Yesterday, I had a post about political fear, opinion polls, and the importance of the secret ballot. It ended like this:

I have said it before, I will say it again: Thank heaven for the secret ballot. The secret ballot is one of the best concepts, best inventions, in the history of mankind. Imagine if the people had to vote in front of Salmond-like kilted goons. (You will forgive a little hyperbole in the emotion of the hour.)

Yes, the occasion for my post was the Scottish referendum, in which the demagogically gifted Alex Salmond was the leader of the independence or separation campaign.

As if writing at my special request, Janet Daley has penned a column (typically marvelous) on the themes in question. The column has this subheading: “In the inviolable privacy of the polling booth, the ordinary citizen gets his revenge.”

Let me pause for a language note: Daley’s column is published in a British paper, the Telegraph. Here in America, would that “his” be allowed to stand? The modern American way is “the ordinary citizen gets their revenge” — or “his or her revenge.” Either one is ugly as hell, and unnecessary as hell.

Probably an editor, thinking himself (!) all Solomonic, would write, “ordinary citizens get their revenge.” But the sentence attached to Daley’s column is best.

Anyway, she writes,

As it turned out, virtually all of the polling in recent weeks had been wrong. In the end, the vote wasn’t very close: it was a clear and decisive No. Whatever poll respondents had said — or been afraid to say — about their intentions because they felt coerced or intimidated by the aggressive tactics of the other camp, when it came to it, they were free to do as they pleased.

Oh, yes. Daley continues,

. . . you can bully people in the street, shout them down at public meetings and dissuade them forcibly from displaying posters or banners you don’t like. You can, with the help of your friends and comrades, create what seems to you, inside the bubble of mutual congratulation, to be an unstoppable momentum.
But making people afraid to voice contrary opinions just reinforces the delusion into which political tribes so easily fall when they are waging war. And, even more dangerously, it leaves them utterly out of touch with the slow-burning resentment they are creating in the opponents they are so determined to crush. The inviolable privacy of the polling booth puts paid to all that: the ordinary citizen, who may well have had his anger and resolve strengthened under fire, gets his revenge.

Janet Daley is a fairly rare thing: an American who turned British. (In this, she is like T. S. Eliot.) It is more common to go the other way. Our Charlie Cooke is a shining example of a Briton turned American (or turning American). Actually, I think he was born American in his heart.

N.B. Nothing — not even a passport and “Don’t Tread on Me” tattooed on his forehead — will keep me from calling him “Sir Charles Cooke.”

Anyway, we are all striving for the same things, I hope: liberty and democracy, as grasped and fostered by dear Mother England.