Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/130

 comes to right decisions in the long run. Perhaps—but on what evidence, by what reasoning, and for what motives! Go examine the long history of the anti-slavery agitation in America: it is a truly magnificent record of buncombe, false pretences, and imbecility. This notion that the mob is wise, I fear, is not to be taken seriously: it was invented by mob-masters to save their faces: there was a lot of chatter about it by Roosevelt, but none by Washington, and very little by Jefferson. Whenever democracy, by an accident, produces a genuine statesman, he is found to be proceeding on the assumption that it is not true. And on the assumption that it is difficult, if not impossible to go to the mob for support, and still retain the ordinary decencies. The best democratic statesmanship, like the best non-democratic statesmanship, tends to safeguard the honour of the higher officers of state by relieving them of that degrading necessity. As every schoolboy knows, such was the intent of the Fathers, as expressed in Article II, Sections 1 and 2, of the Constitution. To this day it is a common device, when this or that office becomes steeped in intolerable