Populace

“ And not only the sunken populace of our great cities are concerned to know it, and the pauper twentieth of our population; we Philistines of the middle-class, too, are concerned to know it, and all who have to set themselves to make progress in perfection. ”

“ So far, however, from the excesses of the populace—at least, in the first years of the Revolution—being a surprise to us, it should more properly be a surprise that, as a rule, they evinced as much good-feeling and tolerance as they did! ”

“ No female traitors, no aristos beneath! The people had been fooled, hideously fooled by a traitor all the more execrable, as he had seemed one of themselves.
"Malediction! Death to the traitor!"
Aye, death indeed! The giant, whoever he might be, would have to bear a charmed life if he were to escape the maddened fury of a foiled populace. ”

“ But that vast portion, lastly, of the working class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes,—to this vast residuum we may with great propriety give the name of Populace. ”

“ He promoted assiduously the interests of the multitude and admired no one man, being excessively devoted to the common weal; suspicious of sovereignty, he hated everything that had grown above its fellows, but loved everything mediocre through pity for its weakness. He showed himself a passionate adherent of the populace as did no one else, and indulged in outspokenness beyond the limits of propriety, even when it involved danger. ”

“ Yet amid all the difficulties and mortifications which beset us, with the Barbarians impossible, with the Philistines determining our present course, with our rising politicians seeking only that the mind of the Populace, when the Populace arrives at power, may be found in harmony with the mind of Mr. ”

“ My reader will be good enough to believe that while I thus speak of a country,—very much under-peopled by ten millions of souls,—I am referring to the condition of a minute fraction of that population,—of something less than two hundred thousand persons, in whom alone the existence of rights and privileges is by the law recognised. The people,—properly so called,—the peasants who cultivate the soil, the mechanics who construct the dwellings, the artisans who fabricate your household utensils, your wearing apparel, your carriages, your ships, your machinery ”

“ I see the felicitous influence of a wise government exercised upon a flourishing and contented population countless as the stars. I see societies, and families, and individuals, all sharing in the general joy. ”

“ I find all the human varieties in this society, not digested and harmonized by noble culture, but existing and asking for the centralizing and discriminating agencies which in civilization sort out the different tastes, characters, and capacities, and assign to each its task, giving devotion its wings and crime its treadmill. This little population in a great country, a country in which Nature allows no one to starve, has lived and so shown its right to live and maintain itself. ”

“ In asking you, therefore, to look for a little at what statistics tell us of the progress of the great masses of the nation, I feel that I am selecting a subject which is connected with the special history of the society. That it happens for the moment to be attracting a considerable amount of popular attention in connection with sensational politics and sociology, with agitations for land nationalization and collectivism among pretended representatives of the working-classes, is an additional reason for our not neglecting this question ”

“ Coming, as you commanded, to observe and report the social state of the metropolis of a people who, in the presence of the world, have renounced the feudal organization of society, I have found them, as you anticipated, totally free from the petty ambitions, the bitter resolves, and the hollow pretences, that characterize the society of older states. ”

“ A government, or a majority, which should undertake to tell the people, or a minority, what they were to eat, drink, or wear, as I believe governments in America did in your day, would be regarded as a curious anachronism indeed. ”

“ The boy, whom we have traced intent upon the revival of the pastimes of the people, had expanded into the statesman, who, in a profound and comprehensive investigation of the elements of public wealth, had shown that a jaded population is not a source of national prosperity. ”

“ Now-a-days we seek to know more of the domestic habits and conditions of the mass of the population, and the degree and kind of intellectual and moral culture which obtained amongst a people at any given period of their history. ”

“ Differences in civilization - their causes In any large community we may see, as between different classes and groups, differences of the same kind as those existing between communities which we speak of as differing in civilization differences of knowledge, belief, custom, taste and speech, which in their extremes among people of the same race, living in the same country, show differences almost as great as those between civilized and savage communities. ”

“ The differences between the people of communities in different places and at different times, which we call differences of civilization, are not differences that inhere in the individuals, but differences that inhere in the society. ”

“ I seek to describe its people as I saw them,—clear-headed, energetic, frank, and hospitable; a community suited to, and labouring for, their country's advancement, rather than for their own present comfort. ”

“ Even in country places, where the population is sparse, and the artificial distinctions of society are little known, the working of this strange element is, in many instances, made manifest, and a petty coterie of village magnates may be found worshipping God apart from the body of the people. ”

“ The social history of this sturdy people offers us a very clear-cut example of what really makes a society or a nation. Not mountains, not dynasties, not blood, but common interests, common traditions, common beliefs; in short, mental community. ”

“ It means a "population;" it means the "vulgar;" it means any particular portion of a population, as, "rich people," "poor people," "mercantile people," etc. etc. In a political sense, it has always been understood to mean that portion of the population of a country, which is possessed of political rights. ”

“ The whole population, under these influences, has become peopled to a remarkable status and strength of opinion, sentiment and action. They prefix that large and generous quality to their best doings and institutions, and have their Peoples’ College, Peoples’ Park, etc. ”

“ There I agree with you; in the present high state of civilization there will be found little or no difference in the manners and customs of people; in the courts, none; very little in the best society, in which you will of course mix; and not so very much as people may imagine among the mass of population ”

“ Another class not less numerous than the existing one, and invested with privileges not less important, would have been added to the public estates of the realm; and the bewildering phrase ‘the People’ would have remained, what it really is, a term of natural philosophy, and not of political science. ”

“ Yet that which distinguishes the work is the detailed delineation of those various social conditions, characteristics, and habits of the common people, which are both of intrinsic importance in themselves and indispensable to the understanding of the course of political action. The pictures of the social life of the people at the close of the Revolution, in the various modifications it manifested in different localities, are most instructive. ”

“ In England we are too apt to designate, by the general term “society,” the particular class, clan, or clique in which we ourselves may happen to move, and if that little speck be sufficiently polished, people are generally quite satisfied with what they term “the present state of society;” ”

“ We receive population as the best practicable substitute for it; and as all people, whatever be their private and peculiar conditions and relations, are presumed to contribute their share to the stock of general wealth, intelligence and virtue, they are all entitled to their respective shares of influence in the measures of government. ”

“ In the category of People, we observe that individuals, self and others, and this in interest, perhaps even more than in interests, commonly take precedence of groups. Institutions and Government are, however, of general interest, the state being much more prominent than is the church ”

“ The docility of the people. The tendency of the city population is to become absorbed in its daily work, to depend upon the newspapers for its opinions and to display marked docility in obeying its leaders. ”

“ We have now seen, gentlemen, two periods of the world, each of which is dominated by the ruling idea of a particular class of the community which impresses its own principle on all the social arrangements of its time. ”

“ I can tell you something about masters and slaves. I'm hearing everywhere that what this country wants is population; that is the talk of the politician, and the learned men, that are supposed to know. ”

“ By the "maintenance" of a State is to be understood the support of its population in healthy and happy life; and the increase of their numbers, so far as that increase is consistent with their happiness. ”

“ The population is sharply divided into classes; there may be friendliness among the various grades of humanity, there may be liberty, but there can be no fraternity, no equality.
How different is the community in which people merely dwell, having their business elsewhere! ”

“ To know these particulars with regard to the poor, that is, the great mass of the people, is truly to know the state of a nation.
The people in a civilised state may be divided into many different orders ”

“ This society now publishes books and tracts upon the moral, economical, physiological, political, financial, religious, medical and social phases of the reform. We have the writings of over two hundred different persons in almost every walk and station in life. We already have a literature of no mean character. Its influence is not only felt in every State and Territory in the land, but in every country on the globe. ”

“ First then, comes the study of civics as fundamentally (and ever anew) an orderly development—at once geographic, economic, and anthropologic in its nature—a survey of place, work, and folk—and these not merely or mainly as broken up into the fine dust of censuses and statistics, nor even of the three too separate sciences above named, but as a living unity, the human hive, the Town. ”

“ When we come to the political aspect of the problem, however, a wholly different series of considerations present themselves. The question now is not how many citizens, but what sort of citizens. The theory of our government is not limited to any number of people. ”

“ I call then this commonwealth pre-eminently and emphatically Human Society, and its intellect the Human Mind, and its decisions the sense of mankind, and its disciplined and cultivated state Civilization in the abstract, and the territory on which it lies the orbis terrarum, or the World. ”

“ Communities, however, have existed where people have thought more of their obligations than of their 'rights,' more of the welfare of their [Pg 323] country, or of the success of a cause to which they have devoted themselves, than of their personal pleasure or interest—have preferred the wise leading of superior men to their own wills and wishes. ”

“ Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out ”

“ Copious extracts from that speech, and from other words of Hamilton in the Convention, are quoted in American History and Government, § 200.
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born; the other, the mass of the people. ... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. ”

“ In aristocratic societies the nobility of birth and wealth, representing the intelligence of the people, assume the role of social control, while the rest of the population are kept in bondage and ignorance. ”

“ A civilization by numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes, could never have been started at all. Shall this civilization attempt to live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the hero principle? On our answer to this question hangs the question whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall among the civilizations of the earth. ”