--- J A 'Dusty' Sayers <dustysayers at earthlink.net> wrote: > 'Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. > It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and > arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All > democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; > tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. > Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our > groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is > our father.' > --Edmund Burke I liked this quote so much that I grabbed it and put into the sigs file on my PDA. Then, as I was adjusting the lines, I noticed that there seemed to be a word missing in the first sentence before "most obscure". Should it be "the"? "that"? So I Googled for "democracy of the dead" and here is the first hit, from http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister2/tradition.htm : Q. Okay, I've heard this line quoted all the time: "Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors." It's a great line. Where does it come from? - Jerry --------------------------------------------------- A. It comes from Chesterton's book, Orthodoxy, Chapter 4, "The Ethics of Elfland." And the line is usually quoted backwards, as you have quoted it. It actually reads: "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead." Chesterton goes on to say: "Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father." - The "Quotemeister" http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister2/tradition.htm Now, isn't that interesting? Here's a quote just the way you have it, down to the apparently missing word, and attributed to GK Chesterton with a precise citation. So I went to Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/), downloaded a zipfile of Chesterton's _Orthodoxy_ (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/130), and scanned for the same phrase. Sure enough, there's the quote, in the fourth paragraph of Chapter IV: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead...." So there is a missing word, it is "the", you and the Chesterton Society's Quotemeister both have the same mistake (and I am going to copy this letter to them), and somewhere in the line of descent from text to you the attribution got switched from Chesterton to Burke. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.] __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com