Catholicism, however, is only alluded to here because it illustrates the essential nature of truly democratic action • 229 Thus enlightened by it, let us turn back to family life • 230 Catholicism shows that democracy is a natural coincidence of conclusions • 231 The home life of a nation depends on the same coincidence, or on spontaneously similar propensities • 231 This truly democratic coincidence forces all governments to accommodate themselves to it • 233 The same democratic power determines the structure of our houses, • 233 and the furniture and other commodities in them, • 234 and indeed all economic products • 234 For though in the process of production the many are dependent on the few, • 235 (a fact which the powers of trade unionism do but make more apparent) • 235 yet it is the wants and tastes of the many which determine what shall be produced • 238 and though great men elicit these wants by first supplying them, • 239 the wants themselves must be latent in the nature of the many, and when once aroused are essentially democratic phenomena • 239 Thus though economic supply is aristocratic, economic demand is purely democratic • 240 The most gifted brewer cannot make the public drink beer they do not like • 241 Now in politics also there is a similar demand and supply; • 242 but the truly democratic demand in politics is not for laws • 242 The demand for laws is not the counterpart of a demand for commodities, for commodities are demanded for their own sake, laws for the sake of their results • 243 The demand for laws is like a demand that commodities shall be made by some special kind of machinery • 243 No one makes this latter demand. Economic demand is single; political demand is double • 244 Political democracy is vulgarly identified with the demand not for social goods, but for machinery • 244 But in so far as democracy is a demand not for goods but for machinery, it is not purely democratic • 245 The demands of the many are manipulated by the few • 245 Why, then, is democracy especially associated with the demand in which its power is least? • 246 Because it is the only sphere of activity in which the many can interfere with the machinery of supply at all; • 246 and they can interfere with it here because the effects of political government on life are less close and important than the effects of business management on business; • 247 and in any case the apparent power of the many is even here controlled by the few • 247 The power of the many is a power to determine the quality of civilisation and progress, not to produce them • 248 CHAPTER III THE QUALITIES OF THE ORDINARY AS OPPOSED TO THE GREAT MAN It will be objected that the conclusions reached in the last chapter derogate from the dignity of the average man • 250 But they do not really do so; • 251 for since the great man, as here technically defined, is the man who influences others so as to promote progress, • 251