he kind. What the masses do with thoughts is that they
rub them down into counters just as they take coins from the mint and
smooth them down by wear until they are only disks of metal. The masses
understand, for instance, that Darwin said that "men are descended from
monkeys." Only summary and glib propositions of that kind can ever get
currency. The learned men are all the time trying to recoin them and
give them at least partial reality. Ruskin set afloat some notions of
art criticism, which have penetrated all our cultivated classes. They
are not lost, but see what has become of them in fifty years by
popularization. A little later a new gospel of furniture and house
decoration was published. The masses have absorbed it. See what they
have made of it. Eastlake wanted no machine work, but machinery was not
to be defeated. It can make lopsided things if those are the fashion,
and it can make all the construction show if Eastlake has got the notion
into the crowd that the pegs ought to be on the outside. Thinking and
understanding are too hard work. If any one wants to blame the masses
let him turn to his own case. He will find that he thinks about and
understands only his own intellectual pursuit. He could not give the
effort to every other department of knowledge. In other matters he is
one of the masses and does as they do. He uses routine, set formulae,
current phrases, caught up from magazines and newspapers of the better
class.

+55. Organization of the masses.+ Masses of men who are on a substantial
equality with each other never can be anything but hopeless savages. The
eighteenth-century notion that men in a state of nature were all equal
is wrong-side up. Men who were equal would be in a state of nature such
as was imagined. They could not form a society. They would be forced to
scatter and wander, at most two or three together. They never could
advance in the arts of civilization. The popular belief that out of some
such horde there has come by the spontaneous development of innate
forces all the civilization which we possess is entirely unfounded.
Masses of men who are approximately equal are in time exterminated or
enslaved. Only when enslaved or subjugated are some of them carried up
with their conquerors by organization and discipline (negroes and
Indians amongst us). A horde in which the only differences are those of
age and sex is not capable of maintaining existence. It fights because
only by conqueri