The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
John Stuart Mill · en
As a democrat and as a believer in crowds I resent the idea that being
stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot know
anything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I do
something no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every man
knows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than
knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket--Smiths
and Browns and Smiths and Smiths--it is a thing I want to have done for
me, I want experts--engineers in human nature that I and my fellow
citizens can hire to pick out my employees, _i.e._, the employees of the
state that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I
had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we
don't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of
our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so
many subjects and detectives toward so many people.
We don't want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do,
to vote on expert questions we don't even want to know anything about,
huge laundry-lists of people that God only knows or could know and that
can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees
who devote their time to it.
If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and
watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day
and night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people we
put in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. Perhaps
I should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say that
it is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men in
prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and
easily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What I
demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get
things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other
sixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have a
right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do
it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect
intelligently to do it for us--by men we have all looked through and
through and trust.
The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications a
week from the ---- Railway which has been trying to make me over into an
expert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I had
time to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are so
arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose
business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don't
take a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroads
and the Government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be any
Government.