Thank you for the correction; it was a quote I had often heard in various forms for years, and finally looked up through Google, but apparently made a mistake in it.... thank you for finding my error--I do not want to disseminate any more false information than I have to. I am most curious about how the attribution got switched to Burke--perhaps people felt it was the sort of thing he might say. All the best, Dusty Mark A. Mandel wrote: >--- 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 > > > -- J A Dusty Sayers Home Page http://www.sayersnet.com/~dusty/ Rescue the Princess http://www.sayersnet.com/~dusty/rescue/ 'Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act.' --William Shakespeare, Hamlet