Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/67

 body will be converted into increased capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place government more and more under the control of the least enlightened classes.”

The hostility of Homo neandertalensis to all exact knowledge, even when its effect is to work him benefits, is not hard to understand. He is against it because it is complex, and, to his dark mind, occult—because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity for taking in ideas, and thus propels him into the realm of the unknowable and alarming. His search is always for short cuts, simple formulæ, revelation. All superstitions are such short cuts, whether they issue out of the African jungle or out of Little Bethel. So are all political platitudes and shibboleths. Their one aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. No man who has not had a long and arduous education in the physical sciences can understand even the most elementary concepts of, say, pathology, but even a hind at the plow can take in the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged,