Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/42

 in the Roman arena delighted him; he applauded Torquemada; only yesterday he was marching against radicals—i. e., idiots who lamented his exploitation and sought to end it—with the American Legion. His natural cowardice, of course, moves him powerfully in such situations: his congenital fear is easily translated into cruelty. But something must also be said for his mere incapacity to project himself into the place of the other, his deficiency in imagination. Are the poor charitable? Then it is only to the poor. When their betters stand before them, asking for something that they may withhold—when they are thus confronted, though the thing asked for be only fair dealing, elemental justice, common decency, they are wolves.

In a previous work I have adverted to the appalling development of this wolfishness among peasants. They may be safely assumed, I believe, to represent the lowest caste among civilized men. They are the closest, both in their avocations and in their mental processes, to primeval man. One may think of them as the sediment remaining in the filter after the stream of progress has gone through. Even the city proletariat is appreciably superior, if only because