LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

communication of the most basic and essential facts, ideas necessary for
leading the good life, registered in the best books.
And man’s duty, as soon as he is fully a man, is to keep those books, to
keep that tradition available. Keep it handy. And the public: American
and English, but for the moment let me stick to the United States of
America. [The] American public [is] rather like that lunatic in Pea’s
novel Moscardino, chap in gook house who just wouldn’t believe that
there could be enough microbes on the back of a postage stamp to knock
a man cold. Thought it was doctors’ fables, in fact thought the doctors
had heard it from other gooks in the asylum.
Waal, the Americans and the English just couldn’t believe that it made
any difference what a man or a nation put inside its head via its reading.
Hence I was supposed to exaggerate when I bust out against such dung
heaps of perfumed pus as the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s and
Scribner’s, as they were in the year 1900 and ceased not essentially to be
as long as they lasted. The stink of stale perfume contains the deadly
gasses which finally poison. No language could quite cover the loathing
I feel for a Sedgewick, but it doubtless seems exaggerated. Later in
London I did a sottisier, trying to make a few people see why the printed
matter on sale in that city would finally kill off the inhabitants; witness
Dunkirk.
The XIX stinking century saw what is called an advance in science.
People learned that bacilli can kill. Prophylaxis entered the general
mind, but an older concept got knocked OUT of the popular mind. It had
been possibly once a good concept, but it had decayed. It was what is or
was called a theological concept. The age, called the age of faith,
thought a wrong idea could bring evil.