ay be most advantageously related to the matter at issue. Human
intelligence must operate from a centre, and must always overcome an
initial bias due to familiarity and proximity. The consensus of
opinion, or public opinion, is not essentially a composite opinion, but
a corrected opinion in which such accidents of locality cancel one
another. The following justification of democracy, formulated by
Matthew Arnold, lays bare its insistent and wholly incontrovertible
motive:

If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has
established this: that it is well for any {165} great class or
description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it
wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and
intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to
understand its wants and to provide for them. They do not really
understand its wants, they do not really provide for them. A class of
men may often itself not either fully understand its own wants or
adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure
diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a
better chance of success.[13]

This conception of democracy has come latterly to be as fine a point of
honor as any article in the code of chivalry or noblesse. The
arrogance that claims a superiority of class, and the obsequiousness
that loves a lord, all this Nietschean "pathos of distance," whether
felt from the heights or the depths, is sharply repugnant to a new
gentility, that embraces all that have had the joy of promiscuous
social intercourse. From this aristocracy no one is excluded that does
not exclude himself through servility or superciliousness. Its
distinction is liberality, that is, the habit of disputing questions
and judging persons on their merits, with due allowance for that never
wholly negligible possibility that the other man is right. Among those
who are united by this spirit, there is one joke that is an unfailing
touchstone and bond of union--the institution of _lese-majeste_. It is
a matter for unquenchable laughter, {166} that superiority should
require to be protected against inferiority by the enforced signs of
respect, or by a hedge of reserve.

It is the ridiculousness of the haughty or the prostrate manner that is
absolutely fatal to it. And its ridiculousness appears at the moment
when you let in the light. Class elevation is pretence, not
super