But if you have scruples (moral or physical)
about this course, you may proceed to employ Reason, which in this
case has all the savage solidity of a blow with the fist.
It is stupid to say that "most people" are stupid. It is like
saying "most people are tall," when it is obvious that "tall"
can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to denounce
the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.
Should the man have been hammered on the nose and brained with logic,
and should he still remain cold, a third course opens: lead him
by the hand (himself half-willing) towards some sunlit and yet secret
meadow and ask him who made the names of the common wild flowers.
They were ordinary people, so far as any one knows, who gave
to one flower the name of the Star of Bethlehem and to another
and much commoner flower the tremendous title of the Eye of Day.
If you cling to the snobbish notion that common people are prosaic,
ask any common person for the local names of the flowers,
names which vary not only from county to county, but even from
dale to dale.
But, curiously enough, the case is much stronger than this.
It will be said that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace,
and that the dim democracies of our modern towns at least have lost it.
For some extraordinary reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London
slang is full of witty things said by nobody in particular.
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