nd 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,
and that democracy classes government among them. In short,
the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things
must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes,
the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy;
and in this I have always believed.

But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been
able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people
got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition.
It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.
It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to
some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German
historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance,
is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the
superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob.
It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated,
more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally
made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane.
The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.
Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant
may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement
that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us.
If w