As usual, Bernard Shaw has an original suggestion to make. He is of the opinion that adult suffrage kills democracy dead. “I am student of that branch of biology called human nature,” writes Shaw in a recent issue of ‘Time and Tide.’ “ A world in which the voice of the people is the voice of God, and the political capacity and sagacity of everybody over the age of 21, infinite and infallible, is to me a fairyland which has never existed and is not postulated in any oracle of mine.” Shaw, therefore, suggests that ‘Councils of tested qualified persons, subject to the sternest possible public criticism and to periodical removal and replacement, is our safest aim.’[36] According to him, business of the democrat is to find some test which will detect the born super-legislator and place him or her on a panel from which our legislators must be chosen. Shaw, thus, believes, in what may be called ‘Totalitarian Democracy.’ With due deference to the ‘Super-playwright,’ we may ask him: But who shall prescribe the tests for the Superman? Evidently, the super-legislators would discharge this function themselves by posing as ‘Saviours’ and ‘Demigods’. In the last analysis, therefore, Shaw’s ‘totalitarian democracy’ will be all totalitarianism and no democracy.
