If we are
really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself,
we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people,
but in the literature which the people studies.
I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was a
much better prophecy than the careful observations of the most cultured
observer. When England was agitated, previous to the last General
Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinct
difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of the
populace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were most
careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of Chinese.
According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety, of whether
certain clauses in the contract of indenture were not inconsistent with
our constitutional traditions: according to them, the case would have
been the same if the people had been Kaffirs or Englishmen. It all
sounded wonderfully enlightened and lucid; and in comparison the popular
joke looked, of course, very poor. For the popular joke against the
Chinese labourers was simply that they were Chinese; it was an objection
to an alien type; the popular papers were full of gibes about pigtails
and yellow faces.
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