DEMOCRACY AS A DEMAND FOR MEANS 245 



are always the work of a special class of inventors. Book in 



They never represent the spontaneously similar ideas 



of the mass of ordinary men, any more than the But in so far 



- . - . . .as democracy 



machinery used in a great brewery represents the is a demand 

 spontaneously similar ideas of the happy and united but for SC 

 customers whom a spontaneously similar taste J^tSSd? 

 leads to the same tied house. All that the many democratic. 

 can do with regard to these political patents is 

 to listen to the accounts of them given by the 

 patentees, their agents, and their travellers, and to 

 make the best choice they can between a number of 

 different contrivances which they have had no share 

 in devising, and which they only partially under- 

 stand. They are, indeed, in much the same 

 position in which that portion of the public would 

 be placed which travels habitually between London 

 and Glasgow, if it were asked to decide by its 

 votes which of five kinds of reversing gear should 

 be made use of on the London and North- Western 

 engines. If this question had really to be decided 

 by vote, the public might so far instruct itself by 

 lectures from the competing inventors as to give The demands 



.... . riii of the many 



votes for this contrivance or for that ; but the very are manipu- 

 grounds on which its choice was formed would be . 

 obviously supplied to it by others ; its choice would 

 be limited by the number of the contrivances before 

 it, and the part spontaneously played by it in the 

 whole transaction would be small. And yet, as has 

 just been said, it is the making of a choice of this 

 kind that is regarded as being, in the domain of 

 politics; typically, if not exclusively, the exercise of 



