Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/192

178 in “The Limits of Pure Democracy.” “We are permitted to do the utmost violence to democracy in our actions as long as we extol it with our words,” said Dr. George Barton Cutten in an address upon his induction as president of Colgate University. “The idea of democracy is not only founded on a mistaken theory that all men are born free and equal, but upon another theory equally unsound, that the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

People of whom not more than 10 per cent have the mental capacity to graduate from college are not fitted to pass upon abstruse economic questions; and most of the great questions that affect the public welfare are of that nature. The founders of the American republic recognized that, although they knew nothing of scientific biology and psychology, and did not expect the people so to act. They contemplated rather that the people could and would select men of superior intelligence to represent them and that they, their representatives, would be able to act reasonably for them, the people. Early bewitched by the fetish of a false and impossible democracy politicians threw all that to the winds and bowed to the will of the people as they tried to interpret it.

Even now, let the ex-soldiers be asked if they do not want a bonus and in great majority they will shout “aye.” Let the voters be asked what they think about it and they in great majority will reply that the boys ought to be given what they want. Therefore Congress by great majority votes it. There is no serious consideration of it as an economic crime, that if enacted is likely to bring great disaster upon us. The people want it, wherefore according to the principles