attack upon Democracy to the mother society of this society, an
attack that I expressed ill and failed to drive home. That is what
I have come down now to do my best to make plainer. This age of
confusion is Democracy; it is all that Democracy can ever give us.
Democracy, if it means anything, means the rule of the planless man,
the rule of the unkempt mind. It means as a necessary consequence
this vast boiling up of collectively meaningless things.

"What is the quality of the common man, I mean of the man that is
common to all of us, the man who is the Standard for such men as
Carnac, the man who seems to be the ideal of the Catholic Democrat?
He is the creature of a few fundamental impulses. He begins in
blind imitation of the life about him. He lusts and takes a wife,
he hungers and tills a field or toils in some other way to earn a
living, a mere aimless living, he fears and so he does not wander,
he is jealous and stays by his wife and his job, is fiercely yet
often stupidly and injuriously defensive of his children and his
possessions, and so until he wearies. Then he dies and needs a
cemetery. He needs a cemetery because he is so afraid of
dissolution that even when he has ceased to be, he still wants a
place and a grave to hold him together and prevent his returning to
the All that made him. Our chief impression of long ages of mankind
comes from its cemeteries. And this is the life of man, as the
common man conceives and lives it. Beyond that he does not go, he
never comprehends himself collectively at all, the state happens
about him; his passion for security, his gregarious self-
defensiveness, makes him accumulate upon himself until he congests
in cities that have no sense of citizenship and states that have no
structure; the clumsy, inconsecutive lying and chatter of his
newspapers, his hoardings and music-halls gives the measure of his