Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/111

 They lie, obviously, in the gross weaknesses and knaveries of the common people—in their inability to grasp any issues save the simplest and most banal, in their incurable tendency to fly into preposterous alarms, in their petty self-seeking and venality, in their instinctive envy and hatred of their superiors—in brief, in their congenital incapacity for the elemental duties of citizens in a civilized state. The boss owns them simply because they can be bought for a job on the street or a load of coal. He holds them, even when they pass beyond any need of jobs or coal, by his shrewd understanding of their immemorial sentimentalities. Looking at Thersites, they see Ulysses. He is the state as they apprehend it; around him clusters all the romance that used to hang about a king. He is the fount of honour and the mould of form. His barbaric code, framed to fit their gullibility, becomes an example to their young. The boss is the eternal reductio ad absurdum of the whole democratic process. He exemplifies its reduction of all ideas to a few elemental wants. And he reflects and makes manifest the inferior man’s congenital fear of liberty—his incapacity for even the most trivial sort of independent action. Life on