NotesOnDemocracy - (EPUB全文下载)

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NOTES ON
DEMOCRACY
By H. L. Mencken
P
UBLISHED AT THE
B
ORZOI
N
EW
Y
ORK
B
Y
A
LFRED
A
.
K
NOPF
1926
Contents
I. DEMOCRATIC MAN
1. His Appearance in the World
2. Varieties of Homo Sapiens
3. The New Psychology
4. Politics Under Democracy
5. The Rôle of the Hormones
6. Envy as a Philosophy
7. Liberty and Democratic Man
8. The Effects Upon Progress
9. The Eternal Mob
II. THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
1. The Two Kinds of Democracy
2. The Popular Will
3. Disproportional Representation
4. The Politician Under Democracy
5. Utopia
6. The Occasional Exception
7. The Maker of Laws
8. The Rewards of Virtue
9. Footnote on Lame Ducks
III. DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
1. The Will to Peace
2. The Democrat as Moralist
3. Where Puritanism Fails
4. Corruption Under Democracy
IV. CODA
1. The Future of Democracy
2. Last Words
DEMOCRATIC MAN
I
1. His Appearance in the World
Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet, soft music. There was, at the start, no harsh bawling from below; there was only a dulcet twittering from above. Democratic man thus began as an ideal being, full of ineffable virtues and romantic wrongs—in brief, as Rousseau's noble savage in smock and jerkin, brought out of the tropical wilds to shame the lords and masters of the civilized lands. The fact continues to have important consequences to this day. It remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale—that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort of superiority—nay, the superiority of superiorities. Everywhere on earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly in transient eclipse, the movement is toward the completer and more enamoured enfranchisement of the lower orders. Down there, one hears, lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!
This notion, as I hint, originated in the poetic fancy of gentlemen on the upper levels—sentimentalists who, observing to their distress that the ass was over-laden, proposed to reform transport by putting him into t ............

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