savonarola by the same instinct.

What is worth knowing he doesn't know and doesn't want to know; what he knows is not true. The cardinal articles of his credo are the inventions of mountebanks; his heroes are mainly scoundrels.

The mob, having heard Christ, turned against Him, and applauded His crucifixion. His theological ideas were too logical and too plausible for

it,

and his ethical ideas were enormously too austere. What it yearned for was the old comfortable balderdash under a new and gaudy name, and that is precisely what Paul offered it. He borrowed from all the wandering dervishes and soul-snatchers of Asia Minor, and flavoured the stew with remnants of the Greek demonology. The result was a code of doctrines so discordant and so no...

But Paul remained the prophet of the sewers. He was to emerge centuries later in many incarnations—Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and so on.

His turgid and witless metaphysics make Christianity bearable to men who would be repelled by Christ's simple and magnificent reduction of the duties of man to the duties of a gentleman.

There is, first, the mob, theoretically and in fact the ultimate judge of all ideas and the source of all power. There is, second, the camorra of self-seeking minorities, each seeking to inflame, delude and victimize it.

A great deal of paper and ink has been wasted discussing the difference between representative government and direct democracy. The theme is a favourite one with university pundits, and also engages and enchants the stall-fed Rousseaus who arise intermittently in the cow States, and occasionally penetrate to Governors' mansions and the United States Senate.