Politics & Power Quote by Dean Inge

Democracy, in Inge's telling, is a lab trial run with a built-in design flaw: it treats every preference as equally valid data. The line works because it sounds like sober empiricism while smuggling in a social hierarchy. "Only an experiment" is a genteel put-down, the voice of a man used to institutions that present themselves as permanent and ordained. By framing democracy as provisional, Inge implies there are sturdier, older arrangements - staffed, conveniently, by people like him.

The real barb sits in the contrast between "counting" and "weighing". Counting is mechanical, egalitarian, blind to merit. Weighing is selective, judgmental, and, crucially, controlled by whoever owns the scale. Inge isn't just lamenting uninformed voters; he's arguing for a political order where some voices carry more mass than others. It's an aristocratic instinct dressed up as concern for quality control.

Context sharpens the intent. Inge lived through the expansion of the franchise in Britain, the rise of mass parties, and the churn of early 20th-century ideology. For many elites, democracy wasn't romance; it was the arrival of the crowd at the gates of policymaking. His phrasing captures a common anxiety of that era: that popular rule would elevate sentiment over expertise, impulse over deliberation.

There's also a strategic vagueness: he never says who should do the weighing. The omission is the point. It invites the reader to imagine a neutral standard of competence while leaving the door open to class prejudice, credentialism, and the comforting fiction that "better" people can be identified without politics entering the room.