"Why, I never even _heard_ of Conrad the Second!"
It is the same with everything--music, poetry, politics. I go night after night to hear the best music in the world given at fabulous cost in the Metropolitan Opera House and am content to murmur vague ecstasies over Caruso, without being aware of who wrote the opera or what it is all about. Most of us know nothing of orchestration or even the names of the different instruments. We may not even be sure of what is meant by counterpoint or the difference between a fugue and an arpeggio.
A handbook would give us these minor details in an hour's reading; but we prefer to sit vacuously making feeble jokes about the singers or the occupants of the neighboring boxes, without a single intelligent thought as to why the composer attempted to write precisely this sort of an opera, when he did it, or how far he succeeded. We are content to take our opinions and criticisms ready made, no matter from whose mouth they fall; and one hears everywhere phrases that, once let loose from the Pandora's Box of some foolish brain, never cease from troubling.
In science I am in even a more parlous state. I know nothing of applied electricity in its simplest forms. I could not explain the theory of the gas engine, and plumbing is to me one of the great mysteries.
Last, but even more lamentable, I really know nothing about politics, though I am rather a strong party man and my name always appears on important citizens' committees about election time. I do not know anything about the city departments or its fiscal administration. I should not have the remotest idea where to direct a poor person who applied to me for relief. Neither have I ever taken the trouble to familiarize myself with even the more important city buildings.
Of course I know the City Hall by sight, but I have never been inside it; I have never visited the Tombs or any one of our criminal courts; I have never been in a police station, a fire house, or inspected a single one of our prisons or reformatory institutions. I do not know whether police magistrates are elected or appointed and I could not tell you in what congressional district I reside. I do not know the name of my alderman, assemblyman, state senator or representative in Congress.