Is There A People?

Of all the great personifications that have dominated the mind of man,
the greatest, the most marvellous, the most impossible and the most
incredible, is surely the People, that impalpable monster to which the
world has consecrated its political institutions for the last hundred
years.

It is doubtful now whether this stupendous superstition has reached its
grand climacteric, and there can be little or no dispute that it is
destined to play a prominent part in the history of mankind for many
years to come. There is a practical as well as a philosophical interest,
therefore, in a note or so upon the attributes of this legendary being.
I write "legendary," but thereby I display myself a sceptic. To a very
large number of people the People is one of the profoundest realities in
life. They believe--what exactly do they believe about the people?

When they speak of the People they certainly mean something more than
the whole mass of individuals in a country lumped together. That is the
people, a mere varied aggregation of persons, moved by no common motive,
a complex interplay. The People, as the believer understands the word,
is something more mysterious than that. The People is something that
overrides and is added to the individualities that make up the people.
It is, as it were, itself an individuality of a higher order--as indeed,
its capital "P" displays. It has a will of its own which is not the
will of any particular person in it, it has a power of purpose and
judgment of a superior sort. It is supposed to be the underlying reality
of all national life and the real seat of all public religious emotion.
Unfortunately, it lacks powers of expression, and so there is need of
rulers and interpreters. If they express it well in law and fact, in
book and song, they prosper under its mysterious approval; if they do
not, it revolts or forgets or does something else of an equally
annihilatory sort. That, briefly, is the idea of the People. My modest
thesis is that there exists nothing of the sort, that the world of men
is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the
collective action is just the algebraic sum of all individual actions.

How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk to intelligent
Americans or read the contemporary literature of the first French
Revolution to understand. I find, for example, so typical a young
American as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the
People to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name of
Shakespeare from the ruck of his contemporaries and the passage in which
this assertion is made is fairly representative of the general
expression of this sort of mysticism. "One must keep one's faith