m boast and lie and leer as he would be
ashamed to see himself doing in his sober senses. He becomes, to
parody Novalis on Spinoza, a mob-intoxicated man. But there is one
notable difference between a decent drunkard and a demagogue. The
drunkard is satisfied with getting drunk himself. The demagogue is not
content till he has made the crowd drunk too. He and the mob are, as
it were, mutual intoxicants, and in the result many a public meeting
turns into so disgraceful an orgy that, if anything comparable to it
occurred in a music-hall, the licence would be withdrawn. This is a
kind of vice of which the moralists have not yet taken sufficient
note. And yet there is no more execrable passion on earth than
demagogue-passion on the one hand, and mob-passion on the other. Cleon
will always be remembered as one of the basest Athenians who ever
lived, and this is because he was the first demagogue of
Imperialism--a violent animal on his hind-legs who bellowed till he
woke up the blood-lust of his fellow-citizens. He was powerful only
so long as he could keep that and other popular lusts active. Men, it
has been said by a notable philosopher, seek after power rather than
beauty; but this, I believe, is only true of demagogues and egoists of
kindred sorts. The demagogue is the man who, instead of aiming at
bringing the mob to his mood, feels after the mood of the mob, and,
having discovered it, whips it into froth and fury. If you keep your
eyes open at a public meeting--not always an easy thing to do in days
when men discuss Welsh Disestablishment--you will see how the
demagogue often becomes the master of a meeting that has listened
coldly to intelligent and honest speeches. Like pot-boiling in art, it
is perfectly easy if you know the way. The Sausage Seller who aspired
to be Cleon's rival, in _The Knights_ of Aristophanes, expounds the
whole art of demagogy in his prayer:

Ye influential impudential powers
Of sauciness and jabber, slang and jaw!
Ye spirits of the market-place and street,
Where I was reared and bred--befriend me now!
Grant me a voluble utterance, and a vast
Unbounded voice, and steadfast impudence!

And, in another passage, Demosthenes initiates him into the means of
obtaining power over the people:

Interlard your rhetoric with lumps
Of mawkish sweet, and greasy flattery.
Be fulsome, coarse, and bloody!

This, indeed, is what oratory is bound to degenerate into in a
democracy unless