l alone have a care for letters, research
and learning will be subordinated to political expediency, and a great
development of noisily competitive religious enterprises will take the
place of any common religious formula. There will commence a secular
decline in the quality of public thought, emotion and activity. There
will be no arrest or remedy for this state of affairs so long as that
superstitious faith in the People as inevitably right "in the last
analysis" remains. And if my supposition is correct, it should be
possible to find in the United States, where faith in the people is
indisputably dominant, some such evidence of the error of this faith. Is
there?

I write as one that listens from afar. But there come reports of
legislative and administrative corruption, of organised public
blackmail, that do seem to carry out my thesis. One thinks of Edgar
Allan Poe, who dreamt of founding a distinctive American literature,
drugged and killed almost as it were symbolically, amid electioneering
and nearly lied out of all posthumous respect by that scoundrel
Griswold; one thinks of State Universities that are no more than mints
for bogus degrees; one thinks of "Science" Christianity and Zion City.
These things are quite insufficient for a Q.E.D., but I submit they
favour my proposition.

Suppose there is no People at all, but only enormous, differentiating
millions of men. All sorts of widely accepted generalisations will
collapse if that foundation is withdrawn. I submit it as worth
considering.

THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS

Sec. 1

There is a growing discord between governments and governed in the
world.

There has always been discord between governments and governed since
States began; government has always been to some extent imposed, and
obedience to some extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as a
matter of course that under all absolutions and narrow oligarchies the
community, so soon as it became educated and as its social elaboration
developed a free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it
attained to any power of thought and expression at all, would express
discontent. But we English and Americans and Western Europeans generally
had supposed that, so far as our own communities were concerned, this
discontent was already anticipated and met by representative
institutions. We had supposed that, with various safeguards and
elaborations, our communities did, as a matter of fact,