ve committee of
profoundly wise, alert and well-informed Common Men. Since the common
man is, as Gustave le Bon has pointed out, a gregarious animal,
collectively rather like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow, the
practical outcome of political democracy in all large communities under
modern conditions is to put power into the hands of rich newspaper
proprietors, advertising producers and the energetic wealthy generally
who are best able to flood the collective mind freely with the
suggestions on which it acts.

But democracy has acquired a better meaning than its first crude
intentions--there never was a theory started yet in the human mind that
did not beget a finer offspring than itself--and the secondary meaning
brings it at last into entire accordance with the subtler conception
of aristocracy. The test of this quintessential democracy is neither a
passionate insistence upon voting and the majority rule, nor an arrogant
bearing towards those who are one's betters in this aspect or that, but
fellowship. The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet and are one
in feeling themselves parts of one synthesis under one purpose and one
scheme. Both realize that self-concealment is the last evil, both make
frankness and veracity the basis of their intercourse. The general
rightness of living for you and others and for others and you is to
understand them to the best of your ability and to make them all, to the
utmost limits of your capacity of expression and their understanding and
sympathy, participators in your act and thought.

3.23. ON DEBTS OF HONOUR.

My ethical disposition is all against punctilio and I set no greater
value on unblemished honour than I do on purity. I never yet met a man
who talked proudly of his honour who did not end by cheating or
trying to cheat me, nor a code of honour that did not impress me as
a conspiracy against the common welfare and purpose in life. There
is honour among thieves, and I think it might well end there as an
obligation in conduct. The soldier who risks a life he owes to his army
in a duel upon some silly matter of personal pride is no better to me
than the clerk who gambles with the money in his master's till. When I
was a boy I once paid a debt of honour, and it is one of the things I
am most ashamed of. I had played cards into debt and I still remember
burningly how I went flushed and shrill-voiced to my mother and got the
money she could so ill afford to gi