accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's
opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a
good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot
separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to
me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils.
The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It
is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot
papers, are marked with a cross.

I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was always
a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition. Before we
come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content to allow for
that personal equation; I have always been more inclined to believe the
ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome
literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and
prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest
demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. I would
always trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts. As long
as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases.

Now, I have to put together a general position, and I pretend to no
training in such things. I propose to do it, therefore, by writing down
one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which I have found
for myself, pretty much in the way that I found them. Then I shall
roughly synthesise them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural
religion; then I shall describe my startling discovery that the whole
thing had been discovered before. It had been discovered by
Christianity. But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount
in order, the earliest was concerned with this element of popular
tradition. And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and