Politics & Power Quote by George Gissing

Progress, Gissing suggests, is a tug-of-war between the mob and the soul. The line lands with the cold snap of late-Victorian disillusionment: modernity is arriving - railways, mass politics, popular newspapers - and yet the collective mind seems to thicken as it grows. “Nations” in his formulation aren’t noble communities; they’re machines for averaging people down, rewarding “stupidity and baseness” because those traits scale easily. Stupidity is efficient. Baseness is contagious. Put them together and you get history at walking pace.

What makes the sentence work is its split-level cynicism. Gissing isn’t simply insulting the public; he’s diagnosing a structural problem. Groups tend to optimize for cohesion, security, and cheap emotion. That’s why nationalism can feel like moral permission: it turns private doubt into public certainty. His “mankind moves so slowly” isn’t a lament about fate but about incentives - the nation-state as a drag coefficient on ethical and intellectual change.

Then comes the pivot: “it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.” It’s a grudging, almost stingy hope, and it’s pointedly meritocratic. The engine of progress isn’t “the people” discovering wisdom together; it’s scattered persons refusing the group’s default settings - writing, inventing, organizing, dissenting. Subtextually, Gissing is also defending the artist-intellectual’s role against mass taste: civilization advances not by applause but by the stubborn minority who can imagine a higher standard and endure being unpopular long enough to make it real.