the details about their poor insides--and with all
their back bills and things?

There must be other voters who feel about this as I do.

Is this Democracy?

This is what Democracy is to me--Democracy is a belief in the
faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their
power to select great and true leaders.

The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government
is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face
of the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust its
leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a
monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be
trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a
kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have
settled down to the idea that this is what we are like--as if the main
qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of
making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I am
living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that
will take being a statesman seriously--as a special and skilled
profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting
things out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great and
true leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fate
in picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In our
politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody can
see it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leader
we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the
people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who
treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and
dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long
enough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite of
what she looks like, and will bring America out.

And America instead of being a kind of big slovenly adolescent,
perpetually thirteen-year-old nation going around with its big innocent
mouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, will
be a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knows
what it wants, and gets it--and does not say much.

XIII

THE RIGHT TO VOTE ALL DAY

This principle which I have applied in this last c