rhaps my reader will have heard me say before--democracy
is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on
in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things
done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the
time off to do them themselves.

I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by my
dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil
and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five
men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with
that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting
down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this
feeling I have--in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the
yellow pencil--is the feeling that this country is being governed with.

I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who
somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general
principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was
being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the
country--he went on the general principle that every time he came on the
name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other.

As a democrat and as a believer in crowds I resent the idea that being
stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot know
anything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I do
something no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every man
knows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than
knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket--Smiths
and Browns and Smiths and Smiths--it is a thing I want to have done for
me, I want experts--engineers in human nature that I and my fellow
citizens can hire to pick out my employees, _i.e._, the employees of the
state that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I
had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we
don't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of
our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so
many subjects and detectives toward so many people.

We don't want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do,
to vote on expert questions we don't even want to know anything about,
huge laundry-lists of people that God only knows or could kn