All education begins with reading and writing: and it is principally by means of reading that the ‘education’ gradually comes. At a certain age the work is done, not where the jesuit fixed it, for character only, but somewhere in the first years of adult life. It is rarely afterwards that the hard-working clerk, engineer, doctor, or mechanic has leisure or opportunity to supplement this basis of teaching. But even if he has, he seldom has the energy, on his own account, to modify what has been imposed on him. The contemporary European or American is a part of a broadcasting set, a necessary part of its machinery. Or he is gradually made into a newspaper-reader, it could be said, rather than a citizen.

The working of the ‘democratic’ electoral system is of course as follows. A person is trained up stringently to certain opinions; then he is given a vote, called a ‘free’ and fully enfranchised person; then he votes (subject, of course, to new and stringent orders from the press, where occasionally his mentor commands him to vote contrary to what he has been taught) strictly in accordance with his training. His support for everything that he has been taught to support can be practically guaranteed. Hence, of course, the vote of the free citizen is a farce: education and suggestion, the imposition of the will of the ruler through the press and other publicity channels, canceling it. So ‘democratic’ government is far more effective than subjugation by physical conquest.

In a very small percentage of cases better brains and good social opportunities enable a person to extricate himself from this ideologic machine. Like a mammal growing wings, he exists thenceforth in another and freer element. But this free region is not conterminous with the arts and sciences; and free spirits do not, as is popularly supposed, inhabit the bodies of men of science or artists. For art and science are the very material out of which the law is made. They are the suggestion; out of them are cut the beliefs by which men are governed. And the teacher is usually as much a dupe as the learner.