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.
But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent having a pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help the Government to be fair to the railroads--or the railroads to be fair to the Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don't want to be jerked into a judge--or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter. Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads tell everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand--time-tables for instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sunday trains on Monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor's job in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitent railroads--with all the details about their poor insides--and with all their back bills and things?
There must be other voters who feel about this as I do.
This is what Democracy is to me--Democracy is a belief in the faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their power to select great and true leaders.
The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face of the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like--as if the main qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I am living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that will take being a statesman seriously--as a special and skilled profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting things out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great and true leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fate in picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In our politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody can see it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leader we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long enough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite of what she looks like, and will bring America out.