THE RIGHTS OF MAJORITIES
(1912)
IN every age some fetich of government has been set up designed to delude the governed, and to induce a blind rather than an intellectual acceptance of authority.
To set up in government some point over which you must not argue, is always very convenient to those who govern; and so you will note, throughout the world's history, that the manipulators of government have always tried to impose some incontrovertible proposition as the basis on which their authority shall rest; and then, having done so, to get the strings of it into their own hands, and work it to their own convenience.
In the present day "majority rule" is the pretended fetich; a majority whose qualification is almost automatic, whose registration is all done for it by the party agents, and whose free and independent vote is brought up to the polling-booth very largely by the bribe of a free ride in a motor-car.
Scores of elections, that is to say, are turned by the indifferent voter, and on this sort of cookery recipe the moral products of majority rule are served up to us as "a dish fit for a king," and as giving moral sanction to government. And whatever indigestion comes to us as the result of our swallowing it whole we are
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