I find, for example, so typical a young
American as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the
People to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name of
Shakespeare from the ruck of his contemporaries and the passage in which
this assertion is made is fairly representative of the general
expression of this sort of mysticism. "One must keep one's faith in the
People--the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers--else of all men
the artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit
and concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But in
the end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate
between it and the false." And then he resorts to italics to emphasise:
"_In the last analysis the People are always right_."
And it was that still more typical American, Abraham Lincoln, who
declared his equal confidence in the political wisdom of this collective
being. "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the
people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
The thing is in the very opening words of the American Constitution, and
Theodore Parker calls it "the American idea" and pitches a still higher
note: "A government of all the people, by all the people, for all the
people; a government of all the principles of eternal justice, _the
unchanging law of God.
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