PART VIII. ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE

XXV. The Entering Wedge

XXVI. Intelligence Work

XXVII. The Appeal to the Public

XXVIII. The Appeal to Reason

PART I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES

IN OUR HEADS

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION

THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES

IN OUR HEADS

There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen,

Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the

British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had

not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest

newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux

for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than

usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day

in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been.

They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were

English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf

of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans.

For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in

fact they were enemies.

But their plight was not so different from that of most of the

population of Europe. They had been mistaken for six weeks, on the

continent the interval may have been only six days or six hours. There

was an interval. There was a moment when the picture of Europe on

which men were conducting their business as usual, did not in any way

correspond to the Europe which was about to make a jumble of their

lives. There was a time for each man when he was still adjusted to an

environment that no longer existed. All over the world as late as July

25th men were making goods that they would not be able to ship, buying

goods they would not be able to import, careers were being planned,

enterprises contemplated, hopes and expectations entertained, all in

the belief that the world as known was the world as it was. Men were

writing books describing that world. They trusted the picture in their

heads. And then over four years later, on a Thursday morning, came the

news of an armistice, and people gave vent to their unutterable relief

that the slaughter was over. Yet in the five days before the real

armistice came, though the end of the war had been celebrated, several

thousand young men died on the battlefields.

Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in

which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us

now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true

picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself. It is harder

to remember that about the beliefs upon which we are now acting, but

in respect to other peoples and other ages we flatter ourselves that

it is easy to see when they were in deadly earnest about ludicrous

pictures of the world. We insist, because of our superior hindsight,

that the world as they needed to know it, and the world as they did

know it, were often two quite contradictory things. We can see, too,

that while they governed and fought, traded and reformed in the world

as they imagined it to be, they produced results, or failed to produce

any, in the world as it was. They started for the Indies and found

America. They diagnosed evil and hanged old women. They thought they

could grow rich by always selling and never buying. A caliph, obeying

what he conceived to be the Will of Allah, burned the library at

Alexandria.

Writing about the year 389, St. Ambrose stated the case for the

prisoner in Plato's cave who resolutely declines to turn his head. "To

discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our

hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states.

'That He hung up the earth upon nothing' (Job xxvi. 7). Why then argue

whether He hung it up in air or upon the water, and raise a

controversy as to how the thin air could sustain the earth; or why, if

upon the waters, the earth does not go crashing down to the bottom?...

Not because the earth is in the middle, as if suspended on even

balance, but because the majesty of God constrains it by the law of

His will, does it endure stable upon the unstable and the void."

[Footnote: Hexaemeron, i. cap 6, quoted in _The Mediæval Mind_,

by Henry Osborn Taylor, Vol. i, p. 73.]

It does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to

know what Scripture states. Why then argue? But a century and a half

after St. Ambrose, opinion was still troubled, on this occasion by the

problem of the antipodes. A monk named Cosmas, famous for his

scientific attainments, was therefore deputed to write a Christian

Topography, or "Christian Opinion concerning the World." [Footnote:

Lecky, _Rationalism in Europe_, Vol. I, pp. 276-8.] It is clear

that he knew exactly what was expected of him, for he based all his

conclusions on the Scriptures as he read them. It appears, then, that

the world is a flat parallelogram, twice as broad from east to west as

it is long from north to south., In the center is the earth surrounded

by ocean, which is in turn surrounded by another earth, where men

lived before the deluge. This other earth was Noah's port of

embarkation. In the north is a high conical mountain around which

revolve the sun and moon. When the sun is behind the mountain it is

night. The sky is glued to the edges of the outer earth. It consists

of four high walls which meet in a concave roof, so that the earth is

the floor of the universe. There is an ocean on the other side of the

sky, constituting the "waters that are above the firmament." The space

between the celestial ocean and the ultimate roof of the universe

belongs to the blest. The space between the earth and sky is inhabited

by the angels. Finally, since St. Paul said that all men are made to

live upon the "face of the earth" how could they live on the back

where the Antipodes are supposed to be? With such a passage before

his eyes, a Christian, we are told, should not 'even speak of the

Antipodes.'" [Footnote: _Id._]

Far less should he go to the Antipodes; nor should any Christian

prince give him a ship to try; nor would any pious mariner wish to

try. For Cosmas there was nothing in the least absurd about his map.

Only by remembering his absolute conviction that this was the map of

the universe can we begin to understand how he would have dreaded

Magellan or Peary or the aviator who risked a collision with the

angels and the vault of heaven by flying seven miles up in the air. In

the same way we can best understand the furies of war and politics by

remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in

its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but

what it supposes to be the fact. And that therefore, like Hamlet, it

will stab Polonius behind the rustling curtain, thinking him the king,

and perhaps like Hamlet add:

"Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!

I took thee for thy better; take thy fortune."

2

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public

only through a fictitious personality. Hence the modicum of truth in

the old saying that no man is a hero to his valet. There is only a

modicum of truth, for the valet, and the private secretary, are often

immersed in the fiction themselves. Royal personages are, of course,

constructed personalities. Whether they themselves believe in their

public character, or whether they merely permit the chamberlain to

stage-manage it, there are at least two distinct selves, the public

and regal self, the private and human. The biographies of great people

fall more or less readily into the histories of these two selves. The

official biographer reproduces the public life, the revealing memoir

the other. The Charnwood Lincoln, for example, is a noble portrait,

not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with

significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or

St. George. Oliver's Hamilton is a majestic abstraction, the sculpture

of an idea, "an essay" as Mr. Oliver himself calls it, "on American

union." It is a formal monument to the state-craft of federalism,

hardly the biography of a person. Sometimes people create their own

facade when they think they are revealing the interior scene. The

Repington diaries and Margot Asquith's are a species of

self-portraiture in which the intimate detail is most revealing as an

index of how the authors like to think about themselves.

But the most interesting kind of portraiture is that which arises

spontaneously in people's minds. When Victoria came to the throne,

says Mr. Strachey, [Footnote: Lytton Strachey, _Queen Victoria_,

p. 72.] "among the outside public there was a great wave of

enthusiasm. Sentiment and romance were coming into fashion; and the

spectacle of the little girl-queen, innocent, modest, with fair hair

and pink cheeks, driving through her capital, filled the hearts of the

beholders with raptures of affectionate loyalty. What, above all,

struck everybody with overwhelming force was the contrast between

Queen Victoria and her uncles. The nasty old men, debauched and

selfish, pigheaded and ridiculous, with their perpetual burden of

debts, confusions, and disreputabilities--they had vanished like the

snows of winter and here at last, crowned and radiant, was the

spring."

M. Jean de Pierrefeu [Footnote: Jean de Pierrefeu, _G. Q. G. Trois

ans au Grand Quartier General_, pp 94-95.] saw hero-worship at

first hand, for he was an officer on Joffre's staff at the moment of

that soldier's greatest fame:

"For two years, the entire world paid an almost divine homage to the

victor of the Marne. The baggage-master literally bent under the

weight of the boxes, of the packages and letters which unknown people

sent him with a frantic testimonial of their admiration. I think that

outside of General Joffre, no commander in the war has been able to

realize a comparable idea of what glory is. They sent him boxes of

candy from all the great confectioners of the world, boxes of

champagne, fine wines of every vintage, fruits, game, ornaments and

utensils, clothes, smoking materials, inkstands, paperweights. Every

territory sent its specialty. The painter sent his picture, the

sculptor his statuette, the dear old lady a comforter or socks, the

shepherd in his hut carved a pipe for his sake. All the manufacturers

of the world who were hostile to Germany shipped their products,

Havana its cigars, Portugal its port wine. I have known a hairdresser

who had nothing better to do than to make a portrait of the General

out of hair belonging to persons who were dear to him; a professional

penman had the same idea, but the features were composed of thousands

of little phrases in tiny characters which sang the praise of the

General. As to letters, he had them in all scripts, from all

countries, written in every dialect, affectionate letters, grateful,

overflowing with love, filled with adoration. They called him Savior

of the World, Father of his Country, Agent of God, Benefactor of

Humanity, etc.... And not only Frenchmen, but Americans, Argentinians,

Australians, etc. etc.... Thousands of little children, without their

parents' knowledge, took pen in hand and wrote to tell him their love:

most of them called him Our Father. And there was poignancy about

their effusions, their adoration, these sighs of deliverance that

escaped from thousands of hearts at the defeat of barbarism. To all

these naif little souls, Joffre seemed like St. George crushing the

dragon. Certainly he incarnated for the conscience of mankind the

victory of good over evil, of light over darkness.

Lunatics, simpletons, the half-crazy and the crazy turned their

darkened brains toward him as toward reason itself. I have read the

letter of a person living in Sydney, who begged the General to save

him from his enemies; another, a New Zealander, requested him to send

some soldiers to the house of a gentleman who owed him ten pounds and

would not pay.

Finally, some hundreds of young girls, overcoming the timidity of

their sex, asked for engagements, their families not to know about it;

others wished only to serve him."

This ideal Joffre was compounded out of the victory won by him, his

staff and his troops, the despair of the war, the personal sorrows,

and the hope of future victory. But beside hero-worship there is the

exorcism of devils. By the same mechanism through which heroes are

incarnated, devils are made. If everything good was to come from

Joffre, Foch, Wilson, or Roosevelt, everything evil originated in the

Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin and Trotsky. They were as omnipotent for evil as

the heroes were omnipotent for good. To many simple and frightened

minds there was no political reverse, no strike, no obstruction, no

mysterious death or mysterious conflagration anywhere in the world of

which the causes did not wind back to these personal sources of evil.

3

Worldwide concentration of this kind on a symbolic personality is rare

enough to be clearly remarkable, and every author has a weakness for

the striking and irrefutable example. The vivisection of war reveals

such examples, but it does not make them out of nothing. In a more

normal public life, symbolic pictures are no less governant of

behavior, but each symbol is far less inclusive because there are so

many competing ones. Not only is each symbol charged with less feeling

because at most it represents only a part of the population, but even

within that part there is infinitely less suppression of individual

difference. The symbols of public opinion, in times of moderate

security, are subject to check and comparison and argument. They come

and go, coalesce and are forgotten, never organizing perfectly the

emotion of the whole group. There is, after all, just one human

activity left in which whole populations accomplish the union sacrée.

It occurs in those middle phases of a war when fear, pugnacity, and

hatred have secured complete dominion of the spirit, either to crush

every other instinct or to enlist it, and before weariness is felt.

At almost all other times, and even in war when it is deadlocked, a

sufficiently greater range of feelings is aroused to establish

conflict, choice, hesitation, and compromise. The symbolism of public

opinion usually bears, as we shall see, [Footnote: Part V.] the marks

of this balancing of interest. Think, for example, of how rapidly,

after the armistice, the precarious and by no means successfully

established symbol of Allied Unity disappeared, how it was followed

almost immediately by the breakdown of each nation's symbolic picture

of the other: Britain the Defender of Public Law, France watching at

the Frontier of Freedom, America the Crusader. And think then of how

within each nation the symbolic picture of itself frayed out, as party

and class conflict and personal ambition began to stir postponed

issues. And then of how the symbolic pictures of the leaders gave way,

as one by one, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, ceased to be the

incarnation of human hope, and became merely the negotiators and

administrators for a disillusioned world.

Whether we regret this as one of the soft evils of peace or applaud it

as a return to sanity is obviously no matter here. Our first concern

with fictions and symbols is to forget their value to the existing

social order, and to think of them simply as an important part of the

machinery of human communication. Now in any society that is not

completely self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone

can know all about everything that happens, ideas deal with events

that are out of sight and hard to grasp. Miss Sherwin of Gopher

Prairie, [Footnote: See Sinclair Lewis, _Main Street_.] is aware

that a war is raging in France and tries to conceive it. She has never

been to France, and certainly she has never been along what is now the

battlefront.

Pictures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is

impossible for her to imagine three million men. No one, in fact, can

imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as,

say, two hundred divisions. But Miss Sherwin has no access to the

order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she

fastens upon Joffre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a

personal duel. Perhaps if you could see what she sees with her mind's

eye, the image in its composition might be not unlike an Eighteenth

Century engraving of a great soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled

and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures

winding off into the landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men

oblivious to these expectations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a

photographer's visit to Joffre. The General was in his "middle class

office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to

write his signature. Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps

on the walls. But since according to popular ideas it is not possible

to think of a general without maps, a few were placed in position for

the picture, and removed soon afterwards." [Footnote: _Op. cit._,

p. 99.]

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not

experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.

That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly

understand their acts. I have seen a young girl, brought up in a

Pennsylvania mining town, plunged suddenly from entire cheerfulness

into a paroxysm of grief when a gust of wind cracked the kitchen

window-pane. For hours she was inconsolable, and to me incomprehensible.

But when she was able to talk, it transpired that if a window-pane

broke it meant that a close relative had died. She was, therefore,

mourning for her father, who had frightened her into running away

from home. The father was, of course, quite thoroughly alive as a

telegraphic inquiry soon proved. But until the telegram came, the

cracked glass was an authentic message to that girl. Why it was

authentic only a prolonged investigation by a skilled psychiatrist

could show. But even the most casual observer could see that the girl,

enormously upset by her family troubles, had hallucinated a complete

fiction out of one external fact, a remembered superstition, and a

turmoil of remorse, and fear and love for her father.

Abnormality in these instances is only a matter of degree. When an

Attorney-General, who has been frightened by a bomb exploded on his

doorstep, convinces himself by the reading of revolutionary literature

that a revolution is to happen on the first of May 1920, we recognize

that much the same mechanism is at work. The war, of course, furnished

many examples of this pattern: the casual fact, the creative

imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a

counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive

response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men

respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in

many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they

respond. Let him cast the first stone who did not believe in the

Russian army that passed through England in August, 1914, did not

accept any tale of atrocities without direct proof, and never saw a

plot, a traitor, or a spy where there was none. Let him cast a stone

who never passed on as the real inside truth what he had heard someone

say who knew no more than he did.

In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It

is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment.

To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response. But because it

_is_ behavior, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in

the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the

real environment where action eventuates. If the behavior is not a

practical act, but what we call roughly thought and emotion, it may

be a long time before there is any noticeable break in the texture of

the fictitious world. But when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results

in action on things or other people, contradiction soon develops.

Then comes the sensation of butting one's head against a stone wall,

of learning by experience, and witnessing Herbert Spencer's tragedy

of the murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts, the

discomfort in short of a maladjustment. For certainly, at the level of

social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment

takes place through the medium of fictions.

By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a representation of the

environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself.

The range of fiction extends all the way from complete hallucination

to the scientists' perfectly self-conscious use of a schematic model,

or his decision that for his particular problem accuracy beyond a

certain number of decimal places is not important. A work of fiction

may have almost any degree of fidelity, and so long as the degree of

fidelity can be taken into account, fiction is not misleading. In

fact, human culture is very largely the selection, the rearrangement,

the tracing of patterns upon, and the stylizing of, what William James

called "the random irradiations and resettlements of our

ideas." [Footnote: James, _Principles of Psychology_, Vol. II, p.

638] The alternative to the use of fictions is direct exposure to the

ebb and flow of sensation. That is not a real alternative, for however

refreshing it is to see at times with a perfectly innocent eye,

innocence itself is not wisdom, though a source and corrective of

wisdom. For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex,

and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal

with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and

combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have

to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To

traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent

difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone

else's need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.

4

The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the

triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture

of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself

out upon the scene of action. It is like a play suggested to the

actors by their own experience, in which the plot is transacted in the

real lives of the actors, and not merely in their stage parts. The

moving picture often emphasizes with great skill this double drama of

interior motive and external behavior. Two men are quarreling,

ostensibly about some money, but their passion is inexplicable. Then

the picture fades out and what one or the other of the two men sees

with his mind's eye is reënacted. Across the table they were

quarreling about money. In memory they are back in their youth when

the girl jilted him for the other man. The exterior drama is

explained: the hero is not greedy; the hero is in love.

A scene not so different was played in the United States Senate. At

breakfast on the morning of September 29, 1919, some of the Senators

read a news dispatch in the _Washington Post_ about the landing

of American marines on the Dalmatian coast. The newspaper said:

FACTS NOW ESTABLISHED

"The following important facts appear already _established_. The

orders to Rear Admiral Andrews commanding the American naval forces in

the Adriatic, came from the British Admiralty via the War Council and

Rear Admiral Knapps in London. The approval or disapproval of the

American Navy Department was not asked....

WITHOUT DANIELS' KNOWLEDGE

"Mr. Daniels was admittedly placed in a peculiar position when cables

reached here stating that the forces over which he is presumed to have

exclusive control were carrying on what amounted to naval warfare

without his knowledge. It was fully realized that the _British

Admiralty might desire to issue orders to Rear Admiral Andrews_ to

act on behalf of Great Britain and her Allies, because the situation

required sacrifice on the part of some nation if D'Annunzio's

followers were to be held in check.

"It was further realized that _under the new league of nations plan

foreigners would be in a position to direct American Naval forces in

emergencies_ with or without the consent of the American Navy

Department...." etc. (Italics mine).

The first Senator to comment is Mr. Knox of Pennsylvania. Indignantly

he demands investigation. In Mr. Brandegee of Connecticut, who spoke

next, indignation has already stimulated credulity. Where Mr. Knox

indignantly wishes to know if the report is true, Mr. Brandegee, a

half a minute later, would like to know what would have happened if

marines had been killed. Mr. Knox, interested in the question, forgets

that he asked for an inquiry, and replies. If American marines had

been killed, it would be war. The mood of the debate is still

conditional. Debate proceeds. Mr. McCormick of Illinois reminds the

Senate that the Wilson administration is prone to the waging of small

unauthorized wars. He repeats Theodore Roosevelt's quip about "waging

peace." More debate. Mr. Brandegee notes that the marines acted "under

orders of a Supreme Council sitting somewhere," but he cannot recall

who represents the United States on that body. The Supreme Council is

unknown to the Constitution of the United States. Therefore Mr. New of

Indiana submits a resolution calling for the facts.

So far the Senators still recognize vaguely that they are discussing a

rumor. Being lawyers they still remember some of the forms of

evidence. But as red-blooded men they already experience all the

indignation which is appropriate to the fact that American marines

have been ordered into war by a foreign government and without the

consent of Congress. Emotionally they want to believe it, because they

are Republicans fighting the League of Nations. This arouses the

Democratic leader, Mr. Hitchcock of Nebraska. He defends the Supreme

Council: it was acting under the war powers. Peace has not yet been

concluded because the Republicans are delaying it. Therefore the

action was necessary and legal. Both sides now assume that the report

is true, and the conclusions they draw are the conclusions of their

partisanship. Yet this extraordinary assumption is in a debate over a

resolution to investigate the truth of the assumption. It reveals how

difficult it is, even for trained lawyers, to suspend response until

the returns are in. The response is instantaneous. The fiction is

taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.

A few days later an official report showed that the marines were not

landed by order of the British Government or of the Supreme Council.

They had not been fighting the Italians. They had been landed at the

request of the Italian Government to protect Italians, and the

American commander had been officially thanked by the Italian

authorities. The marines were not at war with Italy. They had acted

according to an established international practice which had nothing

to do with the League of Nations.

The scene of action was the Adriatic. The picture of that scene in the

Senators' heads at Washington was furnished, in this case probably

with intent to deceive, by a man who cared nothing about the Adriatic,

but much about defeating the League. To this picture the Senate

responded by a strengthening of its partisan differences over the

League.

5

Whether in this particular case the Senate was above or below its

normal standard, it is not necessary to decide. Nor whether the Senate

compares favorably with the House, or with other parliaments. At the

moment, I should like to think only about the world-wide spectacle of

men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli from their

pseudo-environments. For when full allowance has been made for

deliberate fraud, political science has still to account for such

facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that it is

acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it

speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in

different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but

they think and feel in different ones.

It is to these special worlds, it is to these private or group, or

class, or provincial, or occupational, or national, or sectarian

artifacts, that the political adjustment of mankind in the Great

Society takes place. Their variety and complication are impossible to

describe. Yet these fictions determine a very great part of men's

political behavior. We must think of perhaps fifty sovereign

parliaments consisting of at least a hundred legislative bodies. With

them belong at least fifty hierarchies of provincial and municipal

assemblies, which with their executive, administrative and legislative

organs, constitute formal authority on earth. But that does not begin

to reveal the complexity of political life. For in each of these

innumerable centers of authority there are parties, and these parties

are themselves hierarchies with their roots in classes, sections,

cliques and clans; and within these are the individual politicians,

each the personal center of a web of connection and memory and fear

and hope.

Somehow or other, for reasons often necessarily obscure, as the result

of domination or compromise or a logroll, there emerge from these

political bodies commands, which set armies in motion or make peace,

conscript life, tax, exile, imprison, protect property or confiscate

it, encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another,

facilitate immigration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor

it, establish schools, build navies, proclaim "policies," and

"destiny," raise economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring

one people under the rule of another, or favor one class as against

another. For each of these decisions some view of the facts is taken

to be conclusive, some view of the circumstances is accepted as the

basis of inference and as the stimulus of feeling. What view of the

facts, and why that one?

And yet even this does not begin to exhaust the real complexity. The

formal political structure exists in a social environment, where there

are innumerable large and small corporations and institutions,

voluntary and semi-voluntary associations, national, provincial, urban

and neighborhood groupings, which often as not make the decision that

the political body registers. On what are these decisions based?

"Modern society," says Mr. Chesterton, "is intrinsically insecure

because it is based on the notion that all men will do the same thing

for different reasons.... And as within the head of any convict may be

the hell of a quite solitary crime, so in the house or under the hat

of any suburban clerk may be the limbo of a quite separate philosophy.

The first man may be a complete Materialist and feel his own body as a

horrible machine manufacturing his own mind. He may listen to his

thoughts as to the dull ticking of a clock. The man next door may be a

Christian Scientist and regard his own body as somehow rather less

substantial than his own shadow. He may come almost to regard his own

arms and legs as delusions like moving serpents in the dream of

delirium tremens. The third man in the street may not be a Christian

Scientist but, on the contrary, a Christian. He may live in a fairy

tale as his neighbors would say; a secret but solid fairy tale full of

the faces and presences of unearthly friends. The fourth man may be a

theosophist, and only too probably a vegetarian; and I do not see why

I should not gratify myself with the fancy that the fifth man is a

devil worshiper.... Now whether or not this sort of variety is

valuable, this sort of unity is shaky. To expect that all men for all

time will go on thinking different things, and yet doing the same

things, is a doubtful speculation. It is not founding society on a

communion, or even on a convention, but rather on a coincidence. Four

men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as

part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the

light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of

alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post

is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to

expect this to happen night after night is unwise...." [Footnote: G.

K. Chesterton, "The Mad Hatter and the Sane Householder," _Vanity

Fair_, January, 1921, p. 54]

For the four men at the lamp post substitute the governments, the

parties, the corporations, the societies, the social sets, the trades

and professions, universities, sects, and nationalities of the world.

Think of the legislator voting a statute that will affect distant

peoples, a statesman coming to a decision. Think of the Peace

Conference reconstituting the frontiers of Europe, an ambassador in a

foreign country trying to discern the intentions of his own government

and of the foreign government, a promoter working a concession in a

backward country, an editor demanding a war, a clergyman calling on

the police to regulate amusement, a club lounging-room making up its

mind about a strike, a sewing circle preparing to regulate the

schools, nine judges deciding whether a legislature in Oregon may fix

the working hours of women, a cabinet meeting to decide on the

recognition of a government, a party convention choosing a candidate

and writing a platform, twenty-seven million voters casting their

ballots, an Irishman in Cork thinking about an Irishman in Belfast, a

Third International planning to reconstruct the whole of human

society, a board of directors confronted with a set of their

employees' demands, a boy choosing a career, a merchant estimating

supply and demand for the coming season, a speculator predicting the

course of the market, a banker deciding whether to put credit behind a

new enterprise, the advertiser, the reader of advertisments.... Think

of the different sorts of Americans thinking about their notions of

"The British Empire" or "France" or "Russia" or "Mexico." It is not so

different from Mr. Chesterton's four men at the pea green lamp post.

6

And so before we involve ourselves in the jungle of obscurities about

the innate differences of men, we shall do well to fix our attention

upon the extraordinary differences in what men know of the world.

[Footnote: _Cf_. Wallas, _Our Social Heritage_, pp. 77 _et seq_.]

I do not doubt that there are important biological differences. Since

man is an animal it would be strange if there were not. But as

rational beings it is worse than shallow to generalize at all

about comparative behavior until there is a measurable similarity

between the environments to which behavior is a response.

The pragmatic value of this idea is that it introduces a much needed

refinement into the ancient controversy about nature and nurture,

innate quality and environment. For the pseudo-environment is a hybrid

compounded of "human nature" and "conditions." To my mind it shows the

uselessness of pontificating about what man is and always will be from

what we observe man to be doing, or about what are the necessary

conditions of society. For we do not know how men would behave in

response to the facts of the Great Society. All that we really know is

how they behave in response to what can fairly be called a most

inadequate picture of the Great Society. No conclusion about man or

the Great Society can honestly be made on evidence like that.

This, then, will be the clue to our inquiry. We shall assume that what

each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on

pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that

the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the

edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a

fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If

someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time

act exactly as if he had found gold. The way in which the world is

imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does

not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort,

their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results.

The very men who most loudly proclaim their "materialism" and their

contempt for "ideologues," the Marxian communists, place their entire

hope on what? On the formation by propaganda of a class-conscious

group. But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture

to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

What is class consciousness but a way of realizing the world? National

consciousness but another way? And Professor Giddings' consciousness

of kind, but a process of believing that we recognize among the

multitude certain ones marked as our kind?

Try to explain social life as the pursuit of pleasure and the

avoidance of pain. You will soon be saying that the hedonist begs the

question, for even supposing that man does pursue these ends, the

crucial problem of why he thinks one course rather than another likely

to produce pleasure, is untouched. Does the guidance of man's

conscience explain? How then does he happen to have the particular

conscience which he has? The theory of economic self-interest? But how

do men come to conceive their interest in one way rather than another?

The desire for security, or prestige, or domination, or what is

vaguely called self-realization? How do men conceive their security,

what do they consider prestige, how do they figure out the means of

domination, or what is the notion of self which they wish to realize?

Pleasure, pain, conscience, acquisition, protection, enhancement,

mastery, are undoubtedly names for some of the ways people act. There

may be instinctive dispositions which work toward such ends. But no

statement of the end, or any description of the tendencies to seek it,

can explain the behavior which results. The very fact that men

theorize at all is proof that their pseudo-environments, their

interior representations of the world, are a determining element in

thought, feeling, and action. For if the connection between reality

and human response were direct and immediate, rather than indirect and

inferred, indecision and failure would be unknown, and (if each of us

fitted as snugly into the world as the child in the womb), Mr. Bernard

Shaw would not have been able to say that except for the first nine

months of its existence no human being manages its affairs as well as

a plant.

The chief difficulty in adapting the psychoanalytic scheme to

political thought arises in this connection. The Freudians are

concerned with the maladjustment of distinct individuals to other

individuals and to concrete circumstances. They have assumed that if

internal derangements could be straightened out, there would be little

or no confusion about what is the obviously normal relationship. But

public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and

there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public

opinions refer are known only as opinions. The psychoanalyst, on the

other hand, almost always assumes that the environment is knowable,

and if not knowable then at least bearable, to any unclouded

intelligence. This assumption of his is the problem of public opinion.

Instead of taking for granted an environment that is readily known,

the social analyst is most concerned in studying how the larger

political environment is conceived, and how it can be conceived more

successfully. The psychoanalyst examines the adjustment to an X,

called by him the environment; the social analyst examines the X,

called by him the pseudo-environment.

He is, of course, permanently and constantly in debt to the new

psychology, not only because when rightly applied it so greatly helps

people to stand on their own feet, come what may, but because the

study of dreams, fantasy and rationalization has thrown light on how

the pseudo-environment is put together. But he cannot assume as his

criterion either what is called a "normal biological career"

[Footnote: Edward J. Kempf, _Psychopathology_, p. 116.] within

the existing social order, or a career "freed from religious

suppression and dogmatic conventions" outside. [Footnote: _Id_.,

p. 151.] What for a sociologist is a normal social career? Or one

freed from suppressions and conventions? Conservative critics do, to

be sure, assume the first, and romantic ones the second. But in

assuming them they are taking the whole world for granted. They are

saying in effect either that society is the sort of thing which

corresponds to their idea of what is normal, or the sort of thing

which corresponds to their idea of what is free. Both ideas are merely

public opinions, and while the psychoanalyst as physician may perhaps

assume them, the sociologist may not take the products of existing

public opinion as criteria by which to study public opinion.

7

The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out

of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined.

Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance.

He is the creature of an evolution who can just about span a

sufficient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what

on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness.

Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye

could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense

masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items

than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind

vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell,

hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy

picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.

Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior

of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is

dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public

affairs. The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the

pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and

relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are

acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name

of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. And so in the

chapters which follow we shall inquire first into some of the reasons

why the picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with

the world outside. Under this heading we shall consider first the

chief factors which limit their access to the facts. They are the

artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the

comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention

to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be

compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small

vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing

those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of

men's lives.

The analysis then turns from these more or less external limitations

to the question of how this trickle of messages from the outside is

affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices

which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct

the play of our attention, and our vision itself. From this it

proceeds to examine how in the individual person the limited messages

from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified

with his own interests as he feels and conceives them. In the

succeeding sections it examines how opinions are crystallized into

what is called Public Opinion, how a National Will, a Group Mind, a

Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, is formed.

The first five parts constitute the descriptive section of the book.

There follows an analysis of the traditional democratic theory of

public opinion. The substance of the argument is that democracy in its

original form never seriously faced the problem which arises because

the pictures inside people's heads do not automatically correspond

with the world outside. And then, because the democratic theory is

under criticism by socialist thinkers, there follows an examination of

the most advanced and coherent of these criticisms, as made by the

English Guild Socialists. My purpose here is to find out whether these

reformers take into account the main difficulties of public opinion.

My conclusion is that they ignore the difficulties, as completely as

did the original democrats, because they, too, assume, and in a much

more complicated civilization, that somehow mysteriously there exists

in the hearts of men a knowledge of the world beyond their reach.

I argue that representative government, either in what is ordinarily

called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no

matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent,

expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those

who have to make the decisions. I attempt, therefore, to argue that

the serious acceptance of the principle that personal representation

must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone

permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from

the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a

competent opinion about all public affairs. It is argued that the

problem of the press is confused because the critics and the

apologists expect the press to realize this fiction, expect it to make

up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democracy, and that

the readers expect this miracle to be performed at no cost or trouble

to themselves. The newspapers are regarded by democrats as a panacea

for their own defects, whereas analysis of the nature of news and of

the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers

necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or

lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public

opinion. My conclusion is that public opinions must be organized for

the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case

today. This organization I conceive to be in the first instance the

task of a political science that has won its proper place as

formulator, in advance of real decision, instead of apologist, critic,

or reporter after the decision has been made. I try to indicate that

the perplexities of government and industry are conspiring to give

political science this enormous opportunity to enrich itself and to

serve the public. And, of course, I hope that these pages will help a

few people to realize that opportunity more vividly, and therefore to

pursue it more consciously.

PART II

APPROACHES TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE

CHAPTER 2. CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY

" 3. CONTACT AND OPPORTUNITY

" 4. TIME AND ATTENTION

" 5. SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS

CHAPTER II

CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY

1

The picture of a general presiding over an editorial conference at the

most terrible hour of one of the great battles of history seems more

like a scene from The Chocolate Soldier than a page from life. Yet we

know at first hand from the officer who edited the French communiqués

that these conferences were a regular part of the business of war;

that in the worst moment of Verdun, General Joffre and his cabinet met

and argued over the nouns, adjectives, and verbs that were to be

printed in the newspapers the next morning.

"The evening communiqué of the twenty-third (February 1916)" says M.

de Pierrefeu, [Footnote: _G. Q. G_., pp. 126-129.] "was edited in

a dramatic atmosphere. M. Berthelot, of the Prime Minister's office,

had just telephoned by order of the minister asking General Pellé to

strengthen the report and to emphasize the proportions of the enemy's

attack. It was necessary to prepare the public for the worst outcome

in case the affair turned into a catastrophe. This anxiety showed

clearly that neither at G. H. Q. nor at the Ministry of War had the

Government found reason for confidence. As M. Berthelot spoke, General

Pellé made notes. He handed me the paper on which he had written the

Government's wishes, together with the order of the day issued by

General von Deimling and found on some prisoners, in which it was

stated that this attack was the supreme offensive to secure peace.

Skilfully used, all this was to demonstrate that Germany was letting

loose a gigantic effort, an effort without precedent, and that from

its success she hoped for the end of the war. The logic of this was

that nobody need be surprised at our withdrawal. When, a half hour

later, I went down with my manuscript, I found gathered together in

Colonel Claudel's office, he being away, the major-general, General

Janin, Colonel Dupont, and Lieutenant-Colonel Renouard. Fearing that I

would not succeed in giving the desired impression, General Pellé had

himself prepared a proposed communiqué. I read what I had just done.

It was found to be too moderate. General Pellé's, on the other hand,

seemed too alarming. I had purposely omitted von Deimling's order of

the day. To put it into the communiqué _would be to break with the

formula to which the public was accustomed_, would be to transform

it into a kind of pleading. It would seem to say: 'How do you suppose

we can resist?' There was reason to fear that the public would be

distracted by this change of tone and would believe that everything

was lost. I explained my reasons and suggested giving Deimling's text

to the newspapers in the form of a separate note.

"Opinion being divided, General Pellé went to ask General de Castelnau

to come and decide finally. The General arrived smiling, quiet and

good humored, said a few pleasant words about this new kind of

literary council of war, and looked at the texts. He chose the simpler

one, gave more weight to the first phrase, inserted the words 'as had

been anticipated,' which supply a reassuring quality, and was flatly

against inserting von Deimling's order, but was for transmitting it to

the press in a special note ... " General Joffre that evening read the

communiqué carefully and approved it.

Within a few hours those two or three hundred words would be read all

over the world. They would paint a picture in men's minds of what was

happening on the slopes of Verdun, and in front of that picture people

would take heart or despair. The shopkeeper in Brest, the peasant in

Lorraine, the deputy in the Palais Bourbon, the editor in Amsterdam or

Minneapolis had to be kept in hope, and yet prepared to accept

possible defeat without yielding to panic. They are told, therefore,

that the loss of ground is no surprise to the French Command. They are

taught to regard the affair as serious, but not strange. Now, as a

matter of fact, the French General Staff was not fully prepared for

the German offensive. Supporting trenches had not been dug,

alternative roads had not been built, barbed wire was lacking. But to

confess that would have aroused images in the heads of civilians that

might well have turned a reverse into a disaster. The High Command

could be disappointed, and yet pull itself together; the people at

home and abroad, full of uncertainties, and with none of the

professional man's singleness of purpose, might on the basis of a

complete story have lost sight of the war in a melee of faction and

counter-faction about the competence of the officers. Instead,

therefore, of letting the public act on all the facts which the

generals knew, the authorities presented only certain facts, and these

only in such a way as would be most likely to steady the people.

In this case the men who arranged the pseudo-environment knew what the

real one was. But a few days later an incident occurred about which

the French Staff did not know the truth. The Germans announced

[Footnote: On February 26, 1916. Pierrefeu, _G. Q. G._, pp. 133

_et seq_.] that on the previous afternoon they had taken Fort

Douaumont by assault. At French headquarters in Chantilly no one

could understand this news. For on the morning of the twenty-fifth,

after the engagement of the XXth corps, the battle had taken a turn

for the better. Reports from the front said nothing about Douaumont.

But inquiry showed that the German report was true, though no one as

yet knew how the fort had been taken. In the meantime, the German

communiqué was being flashed around the world, and the French had to

say something. So headquarters explained. "In the midst of total

ignorance at Chantilly about the way the attack had taken place, we

imagined, in the evening communiqué of the 26th, a plan of the attack

which certainly had a thousand to one chance of being true." The

communiqué of this imaginary battle read:

"A bitter struggle is taking place around Fort de Douaumont which is

an advanced post of the old defensive organization of Verdun. The

position taken this morning by the enemy, _after several

unsuccessful assaults that cost him very heavy losses_, has been

reached again and passed by our troops whom the enemy has not been

able to drive back." [Footnote: This is my own translation: the

English translation from London published in the New York Times of

Sunday, Feb. 27, is as follows:

London, Feb. 26 (1916). A furious struggle has been in progress around

Fort de Douaumont which is an advance element of the old defensive

organization of Verdun fortresses. The position captured this morning

by the enemy after several fruitless assaults which cost him extremely

heavy losses, [Footnote: The French text says "pertes tres elevees."

Thus the English translation exaggerates the original text.] was

reached again and gone beyond by our troops, which all the attempts of

the enemy have not been able to push back."]

What had actually happened differed from both the French and German

accounts. While changing troops in the line, the position had somehow

been forgotten in a confusion of orders. Only a battery commander and

a few men remained in the fort. Some German soldiers, seeing the door

open, had crawled into the fort, and taken everyone inside prisoner. A

little later the French who were on the slopes of the hill were

horrified at being shot at from the fort. There had been no battle at

Douaumont and no losses. Nor had the French troops advanced beyond it

as the communiqués seemed to say. They were beyond it on either side,

to be sure, but the fort was in enemy hands.

Yet from the communiqué everyone believed that the fort was half

surrounded. The words did not explicitly say so, but "the press, as

usual, forced the pace." Military writers concluded that the Germans

would soon have to surrender. In a few days they began to ask

themselves why the garrison, since it lacked food, had not yet

surrendered. "It was necessary through the press bureau to request

them to drop the encirclement theme." [Footnote: Pierrefeu, _op.

cit._, pp. 134-5.]

2

The editor of the French communiqué tells us that as the battle

dragged out, his colleagues and he set out to neutralize the

pertinacity of the Germans by continual insistence on their terrible

losses. It is necessary to remember that at this time, and in fact

until late in 1917, the orthodox view of the war for all the Allied

peoples was that it would be decided by "attrition." Nobody believed

in a war of movement. It was insisted that strategy did not count, or

diplomacy. It was simply a matter of killing Germans. The general

public more or less believed the dogma, but it had constantly to be

reminded of it in face of spectacular German successes.

"Almost no day passed but the communiqué.... ascribed to the Germans

with some appearance of justice heavy losses, extremely heavy, spoke

of bloody sacrifices, heaps of corpses, hecatombs. Likewise the

wireless constantly used the statistics of the intelligence bureau at

Verdun, whose chief, Major Cointet, had invented a method of

calculating German losses which obviously produced marvelous results.

Every fortnight the figures increased a hundred thousand or so. These

300,000, 400,000, 500,000 casualties put out, divided into daily,

weekly, monthly losses, repeated in all sorts of ways, produced a

striking effect. Our formulae varied little: 'according to prisoners

the German losses in the course of the attack have been considerable' ...

'it is proved that the losses' ... 'the enemy exhausted by his losses

has not renewed the attack' ... Certain formulae, later abandoned

because they had been overworked, were used each day: 'under

our artillery and machine gun fire' ... 'mowed down by our artillery

and machine gun fire' ... Constant repetition impressed the neutrals

and Germany itself, and helped to create a bloody background in spite

of the denials from Nauen (the German wireless) which tried vainly to

destroy the bad effect of this perpetual repetition." [Footnote: _Op.

cit._, pp. 138-139.]

The thesis of the French Command, which it wished to establish

publicly by these reports, was formulated as follows for the guidance

of the censors:

"This offensive engages the active forces of our opponent whose

manpower is declining. We have learned that the class of 1916 is

already at the front. There will remain the 1917 class already being

called up, and the resources of the third category (men above

forty-five, or convalescents). In a few weeks, the German forces

exhausted by this effort, will find themselves confronted with all the

forces of the coalition (ten millions against seven millions)."

[Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 147.]

According to M. de Pierrefeu, the French command had converted itself

to this belief. "By an extraordinary aberration of mind, only the

attrition of the enemy was seen; it appeared that our forces were not

subject to attrition. General Nivelle shared these ideas. We saw the

result in 1917."

We have learned to call this propaganda. A group of men, who can

prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of it to

suit their purpose. That the purpose was in this case patriotic does

not affect the argument at all. They used their power to make the

Allied publics see affairs as they desired them to be seen. The

casualty figures of Major Cointet which were spread about the world

are of the same order. They were intended to provoke a particular kind

of inference, namely that the war of attrition was going in favor of

the French. But the inference is not drawn in the form of argument. It

results almost automatically from the creation of a mental picture of

endless Germans slaughtered on the hills about Verdun. By putting the

dead Germans in the focus of the picture, and by omitting to mention

the French dead, a very special view of the battle was built up. It

was a view designed to neutralize the effects of German territorial

advances and the impression of power which the persistence of the

offensive was making. It was also a view that tended to make the

public acquiesce in the demoralizing defensive strategy imposed upon

the Allied armies. For the public, accustomed to the idea that war

consists of great strategic movements, flank attacks, encirclements,

and dramatic surrenders, had gradually to forget that picture in favor

of the terrible idea that by matching lives the war would be won.

Through its control over all news from the front, the General Staff

substituted a view of the facts that comported with this strategy.

The General Staff of an army in the field is so placed that within

wide limits it can control what the public will perceive. It controls

the selection of correspondents who go to the front, controls their

movements at the front, reads and censors their messages from the

front, and operates the wires. The Government behind the army by its

command of cables and passports, mails and custom houses and blockades

increases the control. It emphasizes it by legal power over

publishers, over public meetings, and by its secret service. But in

the case of an army the control is far from perfect. There is always

the enemy's communiqué, which in these days of wireless cannot be kept

away from neutrals. Above all there is the talk of the soldiers, which

blows back from the front, and is spread about when they are on

leave. [Footnote: For weeks prior to the American attack at St. Mihiel

and in the Argonne-Meuse, everybody in France told everybody else the

deep secret.] An army is an unwieldy thing. And that is why the naval

and diplomatic censorship is almost always much more complete. Fewer

people know what is going on, and their acts are more easily

supervised.

3

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the

word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be

some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real

environment must be limited, before anyone can create a

pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For while people

who have direct access can misconceive what they see, no one else can

decide how they shall misconceive it, unless he can decide where they

shall look, and at what. The military censorship is the simplest form

of barrier, but by no means the most important, because it is known to

exist, and is therefore in certain measure agreed to and discounted.

At different times and for different subjects some men impose and

other men accept a particular standard of secrecy. The frontier

between what is concealed because publication is not, as we say,

"compatible with the public interest" fades gradually into what is

concealed because it is believed to be none of the public's business.

The notion of what constitutes a person's private affairs is elastic.

Thus the amount of a man's fortune is considered a private affair, and

careful provision is made in the income tax law to keep it as private

as possible. The sale of a piece of land is not private, but the price

may be. Salaries are generally treated as more private than wages,

incomes as more private than inheritances. A person's credit rating is

given only a limited circulation. The profits of big corporations are

more public than those of small firms. Certain kinds of conversation,

between man and wife, lawyer and client, doctor and patient, priest

and communicant, are privileged. Directors' meetings are generally

private. So are many political conferences. Most of what is said at a

cabinet meeting, or by an ambassador to the Secretary of State, or at

private interviews, or dinner tables, is private. Many people regard

the contract between employer and employee as private. There was a

time when the affairs of all corporations were held to be as private

as a man's theology is to-day. There was a time before that when his

theology was held to be as public a matter as the color of his eyes.

But infectious diseases, on the other hand, were once as private as

the processes of a man's digestion. The history of the notion of

privacy would be an entertaining tale. Sometimes the notions violently

conflict, as they did when the bolsheviks published the secret

treaties, or when Mr. Hughes investigated the life insurance

companies, or when somebody's scandal exudes from the pages of Town

Topics to the front pages of Mr. Hearst's newspapers.

Whether the reasons for privacy are good or bad, the barriers exist.

Privacy is insisted upon at all kinds of places in the area of what is

called public affairs. It is often very illuminating, therefore, to

ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion.

Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which

you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told

him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted

to see? When he informs you that France thinks this and that, what

part of France did he watch? How was he able to watch it? Where was he

when he watched it? What Frenchmen was he permitted to talk to, what

newspapers did he read, and where did they learn what they say? You

can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They

will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your

public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is

itself a protection.

CHAPTER III

CONTACT AND OPPORTUNITY

1

While censorship and privacy intercept much information at its source,

a very much larger body of fact never reaches the whole public at all,

or only very slowly. For there are very distinct limits upon the

circulation of ideas.

A rough estimate of the effort it takes to reach "everybody" can be

had by considering the Government's propaganda during the war.

Remembering that the war had run over two years and a half before

America entered it, that millions upon millions of printed pages had

been circulated and untold speeches had been delivered, let us turn to

Mr. Creel's account of his fight "for the minds of men, for the

conquest of their convictions" in order that "the gospel of

Americanism might be carried to every corner of the globe."

[Footnote: George Creel, _How We Advertised America._]

Mr. Creel had to assemble machinery which included a Division of News

that issued, he tells us, more than six thousand releases, had to

enlist seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men who delivered at least

seven hundred and fifty-five thousand, one hundred and ninety speeches

to an aggregate of over three hundred million people. Boy scouts

delivered annotated copies of President Wilson's addresses to the

householders of America. Fortnightly periodicals were sent to six

hundred thousand teachers. Two hundred thousand lantern slides were

furnished for illustrated lectures. Fourteen hundred and thirty-eight

different designs were turned out for posters, window cards, newspaper

advertisements, cartoons, seals and buttons. The chambers of commerce,

the churches, fraternal societies, schools, were used as channels of

distribution. Yet Mr. Creel's effort, to which I have not begun to do

justice, did not include Mr. McAdoo's stupendous organization for the

Liberty Loans, nor Mr. Hoover's far reaching propaganda about food,

nor the campaigns of the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., Salvation Army,

Knights of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, not to mention the

independent work of patriotic societies, like the League to Enforce

Peace, the League of Free Nations Association, the National Security

League, nor the activity of the publicity bureaus of the Allies and of

the submerged nationalities.

Probably this is the largest and the most intensive effort to carry

quickly a fairly uniform set of ideas to all the people of a nation.

The older proselyting worked more slowly, perhaps more surely, but

never so inclusively. Now if it required such extreme measures to

reach everybody in time of crisis, how open are the more normal

channels to men's minds? The Administration was trying, and while the

war continued it very largely succeeded, I believe, in creating

something that might almost be called one public opinion all over

America. But think of the dogged work, the complicated ingenuity, the

money and the personnel that were required. Nothing like that exists

in time of peace, and as a corollary there are whole sections, there

are vast groups, ghettoes, enclaves and classes that hear only vaguely

about much that is going on.

They live in grooves, are shut in among their own affairs, barred out

of larger affairs, meet few people not of their own sort, read little.

Travel and trade, the mails, the wires, and radio, railroads,

highways, ships, motor cars, and in the coming generation aeroplanes,

are, of course, of the utmost influence on the circulation of ideas.

Each of these affects the supply and the quality of information and

opinion in a most intricate way. Each is itself affected by technical,

by economic, by political conditions. Every time a government relaxes

the passport ceremonies or the customs inspection, every time a new

railway or a new port is opened, a new shipping line established,

every time rates go up or down, the mails move faster or more slowly,

the cables are uncensored and made less expensive, highways built, or

widened, or improved, the circulation of ideas is influenced. Tariff

schedules and subsidies affect the direction of commercial enterprise,

and therefore the nature of human contracts. And so it may well

happen, as it did for example in the case of Salem, Massachusetts,

that a change in the art of shipbuilding will reduce a whole city from

a center where international influences converge to a genteel

provincial town. All the immediate effects of more rapid transit are

not necessarily good. It would be difficult to say, for example, that

the railroad system of France, so highly centralized upon Paris, has

been an unmixed blessing to the French people.

It is certainly true that problems arising out of the means of

communication are of the utmost importance, and one of the most

constructive features of the program of the League of Nations has been

the study given to railroad transit and access to the sea. The

monopolizing of cables, [Footnote: Hence the wisdom of taking Yap

seriously.] of ports, fuel stations, mountain passes, canals, straits,

river courses, terminals, market places means a good deal more than

the enrichment of a group of business men, or the prestige of a

government. It means a barrier upon the exchange of news and opinion.

But monopoly is not the only barrier. Cost and available supply are

even greater ones, for if the cost of travelling or trading is

prohibitive, if the demand for facilities exceeds the supply, the

barriers exist even without monopoly.

2

The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to

the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost

every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and

periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any

known fact of the world. The income of the individual, and the income

of the community determine the amount of communication that is

possible. But men's ideas determine how that income shall be spent,

and that in turn affects in the long run the amount of income they

will have. Thus also there are limitations, none the less real,

because they are often self-imposed and self-indulgent.

There are portions of the sovereign people who spend most of their

spare time and spare money on motoring and comparing motor cars, on

bridge-whist and post-mortems, on moving-pictures and potboilers,

talking always to the same people with minute variations on the same

old themes. They cannot really be said to suffer from censorship, or

secrecy, the high cost or the difficulty of communication. They suffer

from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene.

Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of

interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter.

They move, as if on a leash, within a fixed radius of acquaintances

according to the law and the gospel of their social set. Among men the

circle of talk in business and at the club and in the smoking car is

wider than the set to which they belong. Among women the social set

and the circle of talk are frequently almost identical. It is in the

social set that ideas derived from reading and lectures and from the

circle of talk converge, are sorted out, accepted, rejected, judged

and sanctioned. There it is finally decided in each phase of a

discussion which authorities and which sources of information are

admissible, and which not.

Our social set consists of those who figure as people in the phrase

"people are saying"; they are the people whose approval matters most

intimately to us. In big cities among men and women of wide interests

and with the means for moving about, the social set is not so rigidly

defined. But even in big cities, there are quarters and nests of

villages containing self-sufficing social sets. In smaller communities

there may exist a freer circulation, a more genuine fellowship from

after breakfast to before dinner. But few people do not know,

nevertheless, which set they really belong to, and which not.

Usually the distinguishing mark of a social set is the presumption

that the children may intermarry. To marry outside the set involves,

at the very least, a moment of doubt before the engagement can be

approved. Each social set has a fairly clear picture of its relative

position in the hierarchy of social sets. Between sets at the same

level, association is easy, individuals are quickly accepted,

hospitality is normal and unembarrassed. But in contact between sets

that are "higher" or "lower," there is always reciprocal hesitation, a

faint malaise, and a consciousness of difference. To be sure in a

society like that of the United States, individuals move somewhat

freely out of one set into another, especially where there is no

racial barrier and where economic position changes so rapidly.

Economic position, however, is not measured by the amount of income.

For in the first generation, at least, it is not income that

determines social standing, but the character of a man's work, and it

may take a generation or two before this fades out of the family

tradition. Thus banking, law, medicine, public utilities, newspapers,

the church, large retailing, brokerage, manufacture, are rated at a

different social value from salesmanship, superintendence, expert

technical work, nursing, school teaching, shop keeping; and those, in

turn, are rated as differently from plumbing, being a chauffeur,

dressmaking, subcontracting, or stenography, as these are from being a

butler, lady's maid, a moving picture operator, or a locomotive

engineer. And yet the financial return does not necessarily coincide

with these gradations.

3

Whatever the tests of admission, the social set when formed is not a

mere economic class, but something which more nearly resembles a

biological clan. Membership is intimately connected with love,

marriage and children, or, to speak more exactly, with the attitudes

and desires that are involved. In the social set, therefore, opinions

encounter the canons of Family Tradition, Respectability, Propriety,

Dignity, Taste and Form, which make up the social set's picture of

itself, a picture assiduously implanted in the children. In this

picture a large space is tacitly given to an authorized version of

what each set is called upon inwardly to accept as the social standing

of the others. The more vulgar press for an outward expression of the

deference due, the others are decently and sensitively silent about

their own knowledge that such deference invisibly exists. But that

knowledge, becoming overt when there is a marriage, a war, or a social

upheaval, is the nexus of a large bundle of dispositions classified by

Trotter [Footnote: W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace.]

under the general term instinct of the herd.

Within each social set there are augurs like the van der Luydens and

Mrs. Manson Mingott in "The Age of Innocence," [Footnote: Edith

Wharton, _The Age of Innocence._] who are recognized as the

custodians and the interpreters of its social pattern. You are made,

they say, if the van der Luydens take you up. The invitations to their

functions are the high sign of arrival and status. The elections to

college societies, carefully graded and the gradations universally

accepted, determine who is who in college. The social leaders,

weighted with the ultimate eugenic responsibility, are peculiarly

sensitive. Not only must they be watchfully aware of what makes for

the integrity of their set, but they have to cultivate a special gift

for knowing what other social sets are doing. They act as a kind of

ministry of foreign affairs. Where most of the members of a set live

complacently within the set, regarding it for all practical purposes

as the world, the social leaders must combine an intimate knowledge of

the anatomy of their own set with a persistent sense of its place in

the hierarchy of sets.

The hierarchy, in fact, is bound together by the social leaders. At

any one level there is something which might almost be called a social

set of the social leaders. But vertically the actual binding together

of society, in so far as it is bound together at all by social

contact, is accomplished by those exceptional people, frequently

suspect, who like Julius Beaufort and Ellen Olenska in "The Age of

Innocence" move in and out. Thus there come to be established personal

channels from one set to another, through which Tarde's laws of

imitation operate. But for large sections of the population there are

no such channels. For them the patented accounts of society and the

moving pictures of high life have to serve. They may develop a social

hierarchy of their own, almost unnoticed, as have the Negroes and the

"foreign element," but among that assimilated mass which always

considers itself the "nation," there is in spite of the great

separateness of sets, a variety of personal contacts through which a

circulation of standards takes place.

Some of the sets are so placed that they become what Professor Ross

has called "radiant points of conventionality." [Footnote: Ross,

_Social Psychology_, Ch. IX, X, XI.] Thus the social superior is

likely to be imitated by the social inferior, the holder of power is

imitated by subordinates, the more successful by the less successful,

the rich by the poor, the city by the country. But imitation does not

stop at frontiers. The powerful, socially superior, successful, rich,

urban social set is fundamentally international throughout the western

hemisphere, and in many ways London is its center. It counts among its

membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it

does the diplomatic set, high finance, the upper circles of the army

and the navy, some princes of the church, a few great newspaper

proprietors, their wives and mothers and daughters who wield the

scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real

social set. But its importance comes from the fact that here at last

the distinction between public and private affairs practically

disappears. The private affairs of this set are public matters, and

public matters are its private, often its family affairs. The

confinements of Margot Asquith like the confinements of royalty are,

as the philosophers say, in much the same universe of discourse as a

tariff bill or a parliamentary debate.

There are large areas of governments in which this social set is not

interested, and in America, at least, it has exercised only a

fluctuating control over the national government. But its power in

foreign affairs is always very great, and in war time its prestige is

enormously enhanced. That is natural enough because these

cosmopolitans have a contact with the outer world that most people do

not possess. They have dined with each other in the capitals, and

their sense of national honor is no mere abstraction; it is a concrete

experience of being snubbed or approved by their friends. To Dr.

Kennicott of Gopher Prairie it matters mighty little what Winston

thinks and a great deal what Ezra Stowbody thinks, but to Mrs. Mingott

with a daughter married to the Earl of Swithin it matters a lot when

she visits her daughter, or entertains Winston himself. Dr. Kennicott

and Mrs. Mingott are both socially sensitive, but Mrs. Mingott is

sensitive to a social set that governs the world, while Dr.

Kennicott's social set governs only in Gopher Prairie. But in matters

that effect the larger relationships of the Great Society, Dr.

Kennicott will often be found holding what he thinks is purely his own

opinion, though, as a matter of fact, it has trickled down to Gopher

Prairie from High Society, transmuted on its passage through the

provincial social sets.

4

It is no part of our inquiry to attempt an account of the social

tissue. We need only fix in mind how big is the part played by the

social set in our spiritual contact with the world, how it tends to

fix what is admissible, and to determine how it shall be judged.

Affairs within its immediate competence each set more or less

determines for itself. Above all it determines the detailed

administration of the judgment. But the judgment itself is formed on

patterns [Footnote: _Cf_. Part III] that may be inherited from

the past, transmitted or imitated from other social sets. The highest

social set consists of those who embody the leadership of the Great

Society. As against almost every other social set where the bulk of

the opinions are first hand only about local affairs, in this Highest

Society the big decisions of war and peace, of social strategy and the

ultimate distribution of political power, are intimate experiences

within a circle of what, potentially at least, are personal

acquaintances.

Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can

be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is

permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral

judgment is so much more common than constructive thought. Yet in

truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate

judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious

and open-hearted. Man's history being what it is, political opinion on

the scale of the Great Society requires an amount of selfless

equanimity rarely attainable by any one for any length of time. We are

concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones. The

time and attention are limited that we can spare for the labor of not

taking opinions for granted, and we are subject to constant

interruption.

CHAPTER IV

TIME AND ATTENTION

NATURALLY it is possible to make a rough estimate only of the amount

of attention people give each day to informing themselves about public

affairs. Yet it is interesting that three estimates that I have

examined agree tolerably well, though they were made at different

times, in different places, and by different methods. [Footnote: July,

1900. D. F. Wilcox, _The American Newspaper: A Study in Social

Psychology_, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

Science, vol. xvi, p. 56. (The statistical tables are reproduced in

James Edward Rogers, _The American Newspaper_.)

1916 (?) W. D. Scott, _The Psychology of Advertising_, pp.

226-248. See also Henry Foster Adams, _Advertising and its Mental

Laws_, Ch. IV.

1920 _Newspaper Reading Habits of College Students_, by Prof.

George Burton Hotchkiss and Richard B. Franken, published by the

Association of National Advertisers, Inc., 15 East 26th Street, New

York City.]

A questionnaire was sent by Hotchkiss and Franken to 1761 men and

women college students in New York City, and answers came from all but

a few. Scott used a questionnaire on four thousand prominent business

and professional men in Chicago and received replies from twenty-three

hundred. Between seventy and seventy-five percent of all those who

replied to either inquiry thought they spent a quarter of an hour a

day reading newspapers. Only four percent of the Chicago group guessed

at less than this and twenty-five percent guessed at more. Among the

New Yorkers a little over eight percent figured their newspaper

reading at less than fifteen minutes, and seventeen and a half at

more.

Very few people have an accurate idea of fifteen minutes, so the

figures are not to be taken literally. Moreover, business men,

professional people, and college students are most of them liable to a

curious little bias against appearing to spend too much time over the

newspapers, and perhaps also to a faint suspicion of a desire to be

known as rapid readers. All that the figures can justly be taken to

mean is that over three quarters of those in the selected groups rate

rather low the attention they give to printed news of the outer world.

These time estimates are fairly well confirmed by a test which is less

subjective. Scott asked his Chicagoans how many papers they read each

day, and was told that

14 percent read but one paper

46 " " two papers

21 " " three papers

10 " " four papers

3 " " five papers

2 " " six papers

3 " " all the papers (eight

at the time of this inquiry).

The two- and three-paper readers are sixty-seven percent, which comes

fairly close to the seventy-one percent in Scott's group who rate

themselves at fifteen minutes a day. The omnivorous readers of from

four to eight papers coincide roughly with the twenty-five percent who

rated themselves at more than fifteen minutes.

2

It is still more difficult to guess how the time is distributed. The

college students were asked to name "the five features which interest

you most." Just under twenty percent voted for "general news," just

under fifteen for editorials, just under twelve for "politics," a

little over eight for finance, not two years after the armistice a

little over six for foreign news, three and a half for local, nearly

three for business, and a quarter of one percent for news about

"labor." A scattering said they were most interested in sports,

special articles, the theatre, advertisements, cartoons, book reviews,

"accuracy," music, "ethical tone," society, brevity, art, stories,

shipping, school news, "current news," print. Disregarding these,

about sixty-seven and a half percent picked as the most interesting

features news and opinion that dealt with public affairs.

This was a mixed college group. The girls professed greater interest

than the boys in general news, foreign news, local news, politics,

editorials, the theatre, music, art, stories, cartoons,

advertisements, and "ethical tone." The boys on the other hand were

more absorbed in finance, sports, business page, "accuracy" and

"brevity." These discriminations correspond a little too closely with

the ideals of what is cultured and moral, manly and decisive, not to

make one suspect the utter objectivity of the replies.

Yet they agree fairly well with the replies of Scott's Chicago

business and professional men. They were asked, not what features

interested them most, but why they preferred one newspaper to another.

Nearly seventy-one percent based their conscious preference on local

news (17.8%), or political (15.8%) or financial (11.3%), or foreign

(9.5%), or general (7.2%), or editorials (9%). The other thirty

percent decided on grounds not connected with public affairs. They

ranged from not quite seven who decided for ethical tone, down to one

twentieth of one percent who cared most about humor.

How do these preferences correspond with the space given by newspapers

to various subjects? Unfortunately there are no data collected on this

point for the newspapers read by the Chicago and New York groups at

the time the questionnaires were made. But there is an interesting

analysis made over twenty years ago by Wilcox. He studied one hundred

and ten newspapers in fourteen large cities, and classified the

subject matter of over nine thousand columns.

Averaged for the whole country the various newspaper matter was found

to fill:

{ (a) War News 17.9

{ { Foreign 1.2

{ (b) General " 21.8 { Politics 6.4

I. News 55.3 { { Crime 3.1

{ { Misc. 11.1

{

{ { Business 8.2

{ (c) Special " 15.6 { Sport 5.1

{ Society 2.3

II. Illustrations 3.1

III. Literature 2.4

{ (a) Editorials 3.9

IV. Opinion 7.1 { (b) Letters & Exchange 3.2

V. Advertisements 32.1

In order to bring this table into a fair comparison, it is necessary

to exclude the space given to advertisements, and recompute the

percentages. For the advertisements occupied only an infinitesimal

part of the conscious preference of the Chicago group or the college

group. I think this is justifiable for our purposes because the press

prints what advertisements it can get, [Footnote: Except those which it

regards as objectionable, and those which, in rare instances, are

crowded out.] whereas the rest of the paper is designed to the taste

of its readers. The table would then read:

{War News 26.4-

{ {Foreign 1.8-

I. News 81.4+{General News 32.0+ {Political 9.4+

{ {Crime 4.6-

{ {Misc. 16.3+

{

{ {Business 12.1-

{Special " 23.0- {Sporting 7.5+

{Society 3.3-

II. Illustrations 4.6-

III. Literature 3.5+

IV. Opinion 10.5- {Editorials 5.8-

{Letters 4.7+

In this revised table if you add up the items which may be supposed to

deal with public affairs, that is to say war, foreign, political,

miscellaneous, business news, and opinion, you find a total of 76.5%

of the edited space devoted in 1900 to the 70.6% of reasons given by

Chicago business men in 1916 for preferring a particular newspaper,

and to the five features which most interested 67.5% of the New York

College students in 1920.

This would seem to show that the tastes of business men and college

students in big cities to-day still correspond more or less to the

averaged judgments of newspaper editors in big cities twenty years

ago. Since that time the proportion of features to news has

undoubtedly increased, and so has the circulation and the size of

newspapers. Therefore, if to-day you could secure accurate replies

from more typical groups than college students or business and

professional men, you would expect to find a smaller percentage of

time devoted to public affairs, as well as a smaller percentage of

space. On the other hand you would expect to find that the average man

spends more than the quarter of an hour on his newspaper, and that

while the percentage of space given to public affairs is less than

twenty years ago the net amount is greater.

No elaborate deductions are to be drawn from these figures. They help

merely to make somewhat more concrete our notions of the effort that

goes day by day into acquiring the data of our opinions. The

newspapers are, of course, not the only means, but they are certainly

the principal ones. Magazines, the public forum, the chautauqua, the

church, political gatherings, trade union meetings, women's clubs, and

news serials in the moving picture houses supplement the press. But

taking it all at the most favorable estimate, the time each day is

small when any of us is directly exposed to information from our

unseen environment.

CHAPTER V

SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS

1

The unseen environment is reported to us chiefly by words. These words

are transmitted by wire or radio from the reporters to the editors who

fit them into print. Telegraphy is expensive, and the facilities are

often limited. Press service news is, therefore, usually coded. Thus a

dispatch which reads,--

"Washington, D. C. June I.--The United States regards the question of

German shipping seized in this country at the outbreak of hostilities

as a closed incident,"

may pass over the wires in the following form:

"Washn i. The Uni Stas rgds tq of Ger spg seized in ts cou at t outbk

o hox as a clod incident." [Footnote: Phillip's Code.]

A news item saying:

"Berlin, June 1, Chancellor Wirth told the Reichstag to-day in

outlining the Government's program that 'restoration and

reconciliation would be the keynote of the new Government's policy.'

He added that the Cabinet was determined disarmament should be carried

out loyally and that disarmament would not be the occasion of the

imposition of further penalties by the Allies."

may be cabled in this form:

"Berlin 1. Chancellor Wirth told t Reichstag tdy in outlining the gvts

pgn tt qn restoration & reconciliation wd b the keynote f new gvts

policy. qj He added ttt cabinet ws dtmd disarmament sd b carried out

loyally & tt disarmament wd n b. the ocan f imposition of further

penalties bi t alis."

In this second item the substance has been culled from a long speech

in a foreign tongue, translated, coded, and then decoded. The

operators who receive the messages transcribe them as they go along,

and I am told that a good operator can write fifteen thousand or even

more words per eight hour day, with a half an hour out for lunch and

two ten minute periods for rest.

2

A few words must often stand for a whole succession of acts, thoughts,

feelings and consequences. We read:

"Washington, Dec. 23--A statement charging Japanese military

authorities with deeds more 'frightful and barbarous' than anything

ever alleged to have occurred in Belgium during the war was issued

here to-day by the Korean Commission, based, the Commission said, on

authentic reports received by it from Manchuria."

Here eyewitnesses, their accuracy unknown, report to the makers of

'authentic reports'; they in turn transmit these to a commission five

thousand miles away. It prepares a statement, probably much too long

for publication, from which a correspondent culls an item of print

three and a half inches long. The meaning has to be telescoped in such

a way as to permit the reader to judge how much weight to give to the

news.

It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the

elements of truth that complete justice would demand into a hundred

word account of what had happened in Korea during the course of

several months. For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of

meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to

evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no

certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same

idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's. Theoretically,

if each fact and each relation had a name that was unique, and if

everyone had agreed on the names, it would be possible to communicate

without misunderstanding. In the exact sciences there is an approach

to this ideal, and that is part of the reason why of all forms of

world-wide cooperation, scientific inquiry is the most effective.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language,

as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors. [Footnote:

Cited by White, _Mechanisms of Character Formation._] The

journalist addressing half a million readers of whom he has only a dim

picture, the speaker whose words are flashed to remote villages and

overseas, cannot hope that a few phrases will carry the whole burden

of their meaning. "The words of Lloyd George, badly understood and

badly transmitted," said M. Briand to the Chamber of Deputies,

[Footnote: Special Cable to _The New York Times,_ May 25, 1921,

by Edwin L, James. ] "seemed to give the Pan-Germanists the idea that

the time had come to start something." A British Prime Minister,

speaking in English to the whole attentive world, speaks his own

meaning in his own words to all kinds of people who will see their

meaning in those words. No matter how rich or subtle--or rather the

more rich and the more subtle that which he has to say, the more his

meaning will suffer as it is sluiced into standard speech and then

distributed again among alien minds. [Footnote: In May of 1921,

relations between England and France were strained by the insurrection

of M. Korfanty in Upper Silesia. The London Correspondence of the

_Manchester Guardian_ (May 20, 1921), contained the following

item:

"The Franco-English Exchange in Words.

"In quarters well acquainted with French ways and character I find a

tendency to think that undue sensibility has been shown by our press

and public opinion in the lively and at times intemperate language of

the French press through the present crisis. The point was put to me

by a well-informed neutral observer in the following manner.

"Words, like money, are tokens of value. They represent meaning,

therefore, and just as money, their representative value goes up and

down. The French word 'etonnant' was used by Bossuet with a terrible

weight of meaning which it has lost to-day. A similar thing can be

observed with the English word 'awful.' Some nations constitutionally

tend to understate, others to overstate. What the British Tommy called

an unhealthy place could only be described by an Italian soldier by

means of a rich vocabulary aided with an exuberant mimicry. Nations

that understate keep their word-currency sound. Nations that overstate

suffer from inflation in their language.

"Expressions such as 'a distinguished scholar,' 'a clever writer,'

must be translated into French as 'a great savant,' 'an exquisite

master.' It is a mere matter of exchange, just as in France one pound

pays 46 francs, and yet one knows that that does not increase its

value at home. Englishmen reading the French press should endeavour to

work out a mental operation similar to that of the banker who puts

back francs into pounds, and not forget in so doing that while in

normal times the change was 25 it is now 46 on account of the war. For

there is a war fluctuation on word exchanges as well as on money

exchanges.

"The argument, one hopes, works both ways, and Frenchmen do not fail

to realize that there is as much value behind English reticence as

behind their own exuberance of expression."]

Millions of those who are watching him can read hardly at all.

Millions more can read the words but cannot understand them. Of those

who can both read and understand, a good three-quarters we may assume

have some part of half an hour a day to spare for the subject. To them

the words so acquired are the cue for a whole train of ideas on which

ultimately a vote of untold consequences may be based. Necessarily the

ideas which we allow the words we read to evoke form the biggest part

of the original data of our opinions. The world is vast, the

situations that concern us are intricate, the messages are few, the

biggest part of opinion must be constructed in the imagination.

When we use the word "Mexico" what picture does it evoke in a resident

of New York? Likely as not, it is some composite of sand, cactus, oil

wells, greasers, rum-drinking Indians, testy old cavaliers flourishing

whiskers and sovereignty, or perhaps an idyllic peasantry à la Jean

Jacques, assailed by the prospect of smoky industrialism, and fighting

for the Rights of Man. What does the word "Japan" evoke? Is it a vague

horde of slant-eyed yellow men, surrounded by Yellow Perils, picture

brides, fans, Samurai, banzais, art, and cherry blossoms? Or the word

"alien"? According to a group of New England college students, writing

in the year 1920, an alien was the following: [Footnote: _The New

Republic_: December 29, 1920, p. 142. ]