“Nous sommes indistincts: chacun de nous est mort; Et la vie unanime est notre sépulture.” Footnote 68: Other results of the increased reading of newspapers and magazines are that large questions are driving out trivial interests (I find this very marked in the country), and the enormous amount of publicity now given everything finds a channel to the public through the press. The reports of commissions, like the Industrial Relations Commission, the surveys, like the Pittsburgh Survey, the reports of foundations, like the Russell Sage, the reports of the rapidly increasing bureaus of research, like the New York Municipal Bureau, all find their way to us through the columns of our daily or weekly or monthly. Therefore we have more material on which to found individual thinking. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XIX THE TRUE DEMOCRACY -------------- DEMOCRACY is the rule of an interacting, interpermeating whole. The present advocates of democracy have, therefore, little kinship with those ardent writers of the past who when they said they believed in the people were thinking of working-men only. A man said to me once, “I am very democratic, I thoroughly enjoy a good talk with a working-man.” What in the world has that to do with democracy? Democracy is faith in humanity, not faith in “poor” people or “ignorant” people, but faith in every living soul. Democracy does not enthrone the working-man, it has nothing to do with sympathy for the “lower classes”; the champions of democracy are not looking down to raise any one up, they recognize that all men must face each other squarely with the knowledge that the give-and-take between them is to be equal. The enthusiasts of democracy to-day are those who have caught sight of a great spiritual unity which is supported by the most vital trend in philosophical thought and by the latest biologists and social psychologists. It is, above all, what we have learnt of the psychical processes of association which makes us believe in democracy. Democracy is every one building the single life, not my life and others, not the individual and the state, but my life bound up with others, the individual which _is_ the state, the state which _is_ the individual. “When a man’s eye shall be single”—do we quite know yet what that means? Democracy is the fullest possible acceptance of the single life.