Is There A People? - Page 2

in the
People--the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers--else of all men
the artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit
and concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But in
the end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate
between it and the false." And then he resorts to italics to emphasise:
"_In the last analysis the People are always right_."

And it was that still more typical American, Abraham Lincoln, who
declared his equal confidence in the political wisdom of this collective
being. "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the
people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
The thing is in the very opening words of the American Constitution, and
Theodore Parker calls it "the American idea" and pitches a still higher
note: "A government of all the people, by all the people, for all the
people; a government of all the principles of eternal justice, _the
unchanging law of God."_

It is unavoidable that a collective wisdom distinct from any individual
and personal one is intended in these passages. Mr. Norris, for example,
never figured to himself a great wave of critical discrimination
sweeping through the ranks of the various provision trades and a
multitude of simple, plain burgesses preferring Shakespeare and setting
Marlowe aside. Such a particularisation of his statement would have at
once reduced it to absurdity. Nor does any American see the people
particularised in that way. They believe in the People one and
indivisible, a simple, mystical being, which pervades and dominates the
community and determines its final collective consequences.

Now upon the belief that there is a People rests a large part of the
political organisation of the modern world. The idea was one of the
chief fruits of the speculations of the eighteenth century, and the
American Constitution is its most perfect 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