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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76966 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                           THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
+
+
+                                   BY
+                             WALTER LIPPMANN
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                       HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
+                    HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
+
+
+                         Printed in the U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+                                   TO
+                              LEARNED HAND
+
+
+
+
+  “_The Voice of the People has been said to be the voice of God:
+  and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it
+  is not true in fact._”—Alexander Hamilton, June 18, 1787, at the
+  Federal Convention (Yates’s notes, cited _Sources and Documents
+  Illustrating the American Revolution_, edited by S. G. Morison).
+
+  “... _consider ‘Government by Public Opinion’ as a formula.... It
+  is an admirable formula: but it presupposes, not only that public
+  opinion exists, but that on any particular question there is a
+  public opinion ready to decide the issue. Indeed, it presupposes
+  that the supreme statesman in democratic government is public
+  opinion. Many of the shortcomings of democratic government are
+  due to the fact that public opinion is not necessarily a great
+  statesman at all._”—From “Some Thoughts on Public Life,” a lecture
+  by Viscount Grey of Fallodon, February 3, 1923.
+
+
+
+
+                              Contents
+
+
+                               PART I
+
+  Chapter                                                  Page
+
+     I. The Disenchanted Man                                 13
+
+    II. The Unattainable Ideal                               22
+
+   III. Agents and Bystanders                                40
+
+    IV. What the Public Does                                 54
+
+     V. The Neutralization of Arbitrary Force                63
+
+                              PART II
+
+    VI. The Question Aristotle Asked                         77
+
+   VII. The Nature of a Problem                              81
+
+  VIII. Social Contracts                                     95
+
+    IX. The Two Questions Before the Public                 107
+
+     X. The Main Value of Public Debate                     110
+
+    XI. The Defective Rule                                  115
+
+   XII. The Criteria of Reform                              125
+
+  XIII. The Principles of Public Opinion                    143
+
+                              PART III
+
+   XIV. Society in Its Place                                155
+
+    XV. Absentee Rulers                                     173
+
+   XVI. The Realms of Disorder                              187
+
+        Index                                               201
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+THE DISENCHANTED MAN
+
+
+1
+
+The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator
+in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there,
+but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected
+by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually
+and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great
+drifts of circumstance.
+
+Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They
+are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed
+at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.
+As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or
+who is doing it, or where he is being carried. No newspaper reports
+his environment so that he can grasp it; no school has taught him how
+to imagine it; his ideals, often, do not fit with it; listening to
+speeches, uttering opinions and voting do not, he finds, enable him to
+govern it. He lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand
+and is unable to direct.
+
+In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is
+a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern.
+Contemplating himself and his actual accomplishments in public affairs,
+contrasting the influence he exerts with the influence he is supposed
+according to democratic theory to exert, he must say of his sovereignty
+what Bismarck said of Napoleon III.: “At a distance it is something,
+but close to it is nothing at all.”[1] When, during an agitation of
+some sort, say a political campaign, he hears himself and some thirty
+million others described as the source of all wisdom and power and
+righteousness, the prime mover and the ultimate goal, the remnants of
+sanity in him protest. He cannot all the time play Chanticleer who was
+so dazzled and delighted because he himself had caused the sun to rise.
+
+For when the private man has lived through the romantic age in politics
+and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is
+sober and unimpressed, his own part in public affairs appears to him a
+pretentious thing, a second rate, an inconsequential. You cannot move
+him then with a good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor
+by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to
+make him vote. He is a man back home from a crusade to make the world
+something or other it did not become; he has been tantalized too often
+by the foam of events, has seen the gas go out of it, and, with sour
+derision for the stuff, he is saying with the author of _Trivia_:[2]
+
+“‘Self-determination,’ one of them insisted.
+
+“‘Arbitration,’ cried another.
+
+“‘Coöperation,’ suggested the mildest of the party.
+
+“‘Confiscation,’ answered an uncompromising female.
+
+“I, too, became intoxicated with the sound of these vocables. And were
+they not the cure for all our ills?
+
+“‘Inoculation!’ I chimed in. ‘Transubstantiation, alliteration,
+inundation, flagellation, and afforestation!’”
+
+
+2
+
+It is well known that nothing like the whole people takes part in
+public affairs. Of the eligible voters in the United States less
+than half go to the polls even in a presidential year.[3] During the
+campaign of 1924 a special effort was made to bring out more voters.
+They did not come out. The Constitution, the nation, the party system,
+the presidential succession, private property, all were supposed to be
+in danger. One party prophesied red ruin, another black corruption, a
+third tyranny and imperialism if the voters did not go to the polls in
+greater numbers. Half the citizenship was unmoved.
+
+The students used to write books about voting. They are now beginning
+to write books about nonvoting. At the University of Chicago Professor
+Merriam and Mr. Gosnell have made an elaborate inquiry[4] into the
+reason why, at the typical Chicago mayoral election of 1923, there
+were, out of 1,400,000 eligible electors, only 900,000 who registered,
+and out of those who registered there were only 723,000 who finally
+managed to vote. Thousands of persons were interviewed. About 30 per
+cent of the abstainers had, or at least claimed to have had, an
+insuperable difficulty about going to the polls. They were ill, they
+were absent from the city, they were women detained at home by a child
+or an invalid, they had had insufficient legal residence. The other 70
+per cent, representing about half a million free and sovereign citizens
+of this Republic, did not even pretend to have a reason for not voting,
+which, in effect, was not an admission that they did not care about
+voting. They were needed at their work, the polls were crowded, the
+polls were inconveniently located, they were afraid to tell their age,
+they did not believe in woman suffrage, the husband objected, politics
+is rotten, elections are rotten, they were afraid to vote, they did
+not know there was an election. About a quarter of those who were
+interviewed had the honesty to say they were wholly uninterested.
+
+Yet Bryce is authority for the statement that “the will of the
+sovereign people is expressed ... in the United States ... by as large
+a proportion of the registered voters as in any other country.”[5]
+And certainly Mr. Lowell’s tables on the use of the initiative and
+referendum in Switzerland in the main support the view that the
+indifference of the American voter is not unique.[6] In fact, realistic
+political thinkers in Europe long ago abandoned the notion that the
+collective mass of the people direct the course of public affairs.
+Robert Michels, himself a Socialist, says flatly that “the majority is
+permanently incapable of self-government,”[7] and quotes approvingly
+the remark of a Swedish Socialist Deputy, Gustaf F. Steffen, that
+“even after the victory there will always remain in political life the
+leaders and the led.” Michels, who is a political thinker of great
+penetration, unburdens himself finally on the subject by printing a
+remark of Hertzen’s that the victory of an opposition party amounts to
+“passing from the sphere of envy to the sphere of avarice.”
+
+There is then nothing particularly new in the disenchantment which the
+private citizen expresses by not voting at all, by voting only for the
+head of the ticket, by staying away from the primaries, by not reading
+speeches and documents, by the whole list of sins of omission for which
+he is denounced. I shall not denounce him further. My sympathies are
+with him, for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible
+task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find
+it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I
+give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is
+expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is
+going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question
+which confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to
+meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of
+political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted
+ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Cited Philip Guedalla, _The Second Empire_.
+
+[2] Logan Pearsall Smith, _More Trivia_, p. 41.
+
+[3] _Cf._ Simon Michelet, _Stay-at-Home Vote and Absentee Voters_,
+pamphlet of the National Get Out the Vote Club; also A. M. Schlesinger
+and E. M. Erickson, “The Vanishing Voter,” _New Republic_, Oct. 15,
+1924. The percentage of the popular to the eligible vote from 1865 to
+1920 declined from 83.51 per cent to 52.36 per cent.
+
+[4] Charles Edward Merriam and Harvey Foote Gosnell, _Non-Voting:
+Causes and Methods of Control_.
+
+[5] James Bryce, _Modern Democracies_, Vol. II, p. 52.
+
+[6] A. Lawrence Lowell, _Public Opinion and Popular Government_. _Cf._
+Appendices.
+
+[7] Robert Michels, _Political Parties_, p. 390.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL
+
+
+I have tried to imagine how the perfect citizen could be produced.
+Some say he will have to be born of the conjunction of the right germ
+plasms, and, in the pages of books written by Madison Grant, Lothrop
+Stoddard and other revivalists, I have seen prescriptions as to just
+who ought to marry whom to produce a great citizenry. Not being a
+biologist I keep an open but hopeful mind on this point, tempered,
+however, with the knowledge that certainty about how to breed ability
+in human beings is on the whole in inverse proportion to the writer’s
+scientific reputation.
+
+It is then to education that logically one turns next, for education
+has furnished the thesis of the last chapter of every optimistic book
+on democracy written for one hundred and fifty years. Even Robert
+Michels, stern and unbending antisentimentalist that he is, says
+in his “final considerations” that “it is the great task of social
+education to raise the intellectual level of the masses, so that they
+may be enabled, within the limits of what is possible, to counteract
+the oligarchical tendencies” of all collective action.
+
+So I have been reading some of the new standard textbooks used to teach
+citizenship in schools and colleges. After reading them I do not see
+how any one can escape the conclusion that man must have the appetite
+of an encyclopædist and infinite time ahead of him. To be sure he no
+longer is expected to remember the exact salary of the county clerk
+and the length of the coroner’s term. In the new civics he studies the
+problems of government, and not the structural detail. He is told, in
+one textbook of five hundred concise, contentious pages, which I have
+been reading, about city problems, state problems, national problems,
+international problems, trust problems, labor problems, transportation
+problems, banking problems, rural problems, agricultural problems, and
+so on _ad infinitum_. In the eleven pages devoted to problems of the
+city there are described twelve sub-problems.
+
+But nowhere in this well-meant book is the sovereign citizen of the
+future given a hint as to how, while he is earning a living, rearing
+children and enjoying his life, he is to keep himself informed about
+the progress of this swarming confusion of problems. He is exhorted to
+conserve the natural resources of the country because they are limited
+in quantity. He is advised to watch public expenditures because the
+taxpayers cannot pay out indefinitely increasing amounts. But he, the
+voter, the citizen, the sovereign, is apparently expected to yield an
+unlimited quantity of public spirit, interest, curiosity and effort.
+The author of the textbook, touching on everything, as he thinks, from
+city sewers to Indian opium, misses a decisive fact: the citizen gives
+but a little of his time to public affairs, has but a casual interest
+in facts and but a poor appetite for theory.
+
+It never occurs to this preceptor of civic duty to provide the student
+with a rule by which he can know whether on Thursday it is his duty
+to consider subways in Brooklyn or the Manchurian Railway, nor how,
+if he determines on Thursday to express his sovereign will on the
+subway question, he is to repair those gaps in his knowledge of that
+question which are due to his having been preoccupied the day before in
+expressing his sovereign will about rural credits in Montana and the
+rights of Britain in the Sudan. Yet he cannot know all about everything
+all the time, and while he is watching one thing a thousand others
+undergo great changes. Unless he can discover some rational ground for
+fixing his attention where it will do the most good, and in a way that
+suits his inherently amateurish equipment, he will be as bewildered as
+a puppy trying to lick three bones at once.
+
+I do not wish to say that it does the student no good to be taken on
+a sightseeing tour of the problems of the world. It may teach him
+that the world is complicated, even if he comes out of the adventure
+“laden with germs, breathing creeds and convictions on you whenever
+he opens his mouth.”[8] He may learn humility, but most certainly his
+acquaintance with what a high-minded author thought were American
+problems in 1925 will not equip him to master American problems ten
+years later. Unless out of the study of transient issues he acquires an
+intellectual attitude no education has occurred.
+
+That is why the usual appeal to education as the remedy for the
+incompetence of democracy is so barren. It is, in effect, a proposal
+that school teachers shall by some magic of their own fit men to govern
+after the makers of laws and the preachers of civic ideals have had a
+free hand in writing the specifications. The reformers do not ask what
+men can be taught. They say they should be taught whatever may be
+necessary to fit them to govern the modern world.
+
+The usual appeal to education can bring only disappointment. For the
+problems of the modern world appear and change faster than any set
+of teachers can grasp them, much faster than they can convey their
+substance to a population of children. If the schools attempt to teach
+children how to solve the problems of the day, they are bound always to
+be in arrears. The most they can conceivably attempt is the teaching
+of a pattern of thought and feeling which will enable the citizen to
+approach a new problem in some useful fashion. But that pattern cannot
+be invented by the pedagogue. It is the political theorist’s business
+to trace out that pattern. In that task he must not assume that the
+mass has political genius, but that men, even if they had genius, would
+give only a little time and attention to public affairs.
+
+The moralist, I am afraid, will agree all too readily with the idea
+that social education must deal primarily not with the elements and
+solutions of particular phases of transient problems but with the
+principles that constitute an attitude toward all problems. I warn
+him off. It will require more than a good conscience to govern modern
+society, for conscience is no guide in situations where the essence of
+the difficulty is to find a guide for the conscience.
+
+When I am tempted to think that men can be fitted out to deal with the
+modern world simply by teaching morals, manners and patriotism, I try
+to remember the fable of the pensive professor walking in the woods at
+twilight. He stumbled into a tree. This experience compelled him to
+act. Being a man of honor and breeding, he raised his hat, bowed deeply
+to the tree, and exclaimed with sincere regret: “Excuse me, sir, I
+thought you were a tree.”
+
+Is it fair, I ask, as a matter of morality, to chide him for his
+conduct? If he had encountered a tree, can any one deny his right to
+collide with it? If he had stumbled into a man, was his apology not
+sufficient? Here was a moral code in perfect working order, and the
+only questionable aspect of his conduct turned not on the goodness of
+his heart or the firmness of his principles but on a point of fact.
+You may retort that he had a moral obligation to know the difference
+between a man and a tree. Perhaps so. But suppose that instead of
+walking in the woods he had been casting a ballot; suppose that instead
+of a tree he had encountered the Fordney-McCumber tariff. How much more
+obligation to know the truth would you have imposed on him then? After
+all, this walker in the woods at twilight with his mind on other things
+was facing, as all of us think we are, the facts he imagined were
+there, and was doing his duty as he had learned it.
+
+In some degree the whole animate world seems to share the inexpertness
+of the thoughtful professor. Pawlow showed by his experiments on dogs
+that an animal with a false stomach can experience all the pleasures
+of eating, and the number of mice and monkeys known to have been
+deceived in laboratories is surpassed only by the hopeful citizens of a
+democracy. Man’s reflexes are, as the psychologists say, conditioned.
+And, therefore, he responds quite readily to a glass egg, a decoy duck,
+a stuffed shirt or a political platform. No moral code, as such, will
+enable him to know whether he is exercising his moral faculties on a
+real and an important event. For effective virtue, as Socrates pointed
+out long ago, is knowledge; and a code of the right and the wrong must
+wait upon a perception of the true and the false.
+
+But even the successful practice of a moral code would not emancipate
+democracy. There are too many moral codes. In our immediate lives,
+within the boundaries of our own society, there may be commonly
+accepted standards. But a political theorist who asks that a local
+standard be universally applied is merely begging one of the questions
+he ought to be trying to solve. For, while possibly it may be an aim
+of political organization to arrive at a common standard of judgment,
+one of the conditions which engenders politics and makes political
+organization necessary is the conflict of standards.
+
+Darwin’s story of the cats and clover[9] may be recommended to any
+one who finds it difficult to free his mind of the assumption that
+his notions of good and bad are universal. The purple clover is
+cross-fertilized by the bumblebee, and, therefore, the more bumblebees
+the better next year’s crop of clover. But the nests of bumblebees are
+rifled by field mice which are fond of the white grubs. Therefore, the
+more field mice the fewer bumblebees and the poorer the crop. But in
+the neighborhood of villages the cats hunt down the field mice. And so
+the more cats the fewer mice, the more bumblebees the better the crop.
+And the more kindly old ladies there are in the village the more cats
+there will be.
+
+If you happen not to be a Hindu or a vegetarian and are a beef-eating
+Occidental you will commend the old ladies who keep the cats who hunt
+the mice who destroy the bumblebees who make the pasture of clover
+for the cattle. If you are a cat you also will be in favor of the old
+ladies. But if you are a field mouse, how different the rights and
+wrongs of that section of the universe! The old ladies who keep cats
+will seem about as kindly as witches with pet tigers, and the Old Lady
+Peril will be debated hysterically by the Field Mouse Security League.
+For what could a patriotic mouse think of a world in which bumblebees
+did not exist for the sole purpose of producing white grubs for field
+mice? There would seem to be no law and order in such a world; and
+only a highly philosophical mouse would admit with Bergson that “the
+idea of disorder objectifies for the convenience of language, the
+disappointment of a mind that finds before it an order different from
+what it wants.”[10] For the order which we recognize as good is an
+order suited to our needs and hopes and habits.
+
+There is nothing universal or eternal or unchangeable about our
+expectations. For rhetorical effect we often say there is. But in
+concrete cases it is not easy to explain why the thing we desire is so
+righteous. If the farmers are able to buy less than their accustomed
+amount of manufactured foods there is disorder and a problem. But what
+absolute standard is there which determines whether a bushel of wheat
+in 1925 should, as compared with 1913, exchange for more, as many,
+or less manufactures? Can any one define a principle which shall say
+whether the standard of living of the farmers or of any other class
+should rise or fall, and how fast and how much? There may be more jobs
+than workingmen at the wage offered: the employers will complain and
+will call it a problem, but who knows any rule which tells how large a
+surplus of labor there ought to be and at what price? There may be more
+workingmen than jobs of the kind and at the places and for the wages
+they will or can take. But, although the problem will be acute, there
+is no principle which determines how many machinists, clerks, coal
+miners, bankers, or salesmen it is the duty of society to provide work
+for.
+
+It requires intense partisanship and much self-deception to argue that
+some sort of peculiar righteousness adheres to the farmers’ claims as
+against the manufacturers’, the employers’ against the wage-earners’,
+the creditors’ against the debtors’, or the other way around. These
+conflicts of interest are problems. They require solution. But there
+is no moral pattern available from which the precise nature of the
+solution can be deduced.
+
+If then eugenics cannot produce the ideal democratic citizen,
+omnicompetent and sovereign, because biology knows neither how to breed
+political excellence nor what that excellence is; if education cannot
+equip the citizen, because the school teacher cannot anticipate the
+issues of the future; if morality cannot direct him, first, because
+right or wrong in specific cases depends upon the perception of true
+or false, and, second, on the assumption that there is a universal
+moral code, which, in fact, does not exist, where else shall we look
+for the method of making the competent citizen? Democratic theorists
+in the nineteenth century had several other prescriptions which still
+influence the thinking of many hopeful persons.
+
+One school based their reforms on the aphorism that the cure for the
+evils of democracy is more democracy. It was assumed that the popular
+will was wise and good if only you could get at it. They proposed
+extensions of the suffrage, and as much voting as possible by means of
+the initiative, referendum and recall, direct election of Senators,
+direct primaries, an elected judiciary, and the like. They begged the
+question, for it has never been proved that there exists the kind of
+public opinion which they presupposed. Since the Bryan campaign of
+1896 this school of thought has made great conquests in most of the
+states, and has profoundly influenced the federal government. The
+eligible vote has trebled since 1896; the direct action of the voter
+has been enormously extended. Yet that same period has seen a decline
+in the percentage of the popular vote cast at presidential elections
+from 80.75 per cent in 1896 to 52.36 per cent in 1920. Apparently there
+is a fallacy in the first assumption of this school that “the whole
+people” desires to participate actively in government. Nor is there any
+evidence to show that the persons who do participate are in any real
+sense directing the course of affairs. The party machines have survived
+every attack. And why should they not? If the voter cannot grasp the
+details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the
+interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion
+because he is asked to express his opinion more often. He will simply
+be more bewildered, more bored and more ready to follow along.
+
+Another school, calling themselves revolutionary, have ascribed the
+disenchantment of democracy to the capitalistic system. They have
+argued that property is power, and that until there is as wide a
+distribution of economic power as there is of the right to vote the
+suffrage cannot be more effective. No serious student, I think,
+would dispute that socialist premise which asserts that the weight
+of influence on society exercised by an individual is more nearly
+related to the character of his property than to his abstract legal
+citizenship. But the socialist conclusion that economic power can be
+distributed by concentrating the ownership of great utilities in the
+state, the conclusion that the pervasion of industrial life by voting
+and referenda will yield competent popular decisions, seems to me again
+to beg the question. For what reason is there to think that subjecting
+so many more affairs to the method of the vote will reveal hitherto
+undiscovered wisdom and technical competence and reservoirs of public
+interest in men? The socialist scheme has at its root the mystical
+fallacy of democracy, that the people, all of them, are competent; at
+its top it suffers from the homeopathic fallacy that adding new tasks
+to a burden the people will not and cannot carry now will make the
+burden of citizenship easily borne. The socialist theory presupposes an
+unceasing, untiring round of civic duties, an enormous complication of
+the political interests that are already much too complicated.
+
+These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and
+socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent
+to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress
+toward such an ideal. I think it is a false ideal. I do not mean an
+undesirable ideal. I mean an unattainable ideal, bad only in the sense
+that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer. An ideal
+should express the true possibilities of its subject. When it does not
+it perverts the true possibilities. The ideal of the omnicompetent,
+sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal. It is
+unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve
+it has produced the current disenchantment.
+
+The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He
+does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is
+happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine
+how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as
+mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual
+ignorances in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force
+in public affairs.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] Logan Pearsall Smith.
+
+[9] As told by J. Arthur Thomson, _The Outline of Science_, Vol. III,
+p. 646.
+
+[10] _Creative Evolution_, Ch. III.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS
+
+
+1
+
+When a citizen has qualified as a voter he finds himself one of the
+theoretical rulers of a great going concern. He has not made the
+complicated machine with its five hundred thousand federal officers
+and its uncounted local offices. He has not seen much of it. He is
+bound by contracts, by debts, by treaties, by laws, made before he
+was aware of them. He does not from day to day decide who shall do
+what in the business of government. Only some small fraction of it
+comes intermittently to his notice. And in those episodic moments
+when he stands in the polling booth he is a highly intelligent and
+public-spirited voter indeed who can discover two real alternatives
+and enlist his influence for a party which promises something he can
+understand.
+
+The actual governing is made up of a multitude of arrangements on
+specific questions by particular individuals. These rarely become
+visible to the private citizen. Government, in the long intervals
+between elections, is carried on by politicians, officeholders
+and influential men who make settlements with other politicians,
+officeholders and influential men. The mass of people see these
+settlements, judge them, and affect them only now and then. They are
+altogether too numerous, too complicated, too obscure in their effects
+to become the subject of any continuing exercise of public opinion.
+
+Nor in any exact and literal sense are those who conduct the daily
+business of government accountable after the fact to the great mass of
+the voters. They are accountable only, except in spectacular cases,
+to the other politicians, officeholders and influential men directly
+interested in the particular act. Modern society is not visible to
+anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole. One section is
+visible to another section, one series of acts is intelligible to this
+group and another to that.
+
+Even this degree of responsible understanding is attainable only by the
+development of fact-finding agencies of great scope and complexity.[11]
+These agencies give only a remote and incidental assistance to the
+general public. Their findings are too intricate for the casual reader.
+They are also almost always much too uninteresting. Indeed the popular
+boredom and contempt for the expert and for statistical measurement are
+such that the organization of intelligence to administer modern affairs
+would probably be entirely neglected were it not that departments of
+government, corporations, trade unions and trade associations are being
+compelled by their own internal necessities of administration, and
+by compulsion of other corporate groups, to record their own acts,
+measure them, publish them and stand accountable for them.
+
+The need in the Great Society not only for publicity but for
+uninterrupted publicity is indisputable. But we shall misunderstand
+the need seriously if we imagine that the purpose of the publication
+can possibly be the informing of every voter. We live at the mere
+beginnings of public accounting. Yet the facts far exceed our
+curiosity. The railroads, for example, make an accounting. Do we read
+the results? Hardly. A few executives here and there, some bankers,
+some regulating officials, some representatives of shippers and the
+like read them. The rest of us ignore them for the good and sufficient
+reason that we have other things to do.
+
+For the man does not live who can read all the reports that drift
+across his doorstep or all the dispatches in his newspaper. And if
+by some development of the radio every man could see and hear all
+that was happening everywhere, if publicity, in other words, became
+absolute, how much time could or would he spend watching the Sinking
+Fund Commission and the Geological Survey? He would probably tune in
+on the Prince of Wales, or, in desperation, throw off the switch and
+seek peace in ignorance. It is bad enough today—with morning newspapers
+published in the evening and evening newspapers in the morning, with
+October magazines in September, with the movies and the radio—to be
+condemned to live under a barrage of eclectic information, to have
+one’s mind made the receptacle for a hullabaloo of speeches, arguments
+and unrelated episodes. General information for the informing of public
+opinion is altogether too general for intellectual decency. And life is
+too short for the pursuit of omniscience by the counting in a state of
+nervous excitement of all the leaves on all the trees.
+
+
+2
+
+If all men had to conceive the whole process of government all the time
+the world’s work would obviously never be carried on. Men make no
+attempt to consider society as a whole. The farmer decides whether to
+plant wheat or corn, the mechanic whether to take the job offered at
+the Pennsylvania or the Erie shops, whether to buy a Ford or a piano,
+and, if a Ford, whether to buy it from the garage on Elm Street or from
+the dealer who sent him a circular. These decisions are among fairly
+narrow choices offered to him; he can no more choose among all the jobs
+in the world than he can consider marrying any woman in the world.
+These choices in detail are in their cumulative mass the government
+of society. They may rest on ignorant or enlightened opinions, but,
+whether he comes to them by accident or scientific instruction, they
+are specific and particular among at best a few concrete alternatives
+and they lead to a definite, visible result.
+
+But men are supposed also to hold public opinions about the general
+conduct of society. The mechanic is supposed not only to choose
+between working for the Pennsylvania or the Erie but to decide how
+in the interests of the nation all the railroads of the country shall
+be regulated. The two kinds of opinion merge insensibly one into the
+other; men have general notions which influence their individual
+decisions and their direct experiences unconsciously govern their
+general notions. Yet it is useful to distinguish between the two kinds
+of opinion, the specific and direct, the general and the indirect.
+
+Specific opinions give rise to immediate executive acts; to take a job,
+to do a particular piece of work, to hire or fire, to buy or sell,
+to stay here or go there, to accept or refuse, to command or obey.
+General opinions give rise to delegated, indirect, symbolic, intangible
+results: to a vote, to a resolution, to applause, to criticism,
+to praise or dispraise, to audiences, circulations, followings,
+contentment or discontent. The specific opinion may lead to a decision
+to act within the area where a man has personal jurisdiction; that
+is, within the limits set by law and custom, his personal power and
+his personal desire. But general opinions lead only to some sort of
+expression, such as voting, and do not result in executive acts except
+in coöperation with the general opinions of large numbers of other
+persons.
+
+Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost
+certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken
+until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed
+and made uniform. The making of one general will out of a multitude
+of general wishes is not an Hegelian mystery, as so many social
+philosophers have imagined, but an art well known to leaders,
+politicians and steering committees.[12] It consists essentially in the
+use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached
+from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas,
+and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogeneous
+will out of a heterogeneous mass of desires. The process, therefore,
+by which general opinions are brought to coöperation consists of an
+intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance. Before a
+mass of general opinions can eventuate in executive action, the choice
+is narrowed down to a few alternatives. The victorious alternative is
+executed not by the mass but by individuals in control of its energy.
+
+A private opinion may be quite complicated, and may issue in quite
+complicated actions, in a whole train of subsidiary opinions, as when
+a man decides to build a house and then makes a hundred judgments as
+to how it shall be built. But a public opinion has no such immediate
+responsibility or continuous result. It leads in politics to the making
+of a pencil mark on a piece of paper, and then to a period of waiting
+and watching as to whether one or two years hence the mark shall be
+made in the same column or in the adjoining one. The decision to make
+the mark may be for reasons _a_^1, _a_^2, _a_^3 ... _a_^n: the result,
+whether an idiot or genius has voted, is A.
+
+For great masses of people, though each of them may have more or less
+distinct views, must when they act converge to an identical result. And
+the more complex the collection of men the more ambiguous must be the
+unity and the simpler the common ideas.
+
+
+3
+
+In English-speaking countries during the last century the contrast
+between the action of men individually and in the mass has been much
+emphasized, and yet greatly misunderstood. Macaulay, for example,
+speaking on the Reform Bill of 1832, drew the conventional distinction
+between private enterprise and public action:
+
+“In all those things which depend on the intelligence, the knowledge,
+the industry, the energy of individuals, this country stands preëminent
+among all countries of the world ancient and modern. But in those
+things which it belongs to the state to direct we have no such claim to
+superiority ... can there be a stronger contrast than that which exists
+between the beauty, the completeness, the speed, the precision with
+which every process is performed in our factories, and the awkwardness,
+the crudeness, the slowness, the uncertainty of the apparatus by which
+offenses are punished and rights vindicated?... Surely we see the
+barbarism of the Thirteenth Century and the highest civilization of the
+Nineteenth Century side by side, and we see that the barbarism belongs
+to the government, and the civilization to the people.”[13]
+
+Macaulay was, of course, thinking of the contrast between factory
+production and government as it existed in England under Queen
+Victoria’s uncles and the hard-drinking, hard-riding squirearchy. But
+the Prussian bureaucracy amply demonstrated that there is no such
+necessary contrast between governmental and private action. There is
+a contrast between action by and through great masses of people and
+action that moves without them.
+
+The fundamental contrast is not between public and private enterprises,
+between “crowd” psychology and individual, but between men doing
+specific things and men attempting to command general results. The
+work of the world is carried on by men in their executive capacity,
+by an infinite number of concrete acts, plowing and planting and
+reaping, building and destroying, fitting this to that, going from
+here to there, transforming A into B and moving B from X to Y. The
+relationships between the individuals doing these specific things are
+balanced by a most intricate mechanism of exchange, of contract, of
+custom and of implied promises. Where men are performing their work
+they must learn to understand the process and the substance of these
+obligations if they are to do it at all. But in governing the work of
+other men by votes or by the expression of opinion they can only reward
+or punish a result, accept or reject alternatives presented to them.
+They can say yes or no to something which has been done, yes or no to
+a proposal, but they cannot create, administer and actually perform
+the act they have in mind. Persons uttering public opinions may now
+and then be able to define the acts of men, but their opinions do not
+execute these acts.
+
+
+4
+
+To the realm of executive acts, each of us, as a member of the public,
+remains always external. Our public opinions are always and forever,
+by their very nature, an attempt to control the actions of others from
+the outside. If we can grasp the full significance of that conclusion
+we shall, I think, have found a way of fixing the rôle of public
+opinion in its true perspective; we shall know how to account for the
+disenchantment of democracy, and we shall begin to see the outline of
+an ideal of public opinion which, unlike that accepted in the dogma of
+democracy, may be really attainable.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XXV and XXVI.
+
+[12] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XIII and XIV.
+
+[13] Speech on the Reform Bill of 1832, quoted in the _Times_
+(London), July 12, 1923.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+WHAT THE PUBLIC DOES
+
+
+1
+
+I do not mean to say that there is no other attainable ideal of public
+opinion but that severely practical one which this essay is meant
+to disclose. One might aim to enrich the minds of men with charming
+fantasies, animate nature and society with spirits, set up an Olympus
+in the skies and an Atlantis at the end of the world. And one might
+then assert that, so the quality of ideas be fine or give peace, it
+does not matter how or whether they eventuate in the government of
+affairs.
+
+Utopia and Nirvana are by definition their own sufficient reason, and
+it may be that to contemplate them is well worth the abandonment of
+feeble attempts to control the action of events. Renunciation, however,
+is a luxury in which all men cannot indulge. They will somehow seek to
+control the behavior of others, if not by positive law then at least
+by persuasion. When men are in that posture toward events they are a
+public, as I am here defining the term; their opinions as to how others
+ought to behave are public opinions. The more clearly it is understood
+what the public can do and what it cannot, the more effectively it will
+do what lies within its power to do well and the less it will interfere
+with the liberties of men.
+
+The rôle of public opinion is determined by the fact that its relation
+to a problem is external. The opinion affects an opinion, but does not
+itself control the executive act. A public opinion is expressed by a
+vote, a demonstration of praise or blame, a following or a boycotting.
+But these manifestations are in themselves nothing. They count only
+if they influence the course of affairs. They influence it, however,
+only if they influence an actor in the affair. And it is, I believe,
+precisely in this secondary, indirect relationship between public
+opinion and public affairs that we have the clue to the limits and the
+possibilities of public opinion.
+
+
+2
+
+It may be objected at once that an election which turns one set of
+men out of office and installs another is an expression of public
+opinion which is neither secondary nor indirect. But what in fact is an
+election? We call it an expression of the popular will. But is it? We
+go into a polling booth and mark a cross on a piece of paper for one of
+two, or perhaps three or four names. Have we expressed our thoughts on
+the public policy of the United States? Presumably we have a number of
+thoughts on this and that with many buts and ifs and ors. Surely the
+cross on a piece of paper does not express them. It would take us hours
+to express our thoughts, and calling a vote the expression of our mind
+is an empty fiction.
+
+A vote is a promise of support. It is a way of saying: I am lined up
+with these men, on this side. I enlist with them. I will follow. I will
+buy. I will boycott. I will strike. I applaud. I jeer. The force I can
+exert is placed here, not there.
+
+The public does not select the candidate, write the platform, outline
+the policy any more than it builds the automobile or acts the play. It
+aligns itself for or against somebody who has offered himself, has made
+a promise, has produced a play, is selling an automobile. The action of
+a group as a group is the mobilization of the force it possesses.
+
+The attempt has been made to ascribe some intrinsic moral and
+intellectual virtue to majority rule. It was said often in the
+nineteenth century that there was a deep wisdom in majorities which
+was the voice of God. Sometimes this flattery was a sincere mysticism,
+sometimes it was the self-deception which always accompanies the
+idealization of power. In substance it was nothing but a transfer to
+the new sovereign of the divine attributes of kings. Yet the inherent
+absurdity of making virtue and wisdom dependent on 51 per cent of any
+collection of men has always been apparent. The practical realization
+that the claim was absurd has resulted in a whole code of civil
+rights to protect minorities and in all sorts of elaborate methods of
+subsidizing the arts and sciences and other human interests so they
+might be independent of the operation of majority rule.
+
+The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in
+its ethical superiority. It is to be found in the sheer necessity of
+finding a place in civilized society for the force which resides in
+the weight of numbers. I have called voting an act of enlistment, an
+alignment for or against, a mobilization. These are military metaphors,
+and rightly so, I think, for an election based on the principle
+of majority rule is historically and practically a sublimated and
+denatured civil war, a paper mobilization without physical violence.
+
+Constitutional democrats, in the intervals when they were not
+idealizing the majority, have acknowledged that a ballot was a
+civilized substitute for a bullet. “The French Revolution,” says
+Bernard Shaw, “overthrew one set of rulers and substituted another
+with different interests and different views. That is what a general
+election enables the people to do in England every seven years if they
+choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution in England;
+and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology.”[14] It makes an
+enormous difference, of course, whether the people fight or vote,
+but we shall understand the nature of voting better if we recognize
+it to be a substitute for fighting. “There grew up in the 17th and
+18th Centuries in England,” says Dwight Morrow in his introduction to
+Professor Morse’s book, “and there has been carried from England to
+almost every civilized government in the world, a procedure through
+which party government becomes in large measure a substitute for
+revolution.”[15] Hans Delbrück puts the matter simply when he says that
+the principle of majority rule is “a purely practical principle. If one
+wants to avoid a civil war, one lets those rule who in any case would
+obtain the upper hand if there should be a struggle; and they are the
+superior numbers.”[16]
+
+But, while an election is in essence sublimated warfare, we must take
+care not to miss the importance of the sublimation. There have been
+pedantic theorists who wished to disqualify all who could not bear
+arms, and woman suffrage has been deplored as a falsification of the
+value of an election in uncovering the alignment of martial force in
+the community. One can safely ignore such theorizing. For, while the
+institution of an election is in its historical origins an alignment
+of the physical force, it has come to be an alignment of all kinds of
+force. It remains an alignment, though in advanced democracies it has
+lost most of its primitive association with military combat. It has
+not lost it in the South where the Negro population is disfranchised
+by force, and not permitted to make its weight felt in an election. It
+has not lost it in the unstable Latin American republics where every
+election is in some measure still an armed revolution. In fact, the
+United States has officially recognized this truth by proclaiming that
+the substitution of election for revolution in Central America is the
+test of political progress.
+
+I do not wish to labor the argument any further than may be necessary
+to establish the theory that what the public does is not to express its
+opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory
+is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can
+be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon
+the notion that the people govern. Instead we must adopt the theory
+that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support
+or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the
+popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes
+occasionally.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] Preface to _The Revolutionist’s Handbook_, p. 179.
+
+[15] _Parties and Party Leaders_, p. xvi.
+
+[16] H. Delbrück, _Government and the Will of the People_, p. 15.
+Translated by Roy S. MacElwee.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+THE NEUTRALIZATION OF ARBITRARY FORCE
+
+
+1
+
+If this is the nature of public action, what ideal can be formulated
+which shall conform to it?
+
+We are bound, I think, to express the ideal in its lowest terms,
+to state it not as an ideal which might conceivably be realized by
+exceptional groups now and then or in some distant future but as an
+ideal which normally might be taught and attained. In estimating the
+burden which a public can carry, a sound political theory must insist
+upon the largest factor of safety. It must understate the possibilities
+of public action.
+
+The action of a public, we had concluded, is principally confined
+to an occasional intervention in affairs by means of an alignment
+of the force which a dominant section of that public can wield. We
+must assume, then, that the members of a public will not possess an
+insider’s knowledge of events or share his point of view. They cannot,
+therefore, construe intent, or appraise the exact circumstances, enter
+intimately into the minds of the actors or into the details of the
+argument. They can watch only for coarse signs indicating where their
+sympathies ought to turn.
+
+We must assume that the members of a public will not anticipate a
+problem much before its crisis has become obvious, nor stay with
+the problem long after its crisis is past. They will not know the
+antecedent events, will not have seen the issue as it developed, will
+not have thought out or willed a program, and will not be able to
+predict the consequences of acting on that program. We must assume as a
+theoretically fixed premise of popular government that normally men as
+members of a public will not be well informed, continuously interested,
+nonpartisan, creative or executive. We must assume that a public is
+inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, that it discerns only gross
+distinctions, is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted; that, since
+it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes whatever it considers, and
+is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.
+
+The public will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave
+before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to
+decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece. Yet usually
+that judgment will necessarily be made apart from the intrinsic merits,
+on the basis of a sample of behavior, an aspect of a situation, by very
+rough external evidence.
+
+We cannot, then, think of public opinion as a conserving or creating
+force directing society to clearly conceived ends, making deliberately
+toward socialism or away from it, toward nationalism, an empire, a
+league of nations or any other doctrinal goal. For men do not agree as
+to their aims, and it is precisely the lack of agreement which creates
+the problems that excite public attention. It is idle, then, to argue
+that though men evidently have conflicting purposes, mankind has some
+all-embracing purpose of which you or I happen to be the authorized
+spokesman. We merely should have moved in a circle were we to conclude
+that the public is in some deep way a messianic force.
+
+
+2
+
+The work of the world goes on continually without conscious direction
+from public opinion. At certain junctures problems arise. It is only
+with the crises of some of these problems that public opinion is
+concerned. And its object in dealing with a crisis is to help allay
+that crisis.
+
+I think this conclusion is unescapable. For though we may prefer to
+believe that the aim of popular action should be to do justice or
+promote the true, the beautiful and the good, the belief will not
+maintain itself in the face of plain experience. The public does not
+know in most crises what specifically is the truth or the justice of
+the case, and men are not agreed on what is beautiful and good. Nor
+does the public rouse itself normally at the existence of evil. It is
+aroused at evil made manifest by the interruption of a habitual process
+of life. And finally, a problem ceases to occupy attention not when
+justice, as we happen to define it, has been done but when a workable
+adjustment that overcomes the crisis has been made. If all this were
+not the necessary manner of public opinion, if it had seriously to
+crusade for justice in every issue it touches, the public would have to
+be dealing with all situations all the time. That is impossible. It is
+also undesirable. For did justice, truth, goodness and beauty depend on
+the spasmodic and crude interventions of public opinion there would be
+little hope for them in this world.
+
+Thus we strip public opinion of any implied duty to deal with the
+substance of a problem, to make technical decisions, to attempt justice
+or impose a moral precept. And instead we say that the ideal of public
+opinion is to align men during the crisis of a problem in such a way
+as to favor the action of those individuals who may be able to compose
+the crisis. The power to discern those individuals is the end of the
+effort to educate public opinion. The aim of research designed to
+facilitate public action is the discovery of clear signs by which these
+individuals may be discerned.
+
+The signs are relevant when they reveal by coarse, simple and objective
+tests which side in a controversy upholds a workable social rule, or
+which is attacking an unworkable rule, or which proposes a promising
+new rule. By following such signs the public might know where to
+align itself. In such an alignment it does not, let us remember,
+pass judgment on the intrinsic merits. It merely places its force at
+the disposal of the side which, according to objective signs, seems
+to be standing for human adjustments according to a clear rule of
+behavior and against the side which appears to stand for settlement in
+accordance with its own unaccountable will.
+
+Public opinion, in this theory, is a reserve of force brought into
+action during a crisis in public affairs. Though it is itself an
+irrational force, under favorable institutions, sound leadership
+and decent training the power of public opinion might be placed at
+the disposal of those who stood for workable law as against brute
+assertion. In this theory, public opinion does not make the law. But by
+canceling lawless power it may establish the condition under which law
+can be made. It does not reason, investigate, invent, persuade, bargain
+or settle. But, by holding the aggressive party in check, it may
+liberate intelligence. Public opinion in its highest ideal will defend
+those who are prepared to act on their reason against the interrupting
+force of those who merely assert their will.
+
+The action of public opinion at its best would not, let it be noted,
+be a continual crusade on behalf of reason. When power, however
+absolute and unaccountable, reigns without provoking a crisis, public
+opinion does not challenge it. Somebody must challenge arbitrary power
+first. The public can only come to his assistance.
+
+
+3
+
+That, I think, is the utmost that public opinion can effectively do.
+With the substance of the problem it can do nothing usually but meddle
+ignorantly or tyrannically. It has no need to meddle with it. Men in
+their active relation to affairs have to deal with the substance, but
+in that indirect relationship when they can act only through uttering
+praise or blame, making black crosses on white paper, they have done
+enough, they have done all they can do if they help to make it possible
+for the reason of other men to assert itself.
+
+For when public opinion attempts to govern directly it is either
+a failure or a tyranny. It is not able to master the problem
+intellectually, nor to deal with it except by wholesale impact. The
+theory of democracy has not recognized this truth because it has
+identified the functioning of government with the will of the people.
+This is a fiction. The intricate business of framing laws and of
+administering them through several hundred thousand public officials is
+in no sense the act of the voters nor a translation of their will.
+
+But although the acts of government are not a translation of public
+opinion, the principal function of government is to do specifically, in
+greater detail, and more continually what public opinion does crudely,
+by wholesale, and spasmodically. It enforces some of the working rules
+of society. It interprets them. It detects and punishes certain kinds
+of aggression. It presides over the framing of new rules. It has
+organized force which is used to counteract irregular force.
+
+It is also subject to the same corruption as public opinion. For when
+government attempts to impose the will of its officials, instead of
+intervening so as to steady adjustments by consent among the parties
+directly interested, it becomes heavy-handed, stupid, imperious, even
+predatory. For the public official, though he is better placed to
+understand the problem than a reader of newspapers, and though he is
+much better able to act, is still fundamentally external to the real
+problems in which he intervenes. Being external, his point of view is
+indirect, and so his action is most appropriate when it is confined to
+rendering indirect assistance to those who are directly responsible.
+
+Therefore, instead of describing government as an expression of the
+people’s will, it would seem better to say that government consists
+of a body of officials, some elected, some appointed, who handle
+professionally, and in the first instance, problems which come to
+public opinion spasmodically and on appeal. Where the parties directly
+responsible do not work out an adjustment, public officials intervene.
+When the officials fail, public opinion is brought to bear on the issue.
+
+
+4
+
+This, then, is the ideal of public action which our inquiry suggests.
+Those who happen in any question to constitute the public should
+attempt only to create an equilibrium in which settlements can be
+reached directly and by consent. The burden of carrying on the work of
+the world, of inventing, creating, executing, of attempting justice,
+formulating laws and moral codes, of dealing with the technic and the
+substance, lies not upon public opinion and not upon government but
+on those who are responsibly concerned as agents in the affair. Where
+problems arise, the ideal is a settlement by the particular interests
+involved. They alone know what the trouble really is. No decision by
+public officials or by commuters reading headlines in the train can
+usually and in the long run be so good as settlement by consent among
+the parties at interest. No moral code, no political theory can usually
+and in the long run be imposed from the heights of public opinion,
+which will fit a case so well as direct agreement reached where
+arbitrary power has been disarmed.
+
+It is the function of public opinion to check the use of force in a
+crisis, so that men, driven to make terms, may live and let live.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+THE QUESTION ARISTOTLE ASKED
+
+
+These conclusions are sharply at variance with the accepted theory of
+popular government. That theory rests upon the belief that there is
+a public which directs the course of events. I hold that this public
+is a mere phantom. It is an abstraction. The public in respect to a
+railroad strike may be the farmers whom the railroad serves; the public
+in respect to an agricultural tariff may include the very railroad men
+who were on strike. The public is not, as I see it, a fixed body of
+individuals. It is merely those persons who are interested in an affair
+and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.
+
+Since these random publics cannot be expected to deal with the merits
+of a controversy, they can give their support with reasonable assurance
+that it will do good only if there are easily recognizable and yet
+pertinent signs which they can follow. Are there such signs? Can they
+be discovered? Can they be formulated so they might be learned and
+used? The chapters of this second part are an attempt to answer these
+questions.
+
+The signs must be of such a character that they can be recognized
+without any substantial insight into the substance of a problem. Yet
+they must be relevant to the solution of the problem. They must be
+signs which will tell the members of a public where they can best align
+themselves so as to promote the solution. In short, they must be guides
+to reasonable action for the use of uninformed people.
+
+The environment is complex. Man’s political capacity is simple. Can
+a bridge be built between them? The question has haunted political
+science ever since Aristotle first formulated it in the great seventh
+book of his _Politics_. He answered it by saying that the community
+must be kept simple and small enough to suit the faculties of its
+citizens. We who live in the Great Society are unable to follow
+his advice. The orthodox democrats answered Aristotle’s question by
+assuming that a limitless political capacity resides in public opinion.
+A century of experience compels us to deny this assumption. For us,
+then, the old question is unanswered; we can neither reject the Great
+Society as Aristotle did, nor exaggerate the political capacity of
+the citizen as the democrats did. We are forced to ask whether it
+is possible for men to find a way of acting effectively upon highly
+complex affairs by very simple means.
+
+I venture to think that this problem may be soluble, that principles
+can be elucidated which might effect a successful junction between the
+intricacies of the environment and the simplicities of human faculty.
+It goes without saying that what I shall present here is no final
+statement of these principles. At most and at best it may be a clue,
+with some illustrations, that can be developed by research. But even
+that much assurance seems to me rash in the light of the difficulties
+which the problem has always presented, and so, following Descartes, I
+add that “after all, it is possible I may be mistaken; and it is but a
+little copper and glass I take for gold and diamonds.”[17]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] _Discourse on Method_, Part I.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+THE NATURE OF A PROBLEM
+
+
+1
+
+Somewhat in the spirit of Descartes, let us begin by supposing that
+your whole experience were confined to one glimpse of the world. There
+would be, I think, no better or worse in your sight, neither good men
+nor bad, patriots nor profiteers, conservatives nor radicals. You would
+be a perfect neutral. From such an impression of things, it would never
+occur to you that the crest of a mountain endured longer than the crest
+of a wave, that people moved about and that trees did not, or that the
+roar of an orator would pass sooner than the roar of Niagara.
+
+Lengthen your experience, and you would begin to notice differences
+in the constancy of things. You would know day and night, perhaps,
+but not winter and summer, movement in space, but little of age in
+time. And if you then formulated your social philosophy, would you not
+almost certainly conclude that the things you saw people doing then
+it was ordained they should do always, and that their characters as
+you had seen them that day would be thus and so forever? And would
+not the resulting treatise pass almost unnoticed in any collection of
+contemporary disquisitions on the nations, the races, the classes or
+the sexes?
+
+But the more you lengthened the span of your impression, the more
+variability you would note, until at last you would say with Heraclitus
+that all things flow. For when the very stars and the rocks were seen
+to have a history, men and their institutions and customs, habits and
+ideals, theories and policies could seem only relatively permanent. And
+you would have to conclude that what at first glance you had called
+a constant turns out after you had watched it longer merely to be
+changing a little more slowly than something else.
+
+With sufficiently long experience you would indeed be bound to
+conclude that while the diverse elements that bear upon the life of
+men, including the characters of men themselves, were changing, yet
+they were not changing at the same pace. Things multiply, they grow,
+they learn, they age, they wear out and they die at different rates.
+An individual, his companions, his implements, his institutions, his
+creeds, his needs, his means of satisfaction, evolve unevenly, and
+endure unevenly. Events do not concur harmoniously in time. Some hurry,
+some straggle, some push and some drag. The ranks have always to be
+reformed.
+
+Instead of that one grand system of evolution and progress, which
+the nineteenth century found so reassuring, there would appear to be
+innumerable systems of evolution, variously affecting each other, some
+linked, some in collision, but each in some fundamental aspect moving
+at its own pace and on its own terms.
+
+The disharmonies of this uneven evolution are the problems of mankind.
+
+
+2
+
+Suppose a man who knew nothing of the history of the nineteenth century
+were shown the tables compiled in the _Statistical Abstract of the
+United States_ for the period from 1800 to 1918: He would note that
+the population of the world had multiplied two and a half times; its
+total commerce 42 times; its shipping tonnage more than 7 times; its
+railways 3664 times; its telegraphs 317 times; its cotton production 17
+times; its coal 113 times; its pig iron 77 times. Could he doubt that
+in a century of such uneven changes men had faced revolutionary social
+problems?
+
+Could he not infer from these figures alone that there had been great
+movements of population, vast changes in men’s occupation, in the
+character of their labor, their wants, their standards of living,
+their ambitions? Would he not fairly infer that the political system
+which had existed in 1800 must have altered vastly with these new
+relationships, that customs, manners and morals appropriate to the
+settled, small and more or less self-contained communities of 1800 had
+been subjected to new strains and had probably been thoroughly revised?
+As he imagined the realities behind the tables, would he not infer that
+as men lived through the changes which these cold figures summarize
+they had been in conflict with their old habits and ideals, that the
+process of making new habits and adjustments must have gone on subject
+to trial and error with hopefulness over material progress and yet much
+disorder and confusion of soul?
+
+
+3
+
+For a more specific illustration of the nature of a problem we may
+examine the problem of population in its simplest form. When Malthus
+first stated it he assumed, for the purposes of argument, two elements
+evolving at different rates. Population, he said, doubled every
+twenty-five years; the produce of land could be increased in the same
+time by an amount “equal to what it at present produces.”[18] He was
+writing about the year 1800. The population of England he estimated
+at seven millions, and the food supply as adequate to that number.
+There was then, in 1800, no problem. By 1825 the population, according
+to his estimate of its rate of increase, would have doubled, but the
+food supply would also have doubled. There would be no problem of
+population. But by 1850 the population would stand at twenty-eight
+millions; the food supply would have increased only by an amount to
+support an additional seven millions. The problem of excess population,
+or, if you like, of food scarcity, would have appeared. For while in
+1800 and in 1825 the food available for each person would be the same,
+in 1850, owing to the uneven rate of growth, there would be only a
+three-quarter ration for each person. And this altered relationship
+Malthus rightly called a problem.
+
+Suppose, now, we complicate Malthus’s argument a bit by assuming
+that in 1850 people had learned to eat less and felt more fit on the
+three-quarter ration. There would then be no problem in 1850, for the
+adjustment of the two variables—food and people—would be satisfactory.
+Or, on the contrary, suppose that soon after 1800 people had demanded a
+higher standard of living and expected more food, though the necessary
+additional food was not produced. These new demands would create a
+problem. Or suppose, as was actually the case,[19] the food supply
+increased faster than Malthus had assumed it could, though population
+did not. The problem of population would not arise at the date he
+predicted. Or suppose the increase of population was reduced by birth
+control. The problem, as Malthus first stated it, would not arise.[20]
+Or suppose the food supply increased faster than the population could
+consume it. There would then be a problem not of population but of
+agricultural surplus.
+
+In an absolutely static society there would be no problems. A problem
+is the result of change. But not of the change in any self-contained
+element. Change would be unnoticeable unless we could measure it
+against some other element which did not change at the same pace. If
+everything in the universe expanded at a mile a minute, or shrank at
+the same rate, we should never know it. For all we can tell we may
+be the size of a mosquito one moment in the sight of God, and of an
+elephant the next; we cannot tell if mosquitoes and elephants and
+chairs and planets change in proportion. Change is significant only in
+relation to something else.
+
+The change which constitutes a problem is an altered relationship
+between two dependent variables.[21] Thus the automobile is a problem
+in the city not because there are so many automobiles but because there
+are too many for the width of the streets, too many for the number of
+competent drivers, because the too narrow streets are filled with too
+many cars driven too recklessly for the present ability of the police
+to control them. Because the automobile is manufactured faster than
+old city streets can be widened, because some persons acquire cars
+faster than they acquire prudence and good manners, because automobiles
+collect in cities faster than policemen can be recruited, trained or
+paid for by slow-yielding taxpayers, there is an automobile problem
+made evident by crowding, obnoxious fumes and collisions.
+
+But though these evils seem to arise from the automobile, the fault
+lies not in the automobile but in the relation between the automobile
+and the city. This may sound like splitting hairs, but unless we
+insist upon it we never define a problem accurately nor lay it open
+successfully to solution.
+
+The problem of national defense, for example, can never be stated by a
+general staff which draws upon its inner consciousness for an estimate
+of the necessary force. The necessary force can be estimated only in
+relation to the probable enemy, and the military problem whether of
+peace or of war lies always in the ratio of forces. Military force
+is a purely relative conception. The British Navy is helpless as a
+child against the unarmed mountaineers of Tibet. The French Army has
+no force as against fishing smacks in the Pacific Ocean. Force has
+to be measured against its objective: the tiger and the shark are
+incomparable one with the other.
+
+Now a settled and accepted ratio of forces that might collide is a
+state of military peace. A competitive and, therefore, constantly
+unbalanced ratio is a prelude to war. The Canadian border presents no
+military problem, not because Canada’s forces and our own are equal
+but because, happily, we do not compare them. They are independent
+variables, having no relation one with the other, and a change in the
+one does not affect the other. In capital ships we are confronted now
+with no naval problem in the Atlantic or in the Pacific, because with
+Britain and Japan, the only two comparable powers, we are agreed on
+a ratio by treaty.[22] But for all types of ships not subject to the
+ratio there is a naval problem in both oceans, and if the Washington
+Treaty should lapse the problem which it settled would recur. It would
+recur because the synchronized progress of the three navies would be
+replaced by a relatively uneven progress of each as compared with the
+others.
+
+
+4
+
+The field of economic activity is the source of many problems. For, as
+Cassel says,[23] we include within the meaning of the word economic
+those means of satisfying human wants which are “usually available only
+in a limited quantity.” Since “the wants of civilized human beings as
+a whole are,” for all practical purposes, “unlimited,” there is in all
+economic life the constant necessity of reaching “an adjustment between
+the wants and the means of supplying the wants.” This disharmony of
+supply and demand is the source of an unending series of problems.
+
+We may note at once that the economist does not claim as his province
+the whole range of adjustments between human wants and the means of
+satisfying them. He usually omits, for example, the human need to
+breathe air. For since the air is unlimited in quantity the human
+need of it is not frustrated, and the surplus air not required by
+men in no way impinges upon their lives. Yet there may be a scarcity
+of air, as, for example, in a congested tenement district. Then an
+economic problem is engendered which has to be met, let us say, by
+building laws requiring a certain number of cubic feet of air a person.
+The economist, in other words, takes as his field of interest the
+maladjustment between human wants and those means of satisfying them
+which are available, but only in limited quantities. In a world where
+every want was satisfied there would be no problems for him; nor any
+in a world where men had no wants; nor any in a world where the only
+wants men had could be supplied by a change on their part of their own
+states of consciousness. To create a problem there must be at least two
+dependent but separated variables: wants and the means of satisfaction;
+and these two variables must have a disposition to alter so that an
+antecedent equilibrium is disturbed.
+
+In the measure, says Cassel, in which the economic system succeeds in
+securing an adjustment between the wants and the means of supplying the
+wants we speak of it as a sound economy. “This task may be accomplished
+in three different ways: first, by eliminating the less important
+wants and so restricting the total wants; secondly, by making the best
+possible use of the means available for the purposes in question; and,
+thirdly, by increased personal exertions.”[24]
+
+Since the problem arises out of the disharmony of supply and demand,
+its solution is to be found by increasing the supply or restricting
+the demand. The choice of method depends first of all on which it
+is possible in specific cases to follow, and, second, granting the
+possibility, on which is the easier or the preferred. Either method
+will give what we acknowledge as a solution. For when two variables are
+in an adjustment which does not frustrate the expectations of either
+there is no problem, and none will be felt to exist.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[18] T. R. Malthus, _An Essay on the Principle of Population_, Chapter
+II.
+
+[19] A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The Population Problem_, p. 28.
+
+[20] Malthus himself recognised this in a later edition of his book.
+
+[21] _Cf._ in this connection W. F. Ogburn, _Social Change_, _passim_,
+but particularly Part IV, I, on “The Hypothesis of Cultural Lag.”
+
+[22] However, the controversy over gun elevation demonstrates how
+difficult it is to maintain an equilibrium of force where so many
+factors are variable.
+
+[23] Gustav Cassel, _A Theory of Social Economy_, Chapter I.
+
+[24] _Ibid._, p. 7.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+SOCIAL CONTRACTS
+
+
+1
+
+It is impossible to imagine in the universe a harmony of all things,
+each with all the others. The only harmonies we know or can conceive,
+outside of what Mr. Santayana calls the realm of essences, are partial
+adjustments which sacrifice to some one end all purposes which conflict
+with it. That the tree may bear fruit for us, we readily kill the
+insects that eat the fruit. So the fruit will ripen for us, we take no
+account of the disharmony we create for innumerable flies.
+
+In the light of eternity it may be wholly unimportant whether the
+harmonies on this earth are suited to men or to insects. For in the
+light of eternity and from the point of view of the universe as a whole
+nothing can be what we call good or bad, better or worse. All ideas of
+value are measurements of some part of this universe with some other
+part, and it is no more possible to value the universe as a whole than
+it is to weigh it as a whole. For all scales of value and of weight are
+contained within it. To judge the whole universe you must, like a god,
+be outside of it, a point of view no mortal mind can adopt.
+
+Unfortunately for the fly, therefore, we are bound to judge him by
+human values. In so far as we have power over him, he must submit to
+the harmonies we seek to establish. We may as a sporting matter admit
+his theoretical right to establish his own harmonies against us if he
+can, and to call them better if he likes, but for us that only is good
+which is good for man. Our universe consists of all that it contains,
+not as such, not as the fly knows it, but in its relation to us. From
+any other point of view but man’s, his conception of the universe is
+askew. It has an emphasis and a perspective, it is shaped to a design
+which is altogether human. The very forms, colors, odors and sound
+of things are dependent for their quality upon our sense organs.
+Their relations are seen and understood against the background of our
+necessities.
+
+In the realm of man’s interests and purposes and desires, the
+perspectives are even narrower. There is no human point of view here,
+but only the points of view of men. None is valid for all human beings,
+none for all of human history, none for all corners of the globe. An
+opinion of the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the pleasant
+and the unpleasant, is dated, is localized, is relative. It applies
+only to some men at some time in some place under some circumstances.
+
+
+2
+
+Against this deep pluralism thinkers have argued in vain. They have
+invented social organisms and national souls, and oversouls, and
+collective souls; they have gone for hopeful analogies to the beehive
+and the anthill, to the solar system, to the human body; they have
+gone to Hegel for higher unities and to Rousseau for a general will
+in an effort to find some basis of union. For though men do not think
+alike, nor want the same things, though their private interests are
+so distinct that they do not merge easily in any common interest,
+yet men cannot live by themselves, nor realize even their private
+purposes without taking into account the behavior of other people. We,
+however, no longer expect to find a unity which absorbs diversity. For
+us the conflicts and differences are so real that we cannot deny them
+and instead of looking for identity of purpose we look simply for an
+accommodation of purposes.
+
+When we speak, then, about the solution of a problem in the Great
+Society, we may mean little more than that two conflicting interests
+have found a _modus vivendi_. It may be, of course, that they have
+really removed all their differences, that one interest has yielded
+to the other, or both to a third. But the solutions of most social
+problems are not so neat as this; everything does not fit perfectly
+as in the solution of a puzzle. The conflicting interests merely find
+a way of giving a little and taking a little, and of existing together
+without too much bad blood.
+
+They still remain separate interests. The men involved still think
+differently. They have no union of mind or purpose. But they travel
+their own ways without collision, and even with some reliance at times
+upon the others’ help. They know their rights and their duties, what
+to expect and what will be expected. Their rights are usually less
+than they claim, and their duties heavier than they like, yet, because
+they are in some degree enforced, conduct is rendered intelligible
+and predictable, and coöperation exists in spite of the conflicting
+interests of men.
+
+The _modus vivendi_ of any particular historical period, the system
+of rights and duties, has generally acquired some high religious or
+ideal sanction. The thinkers laureate of the age will generally manage
+to show that the institutions, the laws, the morality and the custom
+of that age are divinely inspired. These are tiresome illusions which
+have been exploded a thousand times. The prevailing system of rights
+and duties at any time is at bottom a slightly antiquated formulation
+of the balance of power among the active interests in the community.
+There is always a certain lag, as Mr. Ogburn calls it, so that the
+system of rights and duties men are taught is generally a little less
+contemporary than the system they would find most convenient. But,
+whether the system is obsolete or not, in its naked origin, a right
+is a claim somebody was able to assert, and a duty is an obligation
+somebody was able to impose.
+
+
+3
+
+The prevailing system of rights and duties is designed to regulate the
+conflicting purposes of men. An established right is a promise that
+a certain kind of behavior will be backed by the organized force of
+the state or at least by the sentiment of the community; a duty is a
+promise that failure to respect the rights of others in a certain way
+will be punished. The punishment may be death, imprisonment, loss of
+property, the nullification of a right, the expression of disapproval.
+In short, the system of rights and duties is the whole system of
+promises which the courts and public sentiment will support. It is not
+a fixed system. It varies from place to place, and from time to time,
+and with the character of the tribunals and the community. But none the
+less it makes the conduct of men somewhat rational, and establishes a
+kind of union in diversity by limiting and defining the freedom with
+which conflicting purposes can be pursued.
+
+Sometimes the promises are embodied in coercive law: Thou shalt, on
+penalty of this, do that; thou shalt not do so and so. Sometimes
+the promise is based on a contract between two parties: there is no
+obligation to make the contract, but, once made, it must be executed
+or a certain penalty paid. Sometimes the promise is based on an
+ecclesiastical code: it must be followed or the wages of sin will be
+visited either in fact or in anticipation upon the sinner. Sometimes
+the promise is based on custom: it must be respected or the price of
+nonconformity, whatever it may happen to be, must be paid. Sometimes
+the promise is based on habit: it must be executed or the disturbance
+faced which men feel when they break with their habits.
+
+The question of whether any particular right or duty shall be enforced,
+the question of how it shall be enforced, whether by the police,
+by public criticism or private conscience, will not be answered by
+reasoning _a priori_. It will be answered by the dominant interests in
+society, each imposing to the limit of its powers the system of rights
+and duties which most nearly approximates the kind of social harmony
+it finds convenient and desirable. The system will be a reflection of
+the power that each interest is able to exert. The interests which
+find the rule good will defend it; the interests which find it bad will
+attack it. Their arguments will be weapons of defense and offense; even
+the most objective appeal to reason will turn out to be an appeal to
+desert one cause and enlist in another.
+
+
+4
+
+In the controversies between interests the question will be raised as
+to the merits of a particular rule; the argument will turn on whether
+the rule is good, on whether it should be enforced with this penalty
+or that. And out of those arguments, by persuasion or coercion, the
+specific rules of society are made, enforced and revised.
+
+It is the thesis of this book that the members of the public, who
+are the spectators of action, cannot successfully intervene in a
+controversy on the merits of the case. They must judge externally, and
+they can act only by supporting one of the interests directly involved.
+It follows that the public interest in a controversy cannot turn upon
+the specific issue. On what, then, does it turn? In what phase of the
+controversy can the public successfully interest itself?
+
+Only when somebody objects does the public know there is a problem;
+when nobody any longer objects there is a solution. For the public,
+then, any rule is right which is agreeable to all concerned. It follows
+that the public interest in a problem is limited to this: that there
+shall be rules, which means that the rules which prevail shall be
+enforced, and that the unenforceable rules shall be changed according
+to a settled rule. The public’s opinion that John Smith should or
+should not do this or that is immaterial; the public does not know John
+Smith’s motives and needs, and is not concerned with them. But that
+John Smith shall do what he has promised to do is a matter of public
+concern, for unless the social contracts of men are made, enforced
+and revised according to a settled rule, social organization is
+impossible. Their conflicting purposes will engender unending problems
+unless they are regulated by some system of rights and duties.
+
+The interest of the public is not in the rules and contracts and
+customs themselves but in the maintenance of a régime of rule, contract
+and custom. The public is interested in law, not in the laws; in the
+method of law, not in the substance; in the sanctity of contract, not
+in a particular contract; in understanding based on custom, not in this
+custom or that. It is concerned in these things to the end that men in
+their active affairs shall find a _modus vivendi_; its interest is in
+the workable rule which will define and predict the behavior of men so
+that they can make their adjustments. The pressure which the public
+is able to apply through praise and blame, through votes, strikes,
+boycotts or support can yield results only if it reinforces the men who
+enforce an old rule or sponsor a new one that is needed.
+
+The public in this theory is not the dispenser of law or morals, but,
+at best, a reserve force that may be mobilized on behalf of the method
+and spirit of law and morals. In denying that the public can lay down
+the rules I have not said that it should abandon any function which
+the public now exercises. I have merely said that it should abandon
+a pretense. When the public attempts to deal with the substance it
+merely becomes the dupe or unconscious ally of a special interest. For
+there is only one common interest: that all special interests shall act
+according to settled rule. The moment you ask what rule you invade the
+realm of competing interests of special points of view, of personal,
+and class, and sectional, and national bias. The public should not ask
+what rule because it cannot answer the question. It will contribute
+its part to the solution of social problems if it recognizes that some
+system of rights and duties is necessary, but that no particular system
+is peculiarly sacred.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+THE TWO QUESTIONS BEFORE THE PUBLIC
+
+
+The multitude of untroubled rules that men live by are of no concern
+to the public. It has to deal only with the failures. Customs that are
+accepted by all who are expected to follow them, contracts that are
+carried out peaceably, promises that are kept, expectations fulfilled,
+raise no issue. Even when there has been a breach of the rule, there is
+no public question if the breach is clearly established, the aggression
+clearly identified, the penalty determined and imposed. The aggressor
+may be identified because he pleads guilty. He may be identified by
+some due process though he denies his guilt. The rule, a term under
+which I mean to include the method of detection, interpretation and
+enforcement, as well as the precept, is in either case intact. The
+force of the public can be aligned without hesitation on behalf of the
+authorities who administer the rule.
+
+There is no question for the public unless there is doubt as to the
+validity of the rule,—doubt, that is to say, about its meaning, its
+soundness or the method of its application. When there is doubt the
+public requires simple, objective tests to help it decide where it will
+enlist. These tests must, therefore, answer two questions:
+
+First, Is the rule defective?
+
+Second, How shall the agency be recognized which is most likely to mend
+it?
+
+These are, I should maintain, the only two questions which the public
+needs to answer in order to exert the greatest influence it is capable
+of exerting toward the solution of public problems. They are not,
+please note, the only questions which anybody has to answer to solve a
+problem. They are the only questions which a member of the public can
+usefully concern himself with if he wishes to avoid ignorant meddling.
+
+How then shall he know the rule is defective? How shall he recognize
+the reformer? If he is to answer those questions at all, he must be
+able to answer them quickly and without real understanding of the
+problem. Is it possible for him to do that? Can he act intelligently
+but in ignorance?
+
+I think this apparently paradoxical thing can be done in some such way
+as the next four chapters describe.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+THE MAIN VALUE OF PUBLIC DEBATE
+
+
+The individual whose action is governed by a rule is interested in its
+substance. But in those rules which do not control his own action his
+chief interest is that there should be workable rules.
+
+It follows that the membership of the public is not fixed. It changes
+with the issue: the actors in one affair are the spectators of another,
+and men are continually passing back and forth between the field
+where they are executives and the field where they are members of a
+public. The distinction between the two is not, as I said in Chapter
+III, an absolute one: there is a twilight zone where it is hard to say
+whether a man is acting executively on his opinions or merely acting
+to influence the opinion of some one else who is acting executively.
+There is often a mixture of the two types of behavior. And it is this
+mixture, as well as the lack of a clear line of distinction in all
+cases, which permits a very large confusion in affairs between a public
+and a private attitude toward them. The public point of view on a
+question is muddied by the presence in the public of spurious members,
+persons who are really acting to bend the rule in their favor while
+pretending or imagining that they are moved only by the common public
+need that there shall be an acceptable rule.
+
+At the outset it is important, therefore, to detect and to discount the
+self-interested group. In saying this I do not mean to cast even the
+slightest reflection on a union of men to promote their self-interest.
+It would be futile to do so, because we may take it as certain that men
+will act to benefit themselves whenever they think they conveniently
+can. A political theory based on the expectation of self-denial and
+sacrifice by the run of men in any community would not be worth
+considering. Nor is it at all evident that the work of the world could
+be done unless men followed their private interest and contributed to
+affairs that direct inner knowledge which they thus obtain. Moreover,
+the adjustments are likely to be much more real if they are made from
+fully conscious and thoroughly explored special points of view.
+
+Thus the genius of any illuminating public discussion is not to obscure
+and censor private interest but to help it to sail and to make it sail
+under its own colors. The true public, in my definition of that term,
+has to purge itself of the self-interested groups who become confused
+with it. It must purge itself not because private interests are bad
+but because private interests cannot successfully be adjusted to each
+other if any one of them acquires a counterfeit strength. If the true
+public, concerned only in the fact of adjustment, becomes mobilized
+behind a private interest seeking to prevail, the adjustment is false;
+it does not represent the real balance of forces in the affair and the
+solution will break down. It will break down because the true public
+will not stay mobilized very long for anything, and when it demobilizes
+the private interest which was falsely exalted will find its privileges
+unmanageable. It will be like a man placed on Jack Dempsey’s chest by
+six policemen, and then left there after the policemen have gone home
+to dinner. It will be like France placed by the Allies upon a prostrate
+Germany and then left there after the Allies have departed from Europe.
+
+The separation of the public from the self-interested group will not
+be assisted by the self-interested group. We may be sure that any body
+of farmers, business men, trade unionists will always call themselves
+the public if they can. How then is their self-interest to be detected?
+No ordinary bystander is equipped to analyze the propaganda by which
+a private interest seeks to associate itself with the disinterested
+public. It is a perplexing matter, perhaps the most perplexing in
+popular government, and the bystander’s only recourse is to insist upon
+debate. He will not be able, we may assume, to judge the merits of the
+arguments. But if he does insist upon full freedom of discussion, the
+advocates are very likely to expose one another. Open debate may lead
+to no conclusion and throw no light whatever on the problem or its
+answer, but it will tend to betray the partisan and the advocate. And
+if it has identified them for the true public, debate will have served
+its main purpose.
+
+The individual not directly concerned may still choose to join the
+self-interested group and support its cause. But at least he will
+know that he has made himself a partisan, and thus perhaps he may
+be somewhat less likely to mistake a party’s purpose for the aim of
+mankind.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+THE DEFECTIVE RULE
+
+
+1
+
+A man violates a rule and then publicly justifies his action. Here in
+the simplest form is an attack upon the validity of the rule. It is an
+appeal for a public judgment.
+
+For he claims to have acted under a new rule which is better than the
+old one. How shall the public decide as between the two? It cannot,
+we are assuming, enter into the intrinsic merits of the question. It
+follows that the public must ask the aggressor why he did not first
+seek the assent of those concerned before he violated the rule. He
+may say that he did not have time, that he acted in a crisis. In that
+event, there is no serious question for the public, and his associates
+will either thank him or call him a fool. But since the circumstances
+were admittedly exceptional they do not really establish a new rule,
+and the public may be satisfied if the parties at interest peaceably
+make the best of the result. But suppose there was no emergency.
+Suppose the innovator had time to seek assent, but did not on the
+ground that he knew what was best. He may be fairly condemned; the
+objections of the other parties may be fairly sustained.
+
+For the right of innovation by fiat cannot be defended as a working
+principle; a new rule, however excellent in intention, cannot be
+expected to work unless in some degree it has been first understood
+and approved by all who must live according to it. The innovator may
+reply, of course, that he is being condemned by a dogma which is not
+wholly proved. That may be admitted. Against the principle that a new
+rule requires assent historic experience can be cited. There have been
+many instances where a régime has been imposed on an unwilling people
+and admired later by them for its results. The dogma that assent is
+necessary is imperfect, as are most principles. But, nevertheless,
+it is a necessary assumption in society. For if no new rule required
+assent every one could make his own rule, and there would be no rules.
+The dogma therefore must be maintained, softened by the knowledge that
+exceptional times and exceptional men of their own force will make
+way with any dogma. Since the rules of society cannot be based on
+exceptions the exceptions must justify themselves.
+
+The test, therefore, of whether a rule has been justifiably broken is
+the test of assent. The question, then, is how in applying the test of
+assent a member of the public is to determine whether sufficient assent
+has been given. How is he to know whether the régime has been imposed
+by arbitrary force or in substance agreed to?
+
+
+2
+
+We wish to know if assent is lacking. We know it is lacking because
+there is open protest. Or we know it because there is a widespread
+refusal to conform. A workable rule, which has assent, will not
+evoke protest or much disobedience. How shall we, as members of the
+public, measure the significance of the protest or the extent of the
+disobedience?
+
+
+3
+
+Where very few persons are directly involved in the controversy the
+public does best not to intervene at all. One party may protest, but
+unless he protests against the public tribunals set up to adjudicate
+such disputes, his protest may be ignored. The public cannot expect
+to take part in the minutiæ of human adjustments however tragic or
+important they may be to the individuals concerned. The protest of one
+individual against another cannot be treated as a public matter. Only
+if the public tribunal is impugned does it become a public matter, and
+then only because the case may require investigation by some other
+tribunal. In such disputes the public must trust the agencies of
+adjustment acting as checks upon each other. When we remember that the
+public consists of busy men reading newspapers for half an hour or so
+a day, it is not heartless but merely prudent to deny that it can do
+detailed justice.
+
+But where many persons are involved in the controversy there is
+necessarily a public matter. For when many persons are embroiled the
+effects not only are likely to be wide but there may be need of all the
+force the public can exert in order to compel a peaceable adjustment.
+
+The public must take account of a protest voiced on behalf of a
+relatively large number of persons. But how shall the public know that
+such a protest has been made? It must look to see whether the spokesman
+is authorized. How shall it tell if he is authorized? How can it tell,
+that is to say, whether the representative is able to give assent
+by committing his constituency to a course of action? Whether the
+apparent leader is the real leader is a question which the members of
+a public cannot usually answer directly on the merits. Yet they must
+answer in some fashion and with some assurance by some rule of thumb.
+
+The rule of thumb is to throw the burden of proof on those who deny
+that the apparent leader, vested with the external signs of office,
+is the real leader. As between one nation and another, no matter how
+obnoxious the other’s government may be, if there is no open rebellion,
+public opinion cannot go behind the returns. For, unless a people is
+to engage in the hopeless task of playing politics inside another’s
+frontiers, there is no course but to hold that a nation is committed
+by the officials it fails to discharge. If there is open rebellion,
+or that milder substitute, an impending election, it may be wise
+to postpone long term settlements until a firm government has been
+seated. But settlements, if they are made at all, must be made with the
+government in office at the other nation’s capital.
+
+The same theory holds, with modifications, for large bodies of men
+within a state. If the officials of the miners’ union, for instance,
+take a position, it is perfectly idle for an employer to deny that
+they speak for the union miners. He should deny that they speak for
+the nonunion miners, but if the question at issue requires the assent
+of the union, then, unless the union itself impeaches the leaders, the
+public must accept them as authorized.
+
+But suppose the leaders are challenged within the union. How shall
+the importance of the challenge be estimated by the public? Recall
+that the object is to find out not whether the objectors are right but
+simply whether the spokesmen can in fact commit their constituents.
+In weighing the challenge the public’s concern is to know how far
+the opposition can by virtue of its numbers, or of its strategic
+importance, or its determination, impair the value of an assent. But
+if we expected the public to make judgments of this sort we should be
+asking too much of it. The importance of an opposition can be weighed,
+if at all, only by rough, external criteria. With an opposition that
+does not challenge the credentials of the spokesmen, which criticizes
+but is not in rebellion, the public has no concern. That is an internal
+affair. It is only an opposition which threatens not to conform that
+has to be considered.
+
+In such a case, if the spokesmen are elected, they can be held
+competent to give a reliable assent only until a new election has been
+held. If the spokesmen are not elective, and a rebellious opposition is
+evident, their assent can only be taken as tentative. These criteria
+do not, to be sure, weigh the importance of an opposition, but, by
+limiting the kind of settlement which can reasonably be made in face of
+an opposition, they allow for its effect.
+
+They introduce the necessary modification to make workable the general
+principle that the test of assent by large bodies of men is simply that
+their spokesmen have agreed.
+
+
+4
+
+The test of conformity is closely related to the test of assent. For
+it can be assumed that open criticism of a rule, a custom, a law, an
+institution, is already accompanied by or will soon be followed by
+evasion of that rule. It is a fairly safe hypothesis that the run of
+men wish to conform; that any body of men aroused to the point where
+they will pay the price of open heresy probably has an arguable case;
+more certainly that that body will include a considerable number
+who have passed over the line of criticism into the practice of
+nonconformity. Their argument may be wrong, the remedy may be foolish,
+but the fact that they openly criticize at some personal risk is a sign
+that the rule is not working well. Widespread criticism, therefore, has
+a significance beyond its intellectual value. It is almost always a
+symptom on the surface that the rule is unstable.
+
+When a rule is broken not occasionally but very often the rule is
+defective. It simply does not define the conduct which normally may
+be expected of men who live under it. It may sound noble. But it does
+not work. It does not adjust relations. It does not actually organize
+society.
+
+In what way the rule is defective the public cannot specifically
+determine. By the two tests I have suggested, of assent and of
+conformity, the public can determine the presence of a defect in the
+rule. But whether that defect is due to a false measure of the changing
+balance of forces involved, or to neglect of an important interest or
+some relevant circumstance, or to a bad technic of adjustment, or to
+contradictions in the rule, or to obscurity, or to lack of machinery
+for its interpretation or for the deduction of specific rules from
+general ones, the public cannot judge.
+
+It will have gone, I believe, to the limits of its normal powers if it
+judges the rule to be defective, and turns then to identify the agency
+most likely to remedy it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+THE CRITERIA OF REFORM
+
+
+1
+
+The random collections of bystanders who constitute a public could not,
+even if they had a mind to, intervene in all the problems of the day.
+They can and must play a part occasionally, I believe, but they cannot
+take an interest in, they cannot make even the coarsest judgments
+about, and they will not act even in the most grossly partisan way on,
+all the questions arising daily in a complex and changing society.
+Normally they leave their proxies to a kind of professional public
+consisting of more or less eminent persons. Most issues are never
+carried beyond this ruling group; the lay publics catch only echoes of
+the debate.
+
+If, by the push and pull of interested parties and public personages,
+settlements are made more or less continually the party in power
+has the confidence of the country. In effect, the outsiders are
+arrayed behind the dominant insiders. But if the interested parties
+cannot be made to agree, if, as a result, there is disturbance and
+chronic crisis, then the opposition among the insiders may come to
+be considered the hope of the country, and be able to entice the
+bystanders to its side.
+
+To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when
+they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said
+about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government.
+Even the most intelligent large public of which we have any experience
+must determine finally who shall wield the organized power of the
+state, its army and its police, by a choice between the Ins and Outs. A
+community where there is no choice does not have popular government. It
+is subject to some form of dictatorship or it is ruled by the intrigues
+of the politicians in the lobbies.
+
+Although it is the custom of partisans to speak as if there were
+radical differences between the Ins and the Outs, it could be
+demonstrated, I believe, that in stable and mature societies the
+differences are necessarily not profound. If they were profound, the
+defeated minority would be constantly on the verge of rebellion.
+An election would be catastrophic, whereas the assumption in every
+election is that the victors will do nothing to make life intolerable
+to the vanquished and that the vanquished will endure with good humor
+policies which they do not approve.
+
+In the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and in certain
+of the Continental countries an election rarely means even a fraction
+of what the campaigners said it would mean. It means some new faces
+and perhaps a slightly different general tendency in the management
+of affairs. The Ins may have had a bias toward collectivism; the Outs
+will lean toward individualism. The Ins may have been suspicious
+and non-coöperative in foreign affairs; the Outs will perhaps be
+more trusting or entertain another set of suspicions. The Ins may
+have favored certain manufacturing interests; the Outs may favor
+agricultural interests. But even these differing tendencies are very
+small as compared with the immense area of agreement, established habit
+and unavoidable necessity. In fact, one might say that a nation is
+politically stable when nothing of radical consequence is determined by
+its elections.
+
+There is, therefore, a certain mock seriousness about the campaigning
+for votes in well-established communities. Much of the excitement
+is not about the fate of the nation but simply about the outcome
+of the game. Some of the excitement is sincere, like any fervor
+of intoxication. And much of it is deliberately stoked up by the
+expenditure of money to overcome the inertia of the mass of the
+voters. For the most part the real difference between the Ins and the
+Outs is no more than this: the Ins, after a term of power, become so
+committed to policies and so entangled with particular interests that
+they lose their neutral freedom of decision. They cannot then intervene
+to check the arbitrary movement of the interests with which they have
+become aligned. Then it is time for the Outs to take power and restore
+a balance. The virtue of the Outs in this transaction is that they
+are not committed to those particular policies and those particular
+interests which have become overweighted.
+
+The test of whether the Ins are handling affairs effectively is the
+presence or absence of disturbing problems. The need of reform is
+recognizable, as I pointed out in the chapter before this one, by
+the test of assent and the test of conformity. But it is my opinion
+that for the most part the general public cannot back each reformer
+on each issue. It must choose between the Ins and Outs on the basis
+of a cumulative judgment as to whether problems are being solved or
+aggravated. The particular reformers must look for their support
+normally to the ruling insiders.
+
+If, however, there is to be any refinement of public opinion it must
+come from the breaking up of these wholesale judgments into somewhat
+more retail judgments on the major spectacular issues of the day. Not
+all of the issues which interest the public are within the scope of
+politics and reachable through the party system. It seems worth while,
+therefore, to see whether any canons of judgment can be formulated
+which could guide the bystanders in particular controversies.
+
+The problem is to locate by clear and coarse objective tests the actor
+in a controversy who is most worthy of public support.
+
+
+2
+
+When the rule is plain, its validity unchallenged, the breach clear and
+the aggressor plainly located, the question does not arise. The public
+supports the agents of the law, though when the law is working well
+the support of the public is like the gold reserve of a good bank: it
+is known to be there and need not be drawn upon. But in many fields
+of controversy the rule is not plain, or its validity is challenged;
+each party calls the other aggressor, each claims to be acting for
+the highest ideals of mankind. In disputes between nations, between
+sectional interests, between classes, between town and country, between
+churches, the rules of adjustment are lacking and the argument about
+them is lost in a fog of propaganda.
+
+Yet it is controversies of this kind, the hardest controversies to
+disentangle, that the public is called in to judge. Where the facts are
+most obscure, where precedents are lacking, where novelty and confusion
+pervade everything, the public in all its unfitness is compelled to
+make its most important decisions. The hardest problems are those which
+institutions cannot handle. They are the public’s problems.
+
+The one test which the members of a public can apply in these
+circumstances is to note which party to the dispute is least willing to
+submit its whole claim to inquiry and to abide by the result. This does
+not mean that experts are always expert or impartial tribunals really
+impartial. It means simply that where the public is forced to intervene
+in a strange and complex affair, the test of public inquiry is the
+surest clue to the sincerity of the claimant, to his confidence in
+his ability to stand the ordeal of examination, to his willingness to
+accept risks for the sake of his faith in the possibility of rational
+human adjustments. He may impugn a particular tribunal. But he must
+at least propose another. The test is whether, in the absence of an
+established rule, he is willing to act according to the forms of law
+and by a process through which law may be made.
+
+Of all the tests which public opinion can employ, the test of inquiry
+is the most generally useful. If the parties are willing to accept
+it, there is at once an atmosphere of reason. There is prospect of a
+settlement. Failing that there is at least a delay of summary action
+and an opportunity for the clarification of issues. And failing
+that there is a high probability that the most arbitrary of the
+disputants will be isolated and clearly identified. It is no wonder
+that this is the principle invoked for the so-called nonjusticiable
+questions in all the recent experiments under the covenant of the
+League of Nations[25] and the Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of
+International Disputes.[26] For in applying this test of inquiry, what
+we affirm is this: That there is a dispute. That the merits are not
+clear. That the policy which ought to be applied is not established.
+That, nevertheless, we of the public outside say that those who are
+quarreling must act as if there were law to cover the case. That, even
+if the material for a reasoned conclusion is lacking, we demand the
+method and spirit of reason. That we demand any sacrifice that may
+be necessary, the postponement of satisfaction of their just needs,
+the risk that one of them will be defeated and that an injustice will
+be done. These things we affirm because we are maintaining a society
+based on the principle that all controversies are soluble by peaceable
+agreement.
+
+They may not be. But on that dogma our society is founded. And that
+dogma we are compelled to defend. We can defend it, too, with a
+good enough conscience, however disconcerting some of its immediate
+consequences may be. For, by insisting in all disputes upon the
+spirit of reason, we shall tend in the long run to confirm the habit
+of reason. And where that habit prevails no point of view can seem
+absolute to him who holds it, and no problem between men so difficult
+that there is not at least a _modus vivendi_.
+
+The test of inquiry is the master test by which the public can use its
+force to extend the frontiers of reason.
+
+
+3
+
+But while the test of inquiry may distinguish the party which is
+entitled to initial support, it is of value only where one party
+refuses inquiry. If all submit to inquiry, it reveals nothing. And
+in any event it reveals nothing about the prospects of the solution
+proposed. The party seeking publicity may have less to conceal, and may
+mean well, but sincerity unfortunately is no index of intelligence.
+By what criteria are the public then to judge the new rule which is
+proposed as a solution?
+
+The public cannot tell whether the new rule will, in fact, work. It may
+assume, however, that in a changing world no rule will always work. A
+rule, therefore, should be organized so that experience will clearly
+reveal its defects. The rule should be so clear that a violation is
+apparent. But since no generality can cover all cases, this means
+simply that the rule must contain a settled procedure by which it can
+be interpreted. Thus a treaty which says that a certain territory shall
+be evacuated when certain conditions are fulfilled is quite defective,
+and should be condemned, if it does not provide a way of defining
+exactly what those conditions are and when they have been fulfilled. A
+rule, in other words, must include the means of its own clarification,
+so that a breach shall be undeniably overt. Then only does it take
+account of experience which no human intelligence can foresee.
+
+It follows from this that a rule must be organized so that it can be
+amended without revolution. Revision must be possible by consent. But
+assent is not always given, even when the arguments in favor of a
+change are overwhelming. Men will stand on what they call their rights.
+Therefore, in order that deadlock should be dissoluble, a rule should
+provide that subject to a certain formal procedure the controversy over
+revision shall be public. This will often break up the obstruction.
+Where it does not, the community is pretty certain to become engaged on
+behalf of one of the partisans. This is likely to be inconvenient to
+all concerned, and the inconvenience due to meddling in the substance
+of a controversy by a crude, violent and badly aimed public opinion at
+least may teach those directly concerned not to invoke interference the
+next time.
+
+But although amendment should be possible, it should not be continual
+or unforeseen. There should be time for habit and custom to form. The
+pot should not be made to boil all the time, or be stirred up for some
+comparatively insignificant reason, whenever an orator sees a chance
+to make himself important. Since the habits and expectations of many
+different persons are involved in an institution, some way must be
+found of giving it stability without freezing it _in statu quo_. This
+can be done by requiring that amendment shall be in order only after
+due notice.
+
+What due notice may be in each particular case, the public cannot
+say. Only the parties at interest are likely to know where the rhythm
+of their affairs can be interrupted most conveniently. Due notice
+will be one period of time for men operating on long commitments and
+another for men operating on short ones. But the public can watch to
+see whether the principle of due notice is embodied in the proposed
+settlement.
+
+To judge a new rule, then, the tests proposed here are three: Does it
+provide for its own clarification? for its own amendment by consent?
+for due notice that amendment will be proposed? The tests are designed
+for use in judging the prospects of a settlement not by its substance
+but by its procedure. A reform which satisfies these tests is normally
+entitled to public support.
+
+
+4
+
+This is as far as I know how at present to work out an answer to the
+question which we inherit from Aristotle: can simple criteria be
+formulated which will show the bystander where to align himself in
+complex affairs?
+
+I have suggested that the main value of debate is not that it reveals
+the truth about the controversy to the audience but that it may
+identify the partisans. I have suggested further that a problem exists
+where a rule of action is defective, and that its defectiveness can
+best be judged by the public through the test of assent and the test of
+conformity. For remedies I have assumed that normally the public must
+turn to the Outs as against the Ins, although these wholesale judgments
+may be refined by more analytical tests for specific issues. As samples
+of these more analytical tests I have suggested the test of inquiry for
+confused controversies, and for reforms the test of interpretation, of
+amendment and of due notice.
+
+These criteria are neither exhaustive nor definitive. Yet, however
+much tests of this character are improved by practice and reflection,
+it seems to me there always must remain many public affairs to which
+they cannot be applied. I do not believe that the public can intervene
+successfully in all public questions. Many problems cannot be advanced
+by that obtuse partisanship which is fundamentally all that the public
+can bring to bear upon them. There is no reason to be surprised,
+therefore, if the tests I have outlined, or any others that are a vast
+improvement upon them, are not readily applicable to all questions that
+are raised in the discussions of the day.
+
+I should simply maintain that where the members of a public cannot use
+tests of this sort as a guide to action, the wisest course for them is
+not to act at all. They had better be neutral, if they can restrain
+themselves, than blindly partisan. For where events are so confused or
+so subtly balanced or so hard to understand that they do not yield to
+judgments of the kind I have been outlining here, the probabilities are
+very great that the public can produce only muddle if it meddles. For
+not all problems are soluble in the present state of human knowledge.
+Many which may be soluble are not soluble with any force the public can
+exert. Some time alone will cure, and some are the fate of man. It is
+not essential, therefore, always to do something.
+
+It follows that the proper limits of intervention by the public in
+affairs are determined by its capacity to make judgments. These limits
+may be extended as new and better criteria are formulated, or as men
+become more expert through practice. But where there are no tests,
+where such tests as these cannot be used, where, in other words, only
+an opinion on the actual merits of the dispute itself would be of any
+use, any positive action the bystanders are likely to take is almost
+certain to be more of a nuisance than a benefit. Their duty is to keep
+an open mind and wait to see. The existence of a usable test is itself
+the test of whether the public ought to intervene.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[25] Articles XIII, XV.
+
+[26] Articles 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+THE PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC OPINION
+
+
+1
+
+The tests outlined in the preceding chapters have certain common
+characteristics. They all select a few samples of behavior or a
+few aspects of a proposal. They measure these samples by rough but
+objective, by highly generalized but definite standards. And they yield
+a judgment which is to justify the public in aligning itself for or
+against certain actors in the matter at issue.
+
+I do not, of course, set great store upon my formulation of these
+tests. That is wholly tentative, being put out merely as a basis of
+discussion and to demonstrate that the formulation of tests suited to
+the nature of public opinion is not impracticable. But I do attach
+great importance to the character of these tests.
+
+The principles underlying them are these:
+
+1. Executive action is not for the public. The public acts only by
+aligning itself as the partisan of some one in a position to act
+executively.
+
+2. The intrinsic merits of a question are not for the public. The
+public intervenes from the outside upon the work of the insiders.
+
+3. The anticipation, the analysis and the solution of a question are
+not for the public. The public’s judgment rests on a small sample of
+the facts at issue.
+
+4. The specific, technical, intimate criteria required in the handling
+of a question are not for the public. The public’s criteria are
+generalized for many problems; they turn essentially on procedure and
+the overt, external forms of behavior.
+
+5. What is left for the public is a judgment as to whether the actors
+in the controversy are following a settled rule of behavior or their
+own arbitrary desires. This judgment must be made by sampling an
+external aspect of the behavior of the insiders.
+
+6. In order that this sampling shall be pertinent, it is necessary to
+discover criteria, suitable to the nature of public opinion, which can
+be relied upon to distinguish between reasonable and arbitrary behavior.
+
+7. For the purposes of social action, reasonable behavior is conduct
+which follows a settled course whether in making a rule, in enforcing
+it or in amending it.
+
+It is the task of the political scientist to devise the methods of
+sampling and to define the criteria of judgment. It is the task of
+civic education in a democracy to train the public in the use of these
+methods. It is the task of those who build institutions to take them
+into account.
+
+
+2
+
+These principles differ radically from those on which democratic
+reformers have proceeded. At the root of the effort to educate a
+people for self-government there has, I believe, always been the
+assumption that the voter should aim to approximate as nearly as he
+can the knowledge and the point of view of the responsible man. He
+did not, of course, in the mass, ever approximate it very nearly. But
+he was supposed to. It was believed that if only he could be taught
+more facts, if only he would take more interest, if only he would
+read more and better newspapers, if only he would listen to more
+lectures and read more reports, he would gradually be trained to direct
+public affairs. The whole assumption is false. It rests upon a false
+conception of public opinion and a false conception of the way the
+public acts. No sound scheme of civic education can come of it. No
+progress can be made toward this unattainable ideal.
+
+This democratic conception is false because it fails to note the
+radical difference between the experience of the insider and the
+outsider; it is fundamentally askew because it asks the outsider to
+deal as successfully with the substance of a question as the insider.
+He cannot do it. No scheme of education can equip him in advance for
+all the problems of mankind; no device of publicity, no machinery
+of enlightenment, can endow him during a crisis with the antecedent
+detailed and technical knowledge which is required for executive action.
+
+The democratic ideal has never defined the function of the public. It
+has treated the public as an immature, shadowy executive of all things.
+The confusion is deep-seated in a mystical notion of society. “The
+people” were regarded as a person; their wills as a will; their ideas
+as a mind; their mass as an organism with an organic unity of which
+the individual was a cell. Thus the voter identified himself with the
+officials. He tried to think that their thoughts were his thoughts,
+that their deeds were his deeds, and even that in some mysterious
+way they were a part of him. All this confusion of identities led
+naturally to the theory that everybody was doing everything. It
+prevented democracy from arriving at a clear idea of its own limits and
+attainable ends. It obscured for the purposes of government and social
+education the separation of function and the specialization in training
+which have gradually been established in most human activities.
+
+Democracy, therefore, has never developed an education for the public.
+It has merely given it a smattering of the kind of knowledge which
+the responsible man requires. It has, in fact, aimed not at making
+good citizens but at making a mass of amateur executives. It has not
+taught the child how to act as a member of the public. It has merely
+given him a hasty, incomplete taste of what he might have to know if he
+meddled in everything. The result is a bewildered public and a mass
+of insufficiently trained officials. The responsible men have obtained
+their training not from the courses in “civics” but in the law schools
+and law offices and in business. The public at large, which includes
+everybody outside the field of his own responsible knowledge, has had
+no coherent political training of any kind. Our civic education does
+not even begin to tell the voter how he can reduce the maze of public
+affairs to some intelligible form.
+
+Critics have not been lacking, of course, who pointed out what a hash
+democracy was making of its pretensions to government. These critics
+have seen that the important decisions were taken by individuals, and
+that public opinion was uninformed, irrelevant and meddlesome. They
+have usually concluded that there was a congenital difference between
+the masterful few and the ignorant many. They are the victims of a
+superficial analysis of the evils they see so clearly. The fundamental
+difference which matters is that between insiders and outsiders. Their
+relations to a problem are radically different. Only the insider can
+make decisions, not because he is inherently a better man but because
+he is so placed that he can understand and can act. The outsider is
+necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because
+he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land. That is why excellent
+automobile manufacturers, literary critics and scientists often talk
+such nonsense about politics. Their congenital excellence, if it
+exists, reveals itself only in their own activity. The aristocratic
+theorists work from the fallacy of supposing that a sufficiently
+excellent square peg will also fit a round hole. In short, like the
+democratic theorists, they miss the essence of the matter, which is,
+that competence exists only in relation to function; that men are not
+good, but good for something; that men cannot be educated, but only
+educated for something.
+
+Education for citizenship, for membership in the public, ought,
+therefore, to be distinct from education for public office. Citizenship
+involves a radically different relation to affairs, requires different
+intellectual habits and different methods of action. The force of
+public opinion is partisan, spasmodic, simple-minded and external. It
+needs for its direction, as I have tried to show in these chapters,
+a new intellectual method which shall provide it with its own usable
+canons of judgment.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE
+
+
+1
+
+A false ideal of democracy can lead only to disillusionment and
+to meddlesome tyranny. If democracy cannot direct affairs, then a
+philosophy which expects it to direct them will encourage the people
+to attempt the impossible; they will fail, but that will interfere
+outrageously with the productive liberties of the individual. The
+public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own
+powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live
+free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
+
+
+2
+
+The source of that bewilderment lies, I think, in the attempt to
+ascribe organic unity and purpose to society. We have been taught to
+think of society as a body, with a mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a
+collection of men, women and children whose minds, souls and purposes
+are variously related. Instead of being allowed to think realistically
+of a complex of social _relations_, we have had foisted upon us by
+various great propagative movements the notion of a mythical entity,
+called Society, the Nation, the Community.
+
+In the course of the nineteenth century society was personified under
+the influence largely of the nationalist and the socialist movements.
+Each of these doctrinal influences in its own way insisted upon
+treating the public as the agent of an overmastering social purpose.
+In point of fact, the real agents were the nationalist leaders and
+their lieutenants, the social reformers and their lieutenants. But they
+moved behind a veil of imagery. And the public was habituated to think
+that any one conforming to the stereotype of nationalism or of social
+welfare was entitled to support. What the nationalist rulers thought
+and did was the nation’s purpose, and the touchstone for all patriots;
+what the reformers proposed was the benevolent consciousness of the
+human race moving mysteriously but progressively toward perfection.
+
+The deception was so generally practised that it was often practised
+sincerely. But to maintain the fiction that their purposes were the
+spirit of mankind, public men had to accustom themselves to telling the
+public only a part of what they told themselves. And, incidentally,
+they confessed to themselves only a part of the truth on which they
+were acting. Candor in public life became a question of policy and not
+a rule of life.
+
+“He may judge rightly,” Mr. Keynes once said of Mr. Lloyd George,[27]
+“that this is the best of which a democracy is capable,—to be jockeyed,
+humbugged, cajoled along the right road. A prejudice for truth or for
+sincerity as a method may be a prejudice based on some æsthetic or
+personal standard inconsistent, in politics, with practical good. We
+cannot yet tell.”
+
+We do know, as a matter of experience, that all the cards are not laid
+face up upon the table. For however deep the personal prejudice of
+the statesman in favor of truth as a method, he is almost certainly
+forced to treat truth as an element of policy. The evidence on this
+point is overwhelming. No statesman risks the safety of an army out of
+sheer devotion to truth. He does not endanger a diplomatic negotiation
+in order to enlighten everybody. He does not usually forfeit his
+advantages in an election in order to speak plainly. He does not admit
+his own mistakes because confession is so good for the soul. In so far
+as he has power to control the publication of truth, he manipulates it
+to what he considers the necessities of action, of bargaining, morale
+and prestige. He may misjudge the necessities. He may exaggerate the
+goodness of his aims. But where there is a purpose in public affairs
+there are also apparent necessities which weigh in the balance against
+the indiscreet expression of belief. The public man does not and cannot
+act on the fiction that his mind is also the public mind.
+
+You cannot account for this, as angry democrats have done by dismissing
+all public men as dishonest. It is not a question of personal morals.
+The business man, the trade-union leader, the college president, the
+minister of religion, the editor, the critic and the prophet, all feel
+as Jefferson did when he wrote that “although we often wished to go
+faster we slackened our pace that our less ardent colleagues might keep
+pace with us ... [and] by this harmony of the bold with the cautious,
+we advanced with our constituents in undivided mass.”[28]
+
+The necessity for an “undivided mass” makes men put truth in the
+second place. I do not wish to argue that the necessity is not often
+a real one. When a statesman tells me that it is not safe for him to
+disclose all the facts, I am content to trust him in this if I trust
+him at all. There is nothing misleading in a frank refusal to tell. The
+mischief comes in the pretense that all is being told, that the public
+is entirely in the confidence of the public man. And that mischief has
+its source in the sophistry that the public and all the individuals
+composing it are one mind, one soul, one purpose. It is seen to be
+an absurd sophistry, once we look it straight in the face. It is an
+unnecessary sophistry. For we do well enough with doctors, though we
+are ignorant of medicine, and with engine drivers, though we cannot
+drive a locomotive; why not, then, with a Senator, though we cannot
+pass an examination on the merits of an agricultural bill?
+
+Yet we are so deeply indoctrinated with the notion of union based
+upon identity, that we are most reluctant to admit that there is
+room in the world for different and more or less separate purposes.
+The monistic theory has an air of great stability about it; we are
+afraid if we do not hang together we shall all hang separately. The
+pluralistic theory, as its leading advocate, Mr. Laski, has pointed
+out, seems to carry with it “a hint of anarchy.”[29] Yet the suggestion
+is grossly exaggerated. There is least anarchy precisely in those
+areas of society where separate functions are most clearly defined
+and brought into orderly adjustment; there is most anarchy in those
+twilight zones between nations, between employers and employees,
+between sections and classes and races, where nothing is clearly
+defined, where separateness of purpose is covered up and confused,
+where false unities are worshiped, and each special interest is forever
+proclaiming itself the voice of the people and attempting to impose its
+purpose upon everybody as the purpose of all mankind.
+
+
+3
+
+To this confusion liberalism has with the kindest intentions
+contributed greatly. Its main insight was into the prejudices of the
+individual; the liberal discovered a method of proving that men are
+finite, that they cannot escape from the flesh. From the so-called age
+of enlightenment down to our day the heavy guns of criticism have been
+used to make men realize that they submit, as Bacon said, the shadows
+of things to the desires of the mind. Once the resistance was broken
+by proof that man belonged to the natural world, his pretensions to
+absolute certainty were attacked from every quarter. He was shown
+the history of his ideas and of his customs, and he was driven to
+acknowledge that they were bounded by time and space and circumstance.
+He was shown that there is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion
+purged of desire, for the man who holds the opinion must stand at some
+point in space and time and can see not the whole world but only the
+world as seen from that point. So men learned that they saw a little
+through their own eyes, and much more through reports of what other men
+thought they had seen. They were made to understand that all human eyes
+have habits of vision, which are often stereotyped, which always throw
+facts into a perspective; and that the whole of experience is more
+sophisticated than the naïve mind suspects. For its pictures of the
+world are drawn from things half heard and of things half seen; they
+deal with the shadows of things unsteadily, and submit unconsciously to
+the desires of the mind.
+
+It was an amazing and unsettling revelation, and liberalism never quite
+knew what to do with it. In a theater in Moscow a certain M. Yevreynoff
+carried the revelation to one of its logical conclusions. He produced
+the monodrama.[30] This is a play in which the action, the setting and
+all the characters are seen by the audience through the eyes of one
+character only, as the hero sees them, and they take on the quality
+which his mind imagines they possess. Thus in the old theater, if the
+hero drank too much, he reeled in the midst of a sober environment.
+But in M. Yevreynoff’s supremely liberal theater, if I understand
+Mr. Macgowan’s account of it correctly, the drunkard will not reel
+about the lamppost; two lampposts will reel about him, and he will be
+dressed, because that is the way he feels, like Napoleon Bonaparte.
+
+M. Yevreynoff has troubled me a good deal, for he seemed to have
+finished off the liberal with a fool’s cap, and left him sitting in a
+world that does not exist, except as so many crazy mirrors reflecting
+his own follies one upon the other. But then I recalled that M.
+Yevreynoff’s logic was defective and make-believe. He had all the time
+stood soberly outside his own drunken hero, and so had his audience;
+the universe had not after all gone up in the smoke of one fantasy; the
+drunken hero had his point of view, but, after all, there were others,
+just as authentic, with which in the course of his career he might
+collide. There might be a policeman, for example, with fantasies to be
+sure, but his own, who would break in upon the monodrama and remind the
+hero, and us, that when we submit the shadows of things to the desires
+of the mind we do not submit the things themselves.
+
+But while all this does vindicate the sanity of the liberal criticism,
+it does not answer the question: since every action has to be taken by
+somebody, since everybody is in some degree a drunken hero with two
+lampposts teetering about him, how can any common good be furthered by
+this creature who is dominated by his special purposes? The answer was
+that it could be furthered by taming his purposes, enlightening them
+and fitting them into each other as the violin and the drum are fitted
+together into the orchestra. The answer was not acceptable in the
+nineteenth century, when men, in spite of all their iconoclasm, were
+still haunted by the phantom of identity. So liberals refused to write
+harmonious but separate parts for the violinist and the drummer. They
+made, instead, a noble appeal to their highest instincts. They spoke
+over the heads of men to man.
+
+These general appeals were as vague as they were broad. They gave
+particular men no clue as to how to behave sincerely, but they
+furnished them with an excellent masquerade when they behaved
+arbitrarily. Thus the trappings of liberalism came into the service of
+commercial exploiters, of profiteers and prohibitionists and jingoes,
+of charlatans and the makers of buncombe.
+
+For liberalism had burned down the barn to roast the pig. The discovery
+of prejudice in all particular men gave the liberal a shock from
+which he never recovered. He was so utterly disconcerted by his own
+discovery of a necessary but perfectly obvious truth, that he took
+flight into generalities. The appeal to everybody’s conscience gave
+nobody a clue how to act; the voter, the politician, the laborer, the
+capitalist had to construct their own codes _ad hoc_, accompanied
+perhaps by an expansive liberal sentiment, but without intellectual
+guidance from liberal thought. In time, when liberalism had lost its
+accidental association with free trade and _laissez faire_, through
+their abandonment in practice, it sadly justified itself as a necessary
+and useful spirit, as a kind of genial spook worth having around the
+place. For when individual men, guided by no philosophy but their own
+temporary rationalizations, got themselves embroiled, the spook would
+appear and in a peroration straighten out the more arbitrary biases
+they displayed.
+
+Yet even in this disembodied state liberalism is important. It tends
+to awaken a milder spirit; it softens the hardness of action. But it
+does not dominate action, because it has eliminated the actor from its
+scheme of things. It cannot say: You do this and you do that, as all
+ruling philosophies must. It can only say: That isn’t fair, that’s
+selfish, that’s tyrannical. Liberalism has been, therefore, a defender
+of the under dog, and his liberator, but not his guide, when he is
+free. Top dog himself, he easily leaves his liberalism aside, and to
+liberals the sour reflection that they have forged a weapon of release
+but not a way of life.
+
+The liberals have misunderstood the nature of the public to which
+they appealed. The public in any situation is, in fact, merely those
+persons, indirectly concerned, who might align themselves in support
+of one of the actors. But the liberal took no such uninflated view of
+the public. He assumed that all mankind was within hearing, that all
+mankind when it heard would respond homogeneously because it had a
+single soul. His appeal to this cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested
+intuition in everybody was equivalent to an appeal to nobody.
+
+No such fallacy is to be found in the political philosophies which
+active men have lived by. They have all assumed, as a matter of course,
+that in the struggle against evil it was necessary to call upon some
+specific agent to do the work. Even when the thinker was out of temper
+with the human race, he had always hitherto made somebody the hero of
+his campaign. It was the peculiarity of liberalism among theories which
+have played a great part in the world that it attempted to eliminate
+the hero entirely.
+
+Plato would certainly have thought this strange: his _Republic_ is a
+tract on the proper education of a ruling class. Dante, in the turmoil
+of thirteenth century Florence, seeking order and stability, addressed
+himself not to the conscience of Christendom but to the Imperial Party.
+The great state builders of modern times, Hamilton, Cavour, Bismarck,
+Lenin, each had in mind somebody, some group of real people, who
+were to realize his program. The agents in the theory have varied,
+of course; here they are the landlords, then the peasants, or the
+unions, or the military class, or the manufacturers; there are theories
+addressed to a church, to the ruling classes in particular nations, to
+some nation or race. The theories are always, except in the liberal
+philosophy, addressed to somebody.
+
+By comparison the liberal philosophy has an air of vague unworldiness.
+Yet the regard of men for it has been persistent; somehow or other with
+all the lapses in its logic and with all its practical weaknesses it
+touches a human need. These appeals from men to man: are they not a way
+of saying that men desire peace, that there is a harmony attainable in
+which all men can live and let live? It seems so to me. The attempt
+to escape from particular purposes into some universal purpose, from
+personality into something impersonal, is, to be sure, a flight from
+the human problem, but it is at the same time a demonstration of how
+we wish to see that problem solved. We seek an adjustment, as perfect
+as possible, as untroubled as it was before we were born. Even if
+man were a fighting animal, as some say he is, he would wish for a
+world in which he could fight perfectly, with enemies fleet enough to
+extend him and not too fleet to elude him. All men desire their own
+perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own
+terms. Because liberalism could not accommodate the universal need of
+adjustment to the permanence and the reality of individual purpose, it
+remained an incomplete, a disembodied philosophy. It was frustrated
+over the ancient problem of the One and the Many. Yet the problem is
+not so insoluble once we cease to personify society. It is only when
+we are compelled to personify society that we are puzzled as to how
+many separate organic individuals can be united in one homogeneous
+organic individual. This logical underbrush is cleared away if we
+think of society not as the name of a thing but as the name of all
+the adjustments between individuals and their things. Then, we can
+say without theoretical qualms what common sense plainly tells us is
+so: it is the individuals who act, not society; it is the individuals
+who think, not the collective mind; it is the painters who paint,
+not the artistic spirit of the age; it is the soldiers who fight
+and are killed, not the nation; it is the merchant who exports, not
+the country. It is their relations with each other that constitute
+a society. And it is about the ordering of those relations that the
+individuals not executively concerned in a specific disorder may have
+public opinions and may intervene as a public.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[27] John Maynard Keynes, _A Revision of the Treaty_, p. 4.
+
+[28] In a letter to William Wirt, cited by John Sharp Williams, _Thomas
+Jefferson_, p. 7.
+
+[29] Harold J. Laski, _Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty_, p. 24.
+
+[30] Kenneth Macgowan, _The Theatre of Tomorrow_, pp. 249–50.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+ABSENTEE RULERS
+
+
+1
+
+The practical effect of the monistic theories of society has been to
+rationalize that vast concentrating of political and economic power in
+the midst of which we live. Since society was supposed to have organic
+purposes of its own, it came to seem quite reasonable that these
+purposes should be made manifest to a people by laws and decisions from
+a central point. Somebody had to have a purpose revealed to him which
+could be treated as the common purpose; if it was to be accepted it had
+to be enforced by command; if it was really to look like the national
+purpose, it had to be handed down as a rule binding upon all. Thus men
+could say with Goethe:
+
+  “And then a mighty work completed stands,
+  One mind suffices for a thousand hands.”[31]
+
+In this fashion the eulogies of the Great Society have been made. Two
+thousand years ago it was possible for whole civilizations as mature as
+the Chinese and the Greco-Roman to coexist in total indifference to one
+another. Today the food supplies, the raw materials, the manufactures,
+the communications and the peace of the world constitute one great
+system which cannot be thrown severely out of balance in any part
+without disturbing the whole.
+
+Looked at from the top, the system in its far-flung and intricate
+adjustments has a certain grandeur. It might, as some hopeful persons
+think, even ultimately mean the brotherhood of man since all men
+living in advanced communities are now in quite obvious fashion
+dependent upon one another. But the individual man cannot look at the
+system steadily from the top or see it in its ultimate speculative
+possibilities. For him it means in practice, along with the rise in
+certain of his material standards of life, a nerve-wracking increase
+of the incalculable forces that bear upon his fate. My neighbor in the
+country who borrowed money to raise potatoes which he cannot sell for
+cash looks at the bills from the village store asking for immediate
+cash payments, and does not share the philosophic hopeful view of the
+interdependence of the world. When unseen commission merchants in New
+York City refuse his potatoes, the calamity is as dumfounding as a
+drought or a plague of locusts.
+
+The harvest in September of the planting in May is now determined not
+only by wind and weather, which his religion has from time immemorial
+justified, but by a tangle of distant human arrangements of which
+only loose threads are in his hands. He may live more richly than his
+ancestors; he may be wealthier and healthier and, for all he knows,
+even happier. But he gambles with the behavior of unseen men in a
+bewildering way. His relations with invisibly managed markets are
+decisively important for him; his own foresight is not dependable. He
+is a link in a chain that stretches beyond his horizon.
+
+The rôle that salesmanship and speculation play is a measure of the
+spread between the work men do and the results. To market the output
+of Lancashire, says Dibblee,[32] “the merchants and warehousemen of
+Manchester and Liverpool, not to mention the marketing organizations
+in other Lancashire towns, have a greater capital employed than that
+required in all the manufacturing industries of the cotton trade.” And,
+according to Anderson’s calculations,[33] the grain received at Chicago
+in 1915 was sold sixty-two times in futures, as well as an unknown
+number of times in spot transactions. Where men produce for invisible
+and uncertain markets “the initial plans of enterprisers”[34] cannot be
+adequate. The adjustments, often very crude and costly, are effected by
+salesmanship and speculation.
+
+Under these conditions neither the discipline of the craftsman who
+controls his process from beginning to end nor the virtues of thrift,
+economy and work are a complete guide to a successful career. Defoe in
+his _Complete English Tradesman_[35] could say that “trade is not a
+ball where people appear in masque and act a part to make sport ... but
+is a plain, visible scene of honest life ... supported by prudence and
+frugality” ... and so “prudent management and frugality will increase
+any fortune to any degree.” Benjamin Franklin might opine that “he that
+gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary expenses
+excepted) will certainly become rich, if that Being who governs
+the world, to whom all should look for a blessing on their honest
+endeavors, doth not in His wise providence, otherwise determine.” Young
+men were until quite recently exhorted in the very words of Defoe and
+Franklin, though Franklin’s rather canny allowance for the whims of
+the Almighty was not always included. But of late the gospel of success
+contains less about frugality and more about visions and the message
+of business. This new gospel, beneath all its highfalutin cant, points
+dimly though excitedly to the truth that for business success a man
+must project his mind over an invisible environment.
+
+This need has bred an imperious tendency to organization on a large
+scale. To defend themselves against the economic powers of darkness,
+against great monopolies or a devastating competition, the farmers set
+up great centralized selling agencies. Business men form great trade
+associations. Everybody organizes, until the number of committees and
+their paid secretaries cannot be computed. The tendency is pervasive.
+We have had, if I remember correctly, National Smile Week. At any rate
+we have had Nebraska which discovered that if you wish to prohibit
+liquor in Nebraska you must prohibit it everywhere. Nebraska cannot
+live by itself alone, being too weak to control an international
+traffic. We have had the socialist who was convinced that socialism
+can maintain itself only on a socialist planet. We have had Secretary
+Hughes who was convinced that capitalism could exist only on a
+capitalist planet. We have had all the imperialists who could not live
+unless they advanced the backward races. And we have had the Ku Klux
+Klansmen who were persuaded that if you organized and sold hate on a
+country-wide scale there would be lots more hate than there was before.
+We have had the Germans before 1914 who were told they had to choose
+between “world power or downfall,” and the French for some years after
+1919 who could not be “secure” in Europe unless every one else was
+insecure. We have had all conceivable manifestations of the impulse
+to seek stability in an incalculable environment by standardizing for
+one’s own apparent convenience all those who form the context of one’s
+activity.
+
+It has entailed perpetual effort to bring more and more men under the
+same law and custom, and then, of course, to assume control of the
+lawmaking and law-enforcing machinery in this larger area. The effect
+has been to concentrate decision in central governments, in distant
+executive offices, in caucuses and in steering committees. Whether
+this concentration of power is good or bad, permanent or passing, this
+at least is certain. The men who make the decisions at these central
+points are remote from the men they govern and the facts with which
+they deal. Even if they conscientiously regard themselves as agents or
+trustees, it is a pure fiction to say that they are carrying out the
+will of the people. They may govern the people wisely. They are not
+governing with the active consultation of the people. They can at best
+lay down policy wholesale in response to electorates which judge and
+act upon only a detail of the result. For the governors see a kind of
+whole which obscures the infinite varieties of particular interests;
+their vices are abstraction and generalization which appear in politics
+as legalism and bureaucracy. The governed, on the contrary, see vivid
+aspects of a whole which they can rarely imagine, and their prevailing
+vice is to mistake a local prejudice for a universal truth.
+
+The widening distance between the centers where decisions are taken
+and the places where the main work of the world is done has undermined
+the discipline of public opinion upon which all the earlier theorists
+relied.[36] A century ago the model of popular government was the
+self-sufficing township in which the voters’ opinions were formed and
+corrected by talk with their neighbors. They might entertain queer
+opinions about witches and spirits and foreign peoples and other
+worlds. But about the village itself the facts were not radically in
+dispute, and nothing was likely to happen that the elders could not
+with a little ingenuity bring under a well-known precedent of their
+common law.
+
+But under absentee government these checks upon opinion are lacking.
+The consequences are often so remote and long delayed that error is not
+promptly disclosed. The conditioning factors are distant; they do not
+count vividly in our judgments. The reality is inaccessible; the bounds
+of subjective opinion are wide. In the interdependent world, desire,
+rather than custom or objective law, tends to become the criterion of
+men’s conduct. They formulate their demands at large for “security” at
+the expense of every one else’s safety, for “morality” at the expense
+of other men’s tastes and comfort, for the fulfillment of a national
+destiny that consists in taking what you want when you want it. The
+lengthening of the interval between conduct and experience, between
+cause and effect, has nurtured a cult of self-expression in which each
+thinker thinks about his own thoughts and has subtle feelings about
+his feelings. That he does not in consequence deeply affect the course
+of affairs is not surprising.
+
+
+2
+
+The centralizing tendencies of the Great Society have not been accepted
+without protest, and the case against them has been stated again and
+again.[37] Without local institutions, said de Tocqueville, a nation
+may give itself a free government, but it does not possess the spirit
+of liberty. To concentrate power at one point is to facilitate the
+seizure of power. “What are you going to do?” Arthur Young asked some
+provincials at the time of the French Revolution. “We do not know,”
+they replied; “we must see what Paris is going to do.” Local interests
+handled from a distant central point are roughly handled by busy and
+inattentive men. And in the meantime the local training and the local
+winnowing of political talent are neglected. The overburdened central
+authority expands into a vast hierarchy of bureaucrats and clerks
+manipulating immense stacks of paper, always dealing with symbols on
+paper, rarely with things or with people. The genius of centralization
+reached its climax in the famous boast of a French minister of
+education, who said: It is three o’clock; all the pupils in the third
+grade throughout France are now composing a Latin verse.
+
+There is no need to labor the point. The more centralization the less
+can the people concerned be consulted and give conscious assent. The
+more extensive the rule laid down the less account it can take of fact
+and special circumstance. The more it conflicts with local experience,
+the more distant its source and wholesale its character, the less
+easily enforceable it is. General rules will tend to violate particular
+needs. Distantly imposed rules usually lack the sanction of consent.
+Being less suited to the needs of men, and more external to their
+minds, they rest on force rather than on custom and on reason.
+
+A centralized society dominated by the fiction that the governors are
+the spokesmen of a common will tends not only to degrade initiative
+in the individual but to reduce to insignificance the play of public
+opinion. For when the action of a whole people is concentrated, the
+public is so vast that even the crude objective judgments it might
+make on specific issues cease to be practicable. The tests indicated
+in preceding chapters by which a public might judge the workability
+of a rule or the soundness of a new proposal have little value when
+the public runs into millions and the issues are hopelessly entangled
+with each other. It is idle under such circumstances to talk about
+democracy, or about the refinement of public opinion. With such
+monstrous complications the public can do little more than at intervals
+to align itself heavily for or against the régime in power, and for
+the rest to bear with its works, obeying meekly or evading, as seems
+most convenient. For, in practice, the organic theory of society means
+a concentration of power; that is, the way the notion of one purpose
+is actually embodied in affairs. And this in turn means that men must
+either accept frustration of their own purposes or contrive somehow to
+frustrate that declared purpose of that central power which pretends it
+is the purpose of all.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] _Faust_, Part II, Act v, scene 3.
+
+[32] Dibblee, _The Laws of Supply and Demand_, cited by B. M. Anderson,
+Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 259.
+
+[33] B. M. Anderson, Jr., _The Value of Money_, p. 251.
+
+[34] _Ibid._
+
+[35] _Cf._ Werner Lombart, _The Quintessence of Capitalism_, Chapter
+VII.
+
+[36] _Cf._ my _Public Opinion_, Chapters XVI and XVII.
+
+[37] In a convenient form by J. Charles Brun, _Le Régionalisme_, pp.
+13 _et seq._ _Cf._ also Walter Thompson, _Federal Centralization_,
+Chapter XIX.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+THE REALMS OF DISORDER
+
+
+1
+
+Yet the practice of centralization and the philosophy which personifies
+society have acquired a great hold upon men. The dangers are well
+known. If, nevertheless, the practice and the theory persist, it cannot
+be merely because men have been led astray by false doctrine.
+
+If you examine the difficulties enumerated by the sponsors of great
+centralizing measures, such as national prohibition, the national child
+labor amendment, federal control of education or the nationalization of
+railroads, they are reducible, I think, to one dominating idea: that it
+is necessary to extend the area of control over all the factors in a
+problem or the problem will be insoluble anywhere.
+
+It was to this idea that Mr. Lloyd George appealed when he faced his
+critics at the end of his administration. While his words are the words
+of a skilful debater, the idea behind them might almost be called the
+supreme motive of all the imperial and centralizing tendencies of the
+Great Society:
+
+“Lord Grey sought to make peace in the Balkans. He made peace. That
+peace did not stand the jolting of the train that carried it from
+London to the Balkans. It fell to pieces before it ever reached
+Sofia. That was not his fault. The plan was good. The intentions were
+excellent. _But there were factors there which he could not control._
+He tried to prevent the Turks from entering the war against us, a most
+important matter. German diplomacy was too strong for him. He tried to
+prevent Bulgaria from entering the war against us. There again German
+diplomacy defeated us. Well, now I have never taunted Lord Grey with
+that. I do not taunt him now, but what I say is that when you get
+into the realm of foreign affairs there are things I will not say you
+cannot visualize, because you do, but there are factors you cannot
+influence.”[38]
+
+Mr. Lloyd George might have said the same of domestic affairs. There,
+too, factors abound which you cannot influence. And as empires expand
+to protect their frontiers, and then expand further to protect the
+protections to their frontiers, so central governments have been led
+step by step to take one interest after another under their control.
+
+
+2
+
+For the democracies are haunted by this dilemma: they are frustrated
+unless in the laying down of rules there is a large measure of assent;
+yet they seem unable to find solutions of their greatest problems
+except through centralized governing by means of extensive rules which
+necessarily ignore the principle of assent. The problems that vex
+democracy seem to be unmanageable by democratic methods.
+
+In supreme crises the dilemma is presented absolutely. Possibly a
+war can be fought for democracy; it cannot be fought democratically.
+Possibly a sudden revolution may be made to advance democracy; but the
+revolution itself will be conducted by a dictatorship. Democracy may
+be defended against its enemies but it will be defended by a committee
+of safety. The history of the wars and revolutions since 1914 is
+ample evidence on this point. In the presence of danger, where swift
+and concerted action is required, the methods of democracy cannot be
+employed.
+
+That is understandable enough. But how is it that the democratic method
+should be abandoned so commonly in more leisurely and less catastrophic
+times? Why in time of peace should people provoke that centralization
+of power which deprives them of control over the use of that power?
+Is it not a probable answer to say that in the presence of certain
+issues, even in time of peace, the dangers have seemed sufficiently
+menacing to cause people to seek remedies, regardless of method, by the
+shortest and easiest way at hand?
+
+It could be demonstrated, I think, that the issues which have seemed
+so overwhelming were of two kinds: those which turned on the national
+defense or the public safety and those which turned on the power of
+modern capitalism. Where the relations of a people to armed enemies are
+in question or where the relations of employee, customer or farmer to
+large industry are in question the need for solutions has outweighed
+all interest in the democratic method.
+
+In the issues engendered by the rise of the national state and the
+development of large scale industries are to be found the essentially
+new problems of the modern world. For the solution of these problems
+there are few precedents. There is no established body of custom and
+law. The field of international affairs and the field of industrial
+relations are the two great centers of anarchy in society. It is a
+pervasive anarchy. Out of the national state with its terrifying
+military force, and out of great industry with all its elaborate
+economic compulsion, the threat against personal security always rises.
+To offset it somehow, to check it and thwart it, seemed more important
+than any finical regard for the principle of assent.
+
+And so to meet the menace of the national state, its neighbors sought
+to form themselves into more powerful national states; to tame the
+power of capitalism they supported the growth of vast bureaucracies.
+Against powers that were dangerous and uncontrolled they set up powers,
+nominally their own, which were just as vast and just as uncontrolled.
+
+
+3
+
+But only for precarious intervals has security been attained by
+these vast balances of power. From 1870 to 1914 the world was held
+in equilibrium. It was upset, and the world has not yet found a new
+order. The balances of power within the nations are no less unsteady.
+For neither in industry nor in international affairs has it yet been
+possible to hold any balance long enough to fix it by rule and give it
+an institutional form. Power has been checked by power here and there
+and now and then but power has not been adjusted to power and the terms
+of the adjustment settled and accepted.
+
+The attempt to bring power under control by offsetting it with power
+was sound enough in intention. The conflicting purposes of men cannot
+be held under pacific control unless the tendency of all power to
+become arbitrary is checked by other force. All the machinery of
+conference, of peaceful negotiation, of law and the rule of reason is
+workable in large affairs only where the power of the negotiators is
+neutralized one against the other. It may be neutralized because the
+parties are in fact equally powerful. It may be neutralized because the
+weaker has invisible allies among the other powers of the world, or in
+domestic affairs among other interests in society. But before there can
+be law there must be order, and an order is an arrangement of power.
+
+The worst that can be said of the nationalists and collectivists is
+that they attempted to establish balances of power which could not
+endure. The pluralist at least would say that the end they sought must
+be attained differently, that in place of vast wholesale balances of
+power it is necessary to create many detailed balances of power. The
+people as a whole supporting a centralized government cannot tame
+capitalism as a whole. For the powers which are summed up in the term
+capitalism are many. They bear separately upon different groups of
+people. The nation as a unit does not encounter them all, and cannot
+deal with them all. It is to the different groups of people concerned
+that we must look for the power which shall offset the arbitrary power
+that bears upon them. The reduction of capitalism to workable law is
+no matter of striking at it wholesale by general enactments. It is a
+matter of defeating its arbitrary power in detail, in every factory,
+in every office, in every market, and of turning the whole network of
+relations under which industry operates from the dominion of arbitrary
+forces into those of settled rules.
+
+And so it is in the anarchy among nations. If all the acts of a citizen
+are to be treated as organically the actions of that nation, a stable
+balance of power is impossible. Here also it is necessary to break down
+the fiction of identity, to insist that the quarrel of one business man
+with another is their quarrel, and not the nation’s, a quarrel in which
+each is entitled to a vindication of his right to fair adjudication but
+not to patriotic advocacy of his cause. It is only by this dissociation
+of private interests that the mass of disputes across frontiers can
+gradually be brought under an orderly process. For a large part,
+perhaps the greatest part, of the disputes between nations is an
+accumulated mass of undetermined disputes between their nationals. If
+these essentially private disputes could be handled, without patriotic
+fervor and without confusing an oil prospector with the nation as a
+whole, with governments acting as friends of the court and not as
+advocates for a client, the balance of power between governments would
+be easier to maintain. It would not be subject to constant assault from
+within each nation by an everlasting propaganda of suspicion by private
+interests seeking national support. And if only the balance of power
+between governments could be stabilized long enough to establish a line
+of precedents for international conference, a longer peace might result.
+
+
+4
+
+These in roughest outline are some of the conclusions, as they
+appear to me, of the attempt to bring the theory of democracy into
+somewhat truer alignment with the nature of public opinion. I have
+conceived public opinion to be, not the voice of God, nor the voice
+of society, but the voice of the interested spectators of action. I
+have, therefore, supposed that the opinions of the spectators must be
+essentially different from those of the actors, and that the kind of
+action they were capable of taking was essentially different too. It
+has seemed to me that the public had a function and must have methods
+of its own in controversies, qualitatively different from those of
+the executive men; that it was a dangerous confusion to believe that
+private purposes were a mere emanation of some common purpose.
+
+This conception of society seems to me truer and more workable than
+that which endows public opinion with pantheistic powers. It does not
+assume that men in action have universal purposes; they are denied
+the fraudulent support of the fiction that they are the agents of a
+common purpose. They are regarded as the agents of special purposes,
+without pretense and without embarrassment. They must live in a world
+with men who have other special purposes. The adjustments which must
+be made are society, and the best society is the one in which men have
+purposes which they can realize with the least frustration. When men
+take a position in respect to the purposes of others they are acting as
+a public. And the end of their acting in this rôle is to promote the
+conditions under which special purposes can be composed.
+
+It is a theory which puts its trust chiefly in the individuals directly
+concerned. They initiate, they administer, they settle. It would
+subject them to the least possible interference from ignorant and
+meddlesome outsiders, for in this theory the public intervenes only
+when there is a crisis of maladjustment, and then not to deal with the
+substance of the problem but to neutralize the arbitrary force which
+prevents adjustment. It is a theory which economizes the attention of
+men as members of the public, and asks them to do as little as possible
+in matters where they can do nothing very well. It confines the effort
+of men, when they are a public, to a part they might fulfill, to a
+part which corresponds to their own greatest interest in any social
+disturbance; that is, to an intervention which may help to allay the
+disturbance, and thus allow them to return to their own affairs.
+
+For it is the pursuit of their special affairs that they are most
+interested in. It is by the private labors of individuals that life is
+enhanced. I set no great store on what can be done by public opinion
+and the action of masses.
+
+
+5
+
+I have no legislative program to offer, no new institutions to
+propose. There are, I believe, immense confusions in the current
+theory of democracy which frustrate and pervert its action. I have
+attacked certain of the confusions with no conviction except that a
+false philosophy tends to stereotype thought against the lessons of
+experience. I do not know what the lessons will be when we have learned
+to think of public opinion as it is, and not as the fictitious power
+we have assumed it to be. It is enough if with Bentham we know that
+“the perplexity of ambiguous discourse ... distracts and eludes the
+apprehension, stimulates and inflames the passions.”
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] Speech at Manchester, October 14, 1922.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Absentee rulers defined, 173–186
+
+  Action, public, defined, 73–74
+
+  Agencies defined, 125–142;
+    fact-finding, 45
+
+  Agent, public not, 169
+
+  Agents and bystanders defined, 40–53
+
+  Anarchy, 161
+
+  Anderson, Jr., B. M., 176
+
+  Arbitrary force, neutralization of, 63–74
+
+  Aristotle, 77–80
+
+  Assent, defined, 117–123, 129, 189
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis, 162
+
+  Balkans, 188
+
+  Behavior, 55, 68–69;
+    reasonable, defined, 145
+
+  Bentham, Jeremy, 200
+
+  Bergson, Henri, 32–33
+
+  Birth control, its relation to food supply, 87–88
+
+  Bismarck, Prince von, 14, 169
+
+  Brun, J. Charles, 183
+
+  Bryan, William Jennings, 36
+
+  Bryce, James, 18–19
+
+  Bulgaria, 188
+
+  Business, new gospel of, 178
+
+  Bystanders and agents defined, 40–53
+
+
+  Capitalism, 37, 179, 191, 192, 194, 195
+
+  Carr-Saunders, A. M., 87
+
+  Cassel, Gustav, 92, 94
+
+  Cats, mice and clover, 31–32
+
+  Cavour, Count di, 169
+
+  Centralization of government. _See_ Government
+
+  Change, unnoticeable, 88
+
+  Chanticleer, 15
+
+  Chicago mayoral election, 17
+
+  Chinese and Greco-Roman civilizations, 174
+
+  Citizen, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 38, 39, 40,
+        45, 46, 52, 148, 195
+
+  Citizenship, 151
+
+  Civic duty, derision for, 15, 146, 151
+
+  Civil rights, 58
+
+  Civilization, 174
+
+  Clover, cats and mice, 31–32
+
+  Competence, 150
+
+  Conduct, 182
+
+  Conformity, test of, defined, 123–124
+
+  Conscience, 28
+
+  Contracts, social, 40, 95–106;
+    defined, 101–102, 104–105
+
+  Control, 55
+
+  Controversy, 77
+
+  Coöperation, 99
+
+  Corruption, 71, 72
+
+  Criteria of reform defined, 125–142
+
+  Criticism, 123
+
+  Crises, 67
+
+  Crisis, public opinion reserve force in, 69
+
+
+  Dante, 169
+
+  Darwin, Charles, 31, 32
+
+  Debate, public value of, defined, 110–114
+
+  Defective rule defined, 115–124
+
+  Defoe, Daniel, 177
+
+  Delbrück, Hans, 60
+
+  Democracy, 24, 35–37, 71, 146–151, 155, 189, 190, 197–200
+
+  Democratic theory, 14, 61, 147
+
+  Democrats, 59
+
+  Derision of citizens, 15
+
+  Descartes, 81
+
+  Dibblee, G. B., 176
+
+  Dictatorship, 190
+
+  Disenchanted man defined, 20
+
+  “Disorder, idea of,” 32–33;
+    realms of, defined, 187–200
+
+  Dogma of assent, 117
+
+  Duties and rights. _See_ Rights and duties.
+
+
+  Economic problem defined, 92–94.
+
+  Education, 22–23, 24, 27;
+    public, defined, 146–147, 148–151, 169
+
+  Election, defined, 56, 60, 61
+
+  Elections, defined, 127–130
+
+  England, 59, 86
+
+  Enterprise, Macaulay on, 49–50
+
+  Enterprisers, 176
+
+  Environment, 14, 78, 79, 179
+
+  Erickson, E. M., 16
+
+  Eugenics, 34–35
+
+  Evasion of law, 123
+
+  Evils of democracy, 35–36, 37, 173–186
+
+  Evolution, 81–84
+
+  Executive action, 144
+
+  Expectations, 33
+
+  Exploiters, 166
+
+
+  Fable of professor, 28
+
+  Food supply, 86–87
+
+  Franklin, Benjamin, 177–178
+
+  French security, 179
+
+  French Revolution, 59, 183
+
+  Frugality, 177
+
+  Function, government, defined, 70–73;
+    relation to competency, 150
+
+
+  German diplomacy, 188
+
+  Germans, 179
+
+  Goethe, 173
+
+  Gosnell, Harvey Foote, 17
+
+  Government, vii, 14, 41, 50, 61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 73, 126, 173–186,
+        194;
+    defined, 77, 126;
+    function defined, 70–73
+
+  Grant, Madison, 22
+
+  Great Society, 43, 79, 98, 174, 183, 188–189
+
+  Greco-Roman and Chinese civilizations, 174
+
+  Grey, Lord, vii, 188
+
+  Guedalla, Philip, 14
+
+  Gun elevation, 91
+
+
+  Hamilton, Alexander, vii, 169
+
+  Hegel, 98
+
+  Hegelian mystery, 47
+
+  Hertzen, Alexander, 20
+
+  Hughes, Charles Evans, 179
+
+  Human values defined, 95–97
+
+
+  “Idea of disorder,” 32–33
+
+  Ideal, 20, 22, 39, 63, 68, 155
+
+  Idealization, 57
+
+  Ideals, 14
+
+  Ideas, 47, 48
+
+  Imperial Party, 169
+
+  Initiative and referendum, 19
+
+  Innovation, 116
+
+  Inquiry, test of, defined, 130–135
+
+  Intelligence, 69, 135
+
+
+  Jefferson, Thomas, 159
+
+  Justice, 67
+
+
+  Keynes, J. M., 157–158
+
+  Knowledge, 30
+
+  Ku Klux Klan, 179
+
+
+  Lancashire goods, 176
+
+  Laski, Harold J., 161
+
+  Latin America, 61
+
+  Latin verse, 184
+
+  Law, 69, 100, 108, 115, 116, 123, 124, 191–192, 193
+
+  Laws, 69, 71;
+    assent to, defined, 117–122, 123, 124;
+    defective, defined, 125–142, 136;
+    test of, defined, 138
+
+  Leaders, 19
+
+  League of Nations, 133
+
+  Lenin, 169
+
+  Liberal defined, 162
+
+  Liberalism defined, 162–172
+
+  Liberals, 162, 166
+
+  Liberties of men defined, 55
+
+  Liberty, spirit of, 187
+
+  Lloyd George, David, 157–158, 188–189
+
+  Lombart, Werner, 177
+
+  Lowell, Lawrence A., 19
+
+
+  Macaulay, Lord, 49–50
+
+  Macgowan, Kenneth, 163
+
+  Majority, 19;
+    rule defined, 57–58, 60
+
+  Malthus, T. R., 85–87
+
+  Man, disenchanted, 13–21
+
+  Manchester, Lloyd George at, 188–189
+
+  Mayoral election in Chicago, 17
+
+  Merriam, Charles Edward, 17–18
+
+  Methods of public men, 159
+
+  Mice, cats and clover, 31–32
+
+  Michelet, Simon, 16
+
+  Michels, Robert, 19, 22–23
+
+  Minorities, 58
+
+  Monistic theory, 161, 173
+
+  Monodrama, 163–165
+
+  Moral code, 29–30, 35, 74
+
+  Moral codes, 30
+
+  Moralists, 28
+
+  Morality, 100
+
+  Morrow, Dwight, 59–60
+
+  Morse, Prof., 59–60
+
+
+  Napoleon III., 14
+
+  National defense, problem defined, 90–91
+
+  Nationals, 196
+
+  Nationalism, 65
+
+  Neutralization of arbitrary force, 67–74
+
+  Neutralized power, 193
+
+  Newspapers, 13
+
+  Nonvoting, 17–18
+
+
+  Officials, government, 72
+
+  Ogburn, W. F., 89, 100
+
+  Omnicompetency of citizens, 21, 39
+
+  One and Many problem, 171
+
+  Opinion, 48, 52, 56, 61
+
+  Opinion, public. _See_ Public opinion
+
+  Opinions defined, 44–49, 162, 197
+
+  Opposition parties, 20
+
+
+  Party government, 59–60
+
+  Party in power, 126
+
+  Party system, 130
+
+  Parties, political, 127
+
+  Partisanship, 34
+
+  Pawlow, Ivan Petrovich, 30
+
+  People, 19, 36, 41;
+    Macaulay on, 50, 61, 62, 68, 69, 71, 180, 181, 191, 194
+
+  People’s will defined, 72
+
+  Physical force in South, 61
+
+  Plato, 169
+
+  Pluralistic theory defined, 151, 161, 194
+
+  Political capacity, 78
+
+  Political evils, agents against, 169
+
+  Political leaders, 19, 22
+
+  Political system changes, 84–85
+
+  Political talent neglected, 184
+
+  Political theories defined, 22–39
+
+  Politicians, 41
+
+  Politics, truth in, 157–158
+
+  Policy, public, 57
+
+  Population, problem of, defined, 85–87
+
+  Power, arbitrary, 74;
+    balance of, defined, 192–196;
+    of public opinion, 70
+
+  Principles of public opinion, 143
+
+  Problem, nature of, 81–94, 130;
+    of One and Many, 171
+
+  Problems of citizen defined, 13–16, 25, 26, 34, 64, 72, 81–94, 125,
+        129, 131, 140, 141, 187
+
+  Professor, fable of, 28
+
+  Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, 133
+
+  Public, 42;
+    powers defined, 49–52, 54–62;
+    relation to public affairs defined, 63–66, 67, 68, 77, 103, 105,
+        106, 107, 108;
+    debate, value of, defined, 110–114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122,
+        124, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145;
+    education defined, 146–151, 155, 156, 157, 159;
+    in any situation defined, 168, 169;
+    dangers to, defined, 189–191, 193, 197, 198
+
+  Public affairs, 13–21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 55, 56,
+        64, 69, 189
+
+  Public judgment, 115
+
+  Public life, candor in, 157
+
+  Public men, methods of, 159
+
+  Public office, education for, 151
+
+  Public opinion, 44, 48, 52, 53, 55;
+    and public affairs, 55–56, 65;
+    defined 65–70, 71, 72, 73, 74;
+    function of, defined, 74, 79;
+    principles of, 143;
+    tests of, defined, 144–145, 147, 151, 181, 197–200
+
+  Publicity, 43
+
+  Publics, random, 79
+
+
+  Question Aristotle asked, 77–80
+
+  Questions, two, 107
+
+
+  Realms of disorder, 187–200
+
+  Reason, 69
+
+  Reform Bill, 50
+
+  Reform, criteria of, 125–142
+
+  Reform, 129;
+    test of, defined, 135–138
+
+  Reformer, 129, 130
+
+  Registered voters, 19
+
+  Revivalists, 22
+
+  Revolution, 59, 61, 136, 190
+
+  Revolution, French, 59, 183
+
+  Rights, 100
+
+  Rights and duties defined, 100–107
+
+  Rousseau, J. J., 98
+
+  Rule, 68–69;
+    defective, defined, 115–124
+
+  Rules. _See_ Laws
+
+  Rules of society, 117
+
+  Rulers, absentee, defined, 173–186
+
+
+  Santayana, George, 95
+
+  Schlesinger, A. M., 16
+
+  School, 14
+
+  Self-government, 19
+
+  Settlements, 120
+
+  Shaw, G. Bernard, 59
+
+  Smith, Logan Pearsall, 15–16, 26
+
+  Social contracts defined, 95–106
+
+  Socialism, theory of, defined, 37–38, 39, 65
+
+  Socialists, 156
+
+  Society, 28, 30, 31, 32, 42, 45, 71, 73, 79, 88, 98, 103, 106, 134;
+    functions defined, 155–161;
+    defined, 155–172, 176, 183
+
+  Socrates, 30
+
+  Sovereign people, 18–19
+
+  Sovereignty, 14
+
+  Standards, 30, 143
+
+  Statesmanship defined, 155–161
+
+  Steffen, Gustaf F., 19
+
+  Stoddard, Lothrop, 22
+
+  Submission, 162
+
+  Supply and demand, 92
+
+  System, economic, 94;
+    prevailing, 100;
+    of rights and duties, 100
+
+
+  Teachers, 27
+
+  Theory, citizen reigns in, 14
+
+  Thomson, J. Arthur, 31
+
+  Times (London), 50
+
+  Tocqueville, de, 183
+
+  Trade, 177
+
+  Truth, 67
+
+  Turks, 188
+
+  Tyranny, 70–71
+
+
+  Unattainable ideal, 22–39
+
+  United States government, 61
+
+
+  Validity of laws, 108
+
+  Value is measurement, 96
+
+  Value of public debate defined, 110–114
+
+  Values, human, defined, 95–97
+
+  Virtue, 30, 57
+
+  Voice of public opinion defined, 197
+
+  Vote, 36, 55, 56
+
+  Voter, 19, 36, 146
+
+  Voters, 16–17, 18–19, 41
+
+  Voting, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59
+
+
+  War, 90, 190
+
+  Williams, John Sharp, 159
+
+  Wirt, William, 159
+
+  Woman suffrage, 60
+
+  Work, 173
+
+  World, 29
+
+  “World power or downfall,” 179
+
+
+  Yevreynoff, 163–164
+
+  Young, Arthur, 183
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76966 ***