" But
every analyst seems to degrade that dignity, to deny that all men are
reasonable all the time, or educated, or informed, to note that people
are fooled, that they do not always know their own interests, and that
all men are not equally fitted to govern.
The critics were about as welcome as a small boy with a drum. Every
one of these observations on the fallibility of man was being
exploited ad nauseam. Had democrats admitted there was truth in any of
the aristocratic arguments they would have opened a breach in the
defenses. And so just as Aristotle had to insist that the slave was a
slave by nature, the democrats had to insist that the free man was a
legislator and administrator by nature. They could not stop to explain
that a human soul might not yet have, or indeed might never have, this
technical equipment, and that nevertheless it had an inalienable right
not to be used as the unwilling instrument of other men. The superior
people were still too strong and too unscrupulous to have refrained
from capitalizing so candid a statement.
So the early democrats insisted that a reasoned righteousness welled
up spontaneously out of the mass of men. All of them hoped that it
would, many of them believed that it did, although the cleverest, like
Thomas Jefferson, had all sorts of private reservations. But one thing
was certain: if public opinion did not come forth spontaneously,
nobody in that age believed it would come forth at all.
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