t there
is nothing easier than to simulate popular passion in order to win
popular confidence and become a political personage. If
disinterestedness is really so essential to the people, only those
should be elected who oppose the popular will and who show thereby that
they do not want to be elected. Or better still only those who do not
stand for election should be elected, since not to stand is the
undeniable sign of disinterestedness. But this is never done. That which
should always be done is never done.

--But, some one will say, your public bodies which recruit their numbers
by co-optation, Academies and learned societies, do not elect their
members in this way.--

Quite so, and they are right. Such bodies do not want their members to
be disinterested but scientific. They have no reason to prefer an
unwilling member to one who is eager to be elected. Their point of view
is entirely different. The people, which pretends to set store by high
moral character, should exclude from power those who are ambitious of
power, or at least those who covet it with a keenness that suggests
other than disinterested motives.

These considerations show us what the crowd understands by the moral
worth of a man. The moral worth of a man consists, as far as the crowd
is concerned, in his entertaining or pretending to entertain the same
sentiments as itself, and it is just for this reason that the
representatives of the multitude are excellent as documents for
information, but detestable, or at least, useless, and therefore
detestable, as legislators.

Montesquieu, who is seldom wrong, errs in my opinion when he says, "The
people is well-fitted to choose its own magistrates." He, it is true,
did not live under a democracy. For consider, how could the people be
fitted to choose its own magistrates and legislators, when Montesquieu
himself, this time with ample justification, lays down as one of his
principles that morals should correct climate, and that law should
correct morals, and the people, as we know, only thinks of choosing as
its delegates men who share, in every particular, its own manner of
thinking? Climate can be partially resisted by the people; but if the
law should correct morals, legislators should be chosen who have taken
up an attitude of reaction against current morality. It would be very
curious if such a choice were ever made, and not only is it never made
but the contrary invariably happens.

To sum it all u