than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But
there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because, having now
to trace the roots of my personal speculation, this may be counted, I
think, as the only positive bias. I was brought up a Liberal, and have
always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a
self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or
threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle
of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first
is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the
things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than
extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something
more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of
humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of
power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as
such, should be felt as something more heart-breaking than any music
and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than
death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a
Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in
men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold
separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political
instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common.
Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The
democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is
a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry.
It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on
vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the
loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish
a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a
thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own
nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them
badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I
know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by
scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their
noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these
universal human functions