expression. One turns,
therefore, inevitably to the American instance, not because it is the
only one, but because there is the thing in its least complicated form.
We have there an almost exactly logical realisation of this belief. The
whole political machine is designed and expressed to register the
People's will, literature is entirely rewarded and controlled by the
effectual suffrages of the bookseller's counter, science (until private
endowment intervened) was in the hands of the State Legislatures, and
religion the concern of the voluntary congregations.

On the assumption that there is a People there could be no better state
of affairs. You and I and everyone, except for a vote or a book, or a
service now and then, can go about our business, you to your grocery and
I to mine, and the direction of the general interests rests safe in the
People's hands. Now that is by no means a caricature of the attitude of
mind of many educated Americans. You find they have little or nothing to
do with actual politics, and are inclined to regard the professional
politician with a certain contempt; they trouble their heads hardly at
all about literature, and they contemplate the general religious
condition of the population with absolute unconcern. It is not that they
are unpatriotic or morally trivial that they stand thus disengaged; it
is that they have a fatalistic belief in this higher power. Whatever
troubles and abuses may arise they have an absolute faith that "in the
last analysis" the People will get it right.

And now suppose that I am right and that there is no People! Suppose
that the crowd is really no more than a crowd, a vast miscellaneous
confusion of persons which grows more miscellaneous every year. Suppose
this conception of the People arose out of a sentimental idealisation,
Rousseau fashion, of the ancient homogeneous peasant class--a class that
is rapidly being swept out of existence by modern industrial
developments--and that whatever slender basis of fact it had in the
past is now altogether gone. What consequences may be expected?

It does not follow that because the object of your reverence is a dead
word you will get no oracles from the shrine. If the sacred People
remains impassive, inarticulate, non-existent, there are always the
keepers of the shrine who will oblige. Professional politicians, venal
and violent men, will take over the derelict political control, people
who live by the book trade wil