LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

terminology was invalidated when the so-called aristocracy came to
include such a vast mess of what was anything but the best. Aristocracies
ROT, they fall under usurocracy. That is their pathology, their slopdown,
their decadence. Now in spite of lean years, and how, I have
always enjoyed a large share of privilege. Got stocked up with
University advantages. [Great?] deal of mental pleasure. Always could
bask in the best of what had been written and thought. That was nice for
me, and it delayed my public utility for a decade. I had a nice time, but I
contributed singularly little to curin’ the world’s diseases. I don’t ’spose I
worsened ’em any. Let me keep to the rich man’s panic, the bourgeois
panic. This panic starts when he begins not to KNOW. Lord it don’t start
as a clear perception. He begins to smell that CAPITAL comes from
something that isn’t an honest day’s work. And he is scared out of his
pantelettes at the idea of what it would mean to him if he had ONLY
what he could earn doing a workman’s work. Knowing he couldn’t do it
anyhow.
It takes a Whistler to reply to old Eden’s lawyers, “NO, not for an half
hour’s work, for the knowledge of a lifetime.” But the cultural heritage
is NOT merely the piled up skill of a master craftsman. You can’t think
clearly or see clearly till you get WORK into THREE brackets. The
work a man does today. The anterior work that piles up into SKILL
(material skill, handcraft, hand sleight, knowledge, discrimination.) And
the WORK done by men, now dead. Work done by the family, by the
race, before you started workin’ or loafin’. An instinct for the justice of
the claims of ANTERIOR work leads to the craftsman’s pride. It leads to
family pride, and that ROTS when the man or family loses the passion
for justice.
Man with passion for justice, or even a sense of justice, or an uneasiness
about the existence of justice, starts rootin’ round, starts trying to delimit
the claims of the three orders of WORK: 1) work today, 2) work
yesterday by the folk who are still livin’, 3) work by the departed. And
ONLY on that basis can you have sane law and society. But I have sat in