Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/71

 the cradle. The stupendous beauties that they conjured into being are nothing to him: he sticks to the tabloids and the movies, with Hot Dog or its like for Sunday afternoon. A politician by instinct and a statesman by divine right, he has never heard of ‘“The Republic” or “Leviathan.” A Feinschmecker of pornography, he is unaware of Freud.

The Egyptian night that hedges him round is not, perhaps, without its high uses and consolations. Learning survives among us largely because the mob has not got news of it. If the notions it turns loose descended to the lowest levels, there would be an uprising against them, and efforts would be made to put them down by law. In a previous treatise, adverting to this probability, I have sounded a warning against the fatuous effort to put the fine arts into the common-school curriculum in the United States. Its dangers are diminished, no doubt, by the fact that the teachers told off to execute it are themselves completely ignorant, but they remain dangers none the less. The peasants of Georgia, getting wind of the fact that grand operas were being played in Atlanta, demanded that the State Legislature discourage them with a tax of $1000