"Such a meaningless word." Although Caroline's teeth were set on edge by all
political rhetoric, the reverent intoning of the national nonsense-word
"democracy" most irritated her. The much admired Harvard professor George Santayana, now
retired and withdrawn to Europe, had noted the curiously American faculty for
absolute belief in the absolutely untrue as well as the curiously American
inability to detect a contradiction because, as he had written, an "incapacity for
education, when united with great inner vitality, is one root of idealism."
That was it—-American idealism, the most unbearable aspect of these people.
++++
Silently, Wilson folded the handkerchief in four. "So must we all, now, go to
Caesar. "To our masters," Burden smiled, as he always did, when he contemplated the
fiction that the American people in any way controlled their own fate. The
Constitution had largely excluded them while custom had, paradoxically, by enlarging
the franchise limited any meaningful participation in government by the
governed. Naturally, the emotions of the people had to be taken into account, but those
emotions could be easily manipulated by demagogues and press.
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