Daily Inspiration Quote by James F. Cooper

Power doesn’t become cleaner just because more hands are on it; it just gets better at calling itself “the people.” Cooper’s line is a cold splash of realism aimed at a comforting civic myth: that majority rule automatically equals justice. He treats power as a force with a built-in drift toward misuse, like gravity, and then punctures the usual democratic alibi that a majority can’t be tyrannical because it’s numerically representative. The bite is in “nor does it at all mend the matter” - a deliberately plain phrasing that refuses the romance of popular sovereignty. Cooper isn’t arguing against democracy so much as against democratic innocence.

The subtext is a warning about moral outsourcing. When a majority acts, individuals feel absolved: responsibility thins out, decisions harden into “common sense,” and cruelty can pass as consensus. In that way, the majority becomes not a safeguard but a camouflage, giving abuse an aura of legitimacy. Cooper is pushing readers to separate “how many agree” from “whether it’s right,” a distinction that every era tries to blur when it’s convenient.

Context matters: early-to-mid 19th-century America was expanding electorally and territorially while also entrenching slavery, dispossession, and mob politics. Cooper, a novelist watching democracy’s growing confidence, spots the danger in its self-flattery. The sentence works because it’s unsentimental: it doesn’t ask you to trust elites; it asks you to distrust power’s appetite, especially when it learns to speak in the soothing plural of “we.”