Towards democracy

40 Towards Democracy

steep path painfully mounting, you making it steeper -still had added the final stone of stumbling and despair?

Better to be effaced, crazy, criminal, deformed, degraded.

Better instead of the steep to be the most dull fiat and commonplace road.

Better to go clean underfoot of all weak and despised persons—so that they shall not even notice that you are there ;

None so rude and uneducated but you shall go underfoot of them, none so criminal but you shall when the occasion serves go underfoot of them, none so outcast but they shall pass along you and not even notice that you are there,

XXVIII

The undistinguished old Earth! the dusty clods!

The mere brown handfuls crumbled through the fingers, out of which proceed the trees and the grasses and the animals roaming through them, and man with his vastaspiring religions and civilisations.

The common and universal ;

The servant girl tying up her hair before the broken mirror hung from a nail in the wall; the daisy child-face: looking at you from the side of the path as you. pass; the slow humor of old gaffers on the village seat im the sun:

These contain you. - With all your ambitions you cannot escape and go beyond these. It is impossible.

The bride attiring herself im her white veil, the brilliant and admired wit of the salons, the mathematician in his study, cannot go beyond these,