I am the bard of democracy,
I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy.
Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing,
Exulting words, words to democracy’s lands,
O to sternly reject all except democracy!

What does civilization itself rest upon but personalism? The purpose of democracy is to illustrate this image, this doctrine or theory, of completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a single person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or herself alone.

I was looking a long while for intentions,
For a clue to the history of the past for myself, and for these chants—and now I have found it,
It is in democracy—the purport and aim of all the past,
It is the life of one man or one woman today,
All for the modern—all for the average man of today.

A man is not greatest as victor in war, nor inventor or explorer, nor in his intellectual or artistic capacity, or exemplar in some vast benevolence. To the highest democratic view, man is most acceptable in living well the average, practical life and lot which happens to him as ordinary farmer, sea-farer, mechanic, clerk, laborer, or driver. Always waiting untold in the souls of the armies of common people is stuff better than anything that can possibly appear in the leadership of the same.

My utmost pretension is probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively curative power of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers, by the claims, and general movement and result, of ideas. Something of the latter kind is democracy, and is the modern.
I am distrustful of any rules or public customs which interpose barriers between the leaders and the people. I like all fraternization between leaders, people, the masses. The people—their measureless wealth of latent power and capacity—gives final verdicts.

I must insist upon the masses, their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and in the promptness of their love.
Up to the present, the people have no determined tastes, are quite unaware of the grandeur of themselves, and of their destiny. But a profound person can easily know more of the people than they know of themselves. I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.

I mainly write to him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between democracy’s convictions, aspirations, and the people’s crudeness, vice, caprices. I myself see clearly enough the crude, defective streaks in all the strata of the common people; the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the incapable.

Great are the plunges and throes and triumphs and downfalls of democracy,
Much quackery teems even on democracy’s side—
Democracy, the destin’d conqueror,
Yet treacherous lip-smiles everywhere,
And death and infidelity at every step.
It is useless to deny it:
Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism or whether with freedom;
Democracy grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all,
Brings worse and worse invaders.

In downcast hours the soul thinks it always will be—but soon recovers from such sickly moods. There’s one thing we have to remember—that the race is not free of its own ignorance—is hardly in a position to do the best for itself. Truly there is ignorance enough yet among the masses to grow up on mountains of sickness, destitution, and vice. When we get a real democracy, as we will by and bye, this humanity will have its chance—give a fuller report of itself. All will adjust itself.

Democracy—a great word, whose history remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted. The fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future—mainly through the copious production of perfect characters among the people—the rising forever taller and stronger and broader of the intuitions of men and women, and of self-esteem and personality.
As a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. The seed is but sown—the test, the fruit.

I say democracy is only of use that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs, in all public and private life—in religion, literature, colleges, and schools, in the army and navy, in the broad show of artificial things, politics, creeds, modern improvements, and the interchange of  nations.
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of social customs, literatures, arts, schools, theology—displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

The older I grow the more I am confirmed in my optimism, my democracy—not of course denying or excusing what is bad—but it is good, not bad, that is common. Beneath all the froth, illiteracy, worse, there is something latent—now and then to break forth—which cannot be defied, which saves us at last. 

Yet I do not put it either on the ground that the people, the masses, even the best of them, are, in their latent or exhibited qualities, essentially sensible and good—nor on the ground of their rights; but that good or bad, rights or no rights, the democratic formula is the only safe and preservative one for coming times. Equality of all rights and persons is imperiously demanded by self-preservation.

We endow the masses with the suffrage for their own sake, no doubt—then, perhaps still more, from another point of view, for community’s sake. The cause of the ruin of all states that have been ruined has been that the whole body of the inhabitants without exception were not equally interested in the preservation of those states or cities—or that a portion was degraded. 

Indirectly, but surely, goodness, virtue, law, (of the very best,) follow freedom. These, to democracy, are what the keel is to the ship, or saltness to the ocean. With the noble democratic spirit—even accompanied by its freaks and excesses—no people can ever become enslaved.

But democracy has been so retarded and jeopardized by powerful personalities, that its first instincts are fain to clip, conform, bring in stragglers, and reduce everything to a dead level—the all-leveling aggregate of democracy.
That growth and tendency of all modern theology, literature, social manners most to be dreaded, is the feebleness, inertia, the loss of power, the loss of personality being diffused over a vast democratic level. Modern science and democracy appear to be endangering, perhaps eliminating, that primal and interior something in man, in his soul’s abysms, coloring all, and, by exceptional fruitions, giving the last majesty to him.

That forms an appearance only; the reality is quite different. The most marked peculiarity of modern philosophy is toward the special subjective, the theory of individuality. The new influences, upon the whole, are surely preparing the way for grander individualities than ever.  I have allow’d the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon the all-varied, all-permitting, all-free theorem of individuality and assist it as counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of democracy.

Democracy, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school. It is life’s gymnasium, not of good only, but of all. We try often, though we fall back often. A brave delight, fit for freedom’s athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success.

Democracy is the best, perhaps only, fit and full means, formulater, general caller-forth, trainer, for the millions, not for grand material personalities only, but for the ultimate democratic purports, the ethereal and spiritual ones.
The democracy I favor (if forced to choose) willingly leaves all material and political successes to enter upon and enjoy the moral, philosophical and religious ones. I say at the core of democracy, finally, is a sane and pervading religiousness. All the religions, old and new, are there. Religion—true, divine, the leveler—touches, infuses everyone, is democracy and greater than democracy.

As democracy and science in the modern have an entire lack of what in Greece and Rome was furnished by reverence for the gods—the future must substitute it by a new feeling, a profound and tender enthusiasm for the people, and especially for the poorer and less favored and educated masses. This must take the place of Jupiter and the gods.

It is no less than the idea of immortality, above all other ideas, that is to enter into, and vivify, and give crowning religious stamp, to democracy—
Democracy, while weapons were everywhere aim’d at your breast,
I saw you serenely give birth to immortal children.

NEXT: THE POET AS DEMOCRAT

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