Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence isn`t offering a polite critique of elections; he`s staging a sneer at a whole civilization that confuses comfort with meaning. The line snaps because it yokes "democracy" to the inventory of modern life: wages and prices, electric light, water closets. Not ideals, not duties, not tragic choices - fixtures and paychecks. It`s deliberately reductive, a writer`s way of saying that when a society measures its success by what can be counted, it will start treating human beings as countable too.

The intent is anti-bourgeois before it`s anti-democratic. Lawrence is attacking the moral mood that comes with mass politics: the demand that public life justify itself in practical, distributable goods. "Vulgar" here isn`t just snobbery (though there`s plenty); it`s his shorthand for the flattening of experience, the suspicion of ecstasy, the replacement of inner life with amenities. The choice of "water closets" is comic and cruel: democracy as plumbing. You can hear the provocation - if everyone gets a vote, everyone gets a say in what matters, and what "matters" shrinks to what makes life easier, safer, cleaner.

Context sharpens the bite. Lawrence is writing in the wake of industrial capitalism, expanding suffrage, and the mechanized horror of World War I - a moment when "progress" looked like electrification at home and electrified wire at the фронт. His subtext is that the modern state can deliver services while starving the soul, and that a politics obsessed with material uplift may become a politics incapable of transcendence. That`s not a policy argument; it`s a cultural diagnosis, delivered with an artist`s contempt for the ledger.