All my subjects without exception may be said to be democratic people in the deepest possible sense. I say this on the basis of a previous analysis of authoritarian and democratic character structures 20 which is too elaborate to present here; it is possible only to describe some aspects of this behavior in short space. These people have all the obvious or superficial democratic characteristics. They can be, and are, friendly with anyone of suitable character, regardless of class, education, political belief, race, or color. As a matter of fact, it often seems as if they are not even aware of these differences, which are for the average person so obvious and so important.

They have not only this most obvious quality, but their democratic feeling goes deeper as well. For instance, they find it possible to learn from anybody who has something to teach them-no matter what other characteristics he may have. In such a learning relationship, they do not try to maintain any outward "dignity" or to maintain status or age prestige or the like. It should even be said that my subjects share a quality that could be called "humility" of a certain type. They are all quite aware of their own worth, so that there is no humbleness of the cringing or of the designing and calculating type. They are equally aware of how little they know in comparison with what could be known and what is known by others. Because of this it is possible for them without pose to be honestly respectful, and even humble, before people who can teach them something which they do not know or who have a skill they do not possess. They give this honest respect to a carpenter who is a good carpenter or, for that matter, to anybody who is a master of his own tools or his own craft.

The careful distinction must be made between this democratic feeling and a lack of discrimination in taste, of an undiscriminating equality of any one human being with any other. These individuals, themselves elite, select for their friends elite, but this is an elite of character, capacity, and talent, rather than of birth, race, blood, name, family, age, youth, fame, or power.

Most profound, but also most vague, is the hard-to-get-at tendency to give a certain quantum of respect to any human being just because he is a human individual; our subjects seem not to wish to go beyond a certain minimum point, even with scoundrels, of demeaning, of derogating, or robbing of dignity.