The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.

Bryce is warning against reifying “the People” as a single, unified actor. In democratic rhetoric the phrase can sound like a sovereign personality with one will, but Bryce insists it is only a shorthand for countless distinct persons, each with separate interests, judgments, and degrees of information. The point has practical force: appeals made in the name of “the People” can conceal factional aims, pressure dissenters, or justify policies as if unanimity existed. Read this way, the line is both a defense of individual moral and political agency and a caution to democratic societies to treat public opinion as plural, shifting, and often internally contradictory rather than as an infallible collective voice.