Within limits that vary, the emotion is _Public opinion

stimulus and response. Therefore, if among a number of people,

possessing various tendencies to respond, you can find a stimulus

which will arouse the same emotion in many of them, you can substitute

it for the original stimuli. If, for example, one man dislikes the

League, another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be

able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis

of what they all hate. Suppose that symbol is Americanism. The first

man may read it as meaning the preservation of American isolation, or

as he may call it, independence; the second as the rejection of a

politician who clashes with his idea of what an American president

should be, the third as a call to resist revolution. The symbol in

itself signifies literally no one thing in particular, but it can be

associated with almost anything. And because of that it can become the

common bond of common feelings, even though those feelings were

originally attached to disparate ideas.

When political parties or newspapers declare for Americanism,

Progressivism, Law and Order, Justice, Humanity, they hope to

amalgamate the emotion of conflicting factions which would surely

divide, if, instead of these symbols, they were invited to discuss a

specific program. For when a coalition around the symbol has been

effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than

toward critical scrutiny of the measures. It is, I think, convenient

and technically correct to call multiple phrases like these symbolic.

They do not stand for specific ideas, but for a sort of truce or

junction between ideas. They are like a strategic railroad center

where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their

ultimate destination. But he who captures the symbols by which public

feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the

approaches of public policy. And as long as a particular symbol has

the power of coalition, ambitious factions will fight for possession.

Think, for example, of Lincoln's name or of Roosevelt's. A leader or

an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master

of the current situation. There are limits, of course. Too violent

abuse of the actualities which groups of people think the symbol

represents, or too great resistance in the name of that symbol to new

purposes, will, so to speak, burst the symbol. In this manner, during

the year 1917, the imposing symbol of Holy Russia and the Little

Father burst under the impact of suffering and defeat.

The tremendous consequences of Russia's collapse were felt on all the

fronts and among all the peoples. They led directly to a striking

experiment in the crystallization of a common opinion out of the

varieties of opinion churned up by the war. The Fourteen Points were

addressed to all the governments, allied, enemy, neutral, and to all

the peoples. They were an attempt to knit together the chief

imponderables of a world war. Necessarily this was a new departure,

because this was the first great war in which all the deciding

elements of mankind could be brought to think about the same ideas, or

at least about the same names for ideas, simultaneously. Without

cable, radio, telegraph, and daily press, the experiment of the

Fourteen Points would have been impossible. It was an attempt to

exploit the modern machinery of communication to start the return to a

"common consciousness" throughout the world.

But first we must examine some of the circumstances as they presented

themselves at the end of 1917. For in the form which the document

finally assumed, all these considerations are somehow represented.

During the summer and autumn a series of events had occurred which

profoundly affected the temper of the people and the course of the

war. In July the Russians had made a last offensive, had been

disastrously beaten, and the process of demoralization which led to

the Bolshevik revolution of November had begun. Somewhat earlier the

French had suffered a severe and almost disastrous defeat in Champagne

which produced mutinies in the army and a defeatist agitation among

the civilians. England was suffering from the effects of the submarine

raids, from the terrible losses of the Flanders battles, and in

November at Cambrai the British armies met a reverse that appalled the

troops at the front and the leaders at home. Extreme war weariness

pervaded the whole of western Europe.

In effect, the agony and disappointment had jarred loose men's

concentration on the accepted version of the war. Their interests were

no longer held by the ordinary official pronouncements, and their

attention began to wander, fixing now upon their own suffering, now

upon their party and class purposes, now upon general resentments

against the governments. That more or less perfect organization of

perception by official propaganda, of interest and attention by the

stimuli of hope, fear, and hatred, which is called morale, was by way

of breaking down. The minds of men everywhere began to search for new

attachments that promised relief.

Suddenly they beheld a tremendous drama. On the Eastern front there

was a Christmas truce, an end of slaughter, an end of noise, a promise

of peace. At Brest-Litovsk the dream of all simple people had come to

life: it was possible to negotiate, there was some other way to end

the ordeal than by matching lives with the enemy. Timidly, but with

rapt attention, people began to turn to the East. Why not, they asked?

What is it all for? Do the politicians know what they are doing? Are

we really fighting for what they say? Is it possible, perhaps, to

secure it without fighting? Under the ban of the censorship, little of

this was allowed to show itself in print, but, when Lord Lansdowne

spoke, there was a response from the heart. The earlier symbols of the

war had become hackneyed, and had lost their power to unify. Beneath

the surface a wide schism was opening up in each Allied country.

Something similar was happening in Central Europe. There too the

original impulse of the war was weakened; the union sacrée was broken.

The vertical cleavages along the battle front were cut across by

horizontal divisions running in all kinds of unforeseeable ways. The

moral crisis of the war had arrived before the military decision was

in sight. All this President Wilson and his advisers realized. They

had not, of course, a perfect knowledge of the situation, but what I

have sketched they knew.

They knew also that the Allied Governments were bound by a series of

engagements that in letter and in spirit ran counter to the popular

conception of what the war was about. The resolutions of the Paris

Economic Conference were, of course, public property, and the network

of secret treaties had been published by the Bolsheviks in November of

1917. [Footnote: President Wilson stated at his conference with the

Senators that he had never heard of these treaties until he reached

Paris. That statement is perplexing. The Fourteen Points, as the text

shows, could not have been formulated without a knowledge of the

secret treaties. The substance of those treaties was before the

President when he and Colonel House prepared the final published text

of the Fourteen Points.] Their terms were only vaguely known to the

peoples, but it was definitely believed that they did not comport with

the idealistic slogan of self-determination, no annexations and no

indemnities. Popular questioning took the form of asking how many

thousand English lives Alsace-Lorraine or Dalmatia were worth, how

many French lives Poland or Mesopotamia were worth. Nor was such

questioning entirely unknown in America. The whole Allied cause had

been put on the defensive by the refusal to participate at

Brest-Litovsk.

Here was a highly sensitive state of mind which no competent leader

could fail to consider. The ideal response would have been joint

action by the Allies. That was found to be impossible when it was

considered at the Interallied Conference of October. But by December

the pressure had become so great that Mr. George and Mr. Wilson were

moved independently to make some response. The form selected by the

President was a statement of peace terms under fourteen heads. The

numbering of them was an artifice to secure precision, and to create

at once the impression that here was a business-like document. The

idea of stating "peace terms" instead of "war aims" arose from the

necessity of establishing a genuine alternative to the Brest-Litovsk

negotiations. They were intended to compete for attention by

substituting for the spectacle of Russo-German parleys the much

grander spectacle of a public world-wide debate.

Having enlisted the interest of the world, it was necessary to hold

that interest unified and flexible for all the different possibilities

which the situation contained. The terms had to be such that the

majority among the Allies would regard them as worth while. They had

to meet the national aspirations of each people, and yet to limit

those aspirations so that no one nation would regard itself as a

catspaw for another. The terms had to satisfy official interests so as

not to provoke official disunion, and yet they had to meet popular

conceptions so as to prevent the spread of demoralization. They had,

in short, to preserve and confirm Allied unity in case the war was to

go on.

But they had also to be the terms of a possible peace, so that in case

the German center and left were ripe for agitation, they would have a

text with which to smite the governing class. The terms had,

therefore, to push the Allied governors nearer to their people, drive

the German governors away from their people, and establish a line of

common understanding between the Allies, the non-official Germans, and

the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary. The Fourteen Points were a

daring attempt to raise a standard to which almost everyone might

repair. If a sufficient number of the enemy people were ready there

would be peace; if not, then the Allies would be better prepared to

sustain the shock of war.

All these considerations entered into the making of the Fourteen

Points. No one man may have had them all in mind, but all the men

concerned had some of them in mind. Against this background let us

examine certain aspects of the document. The first five points and the

fourteenth deal with "open diplomacy," "freedom of the seas," "equal

trade opportunities," "reduction of armaments," no imperialist

annexation of colonies, and the League of Nations. They might be

described as a statement of the popular generalizations in which

everyone at that time professed to believe. But number three is more

specific. It was aimed consciously and directly at the resolutions of

the Paris Economic Conference, and was meant to relieve the German

people of their fear of suffocation.

Number six is the first point dealing with a particular nation. It was

intended as a reply to Russian suspicion of the Allies, and the

eloquence of its promises was attuned to the drama of Brest-Litovsk.

Number seven deals with Belgium, and is as unqualified in form and

purpose as was the conviction of practically the whole world,

including very large sections of Central Europe. Over number eight we

must pause. It begins with an absolute demand for evacuation and

restoration of French territory, and then passes on to the question of

Alsace-Lorraine. The phrasing of this clause most perfectly

illustrates the character of a public statement which must condense a

vast complex of interests in a few words. "And the wrong done to

France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has

unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be

righted. ..." Every word here was chosen with meticulous care. The

wrong done should be righted; why not say that Alsace-Lorraine should

be restored? It was not said, because it was not certain that all of

the French _at that time_ would fight on indefinitely for

reannexation if they were offered a plebiscite; and because it was

even less certain whether the English and Italians would fight on. The

formula had, therefore, to cover both contingencies. The word

"righted" guaranteed satisfaction to France, but did not read as a

commitment to simple annexation. But why speak of the wrong done by

_Prussia_ in _1871_? The word Prussia was, of course, intended

to remind the South Germans that Alsace-Lorraine belonged not to

them but to Prussia. Why speak of peace unsettled for "fifty years,"

and why the use of "1871"? In the first place, what the French and

the rest of the world remembered was 1871. That was the nodal

point of their grievance. But the formulators of the Fourteen Points

knew that French officialdom planned for more than the Alsace-Lorraine

of 1871. The secret memoranda that had passed between the Czar's

ministers and French officials in 1916 covered the annexation of the

Saar Valley and some sort of dismemberment of the Rhineland. It was

planned to include the Saar Valley under the term "Alsace-Lorraine"

because it had been part of Alsace-Lorraine in 1814, though it had

been detached in 1815, and was no part of the territory at the close

of the Franco-Prussian war. The official French formula for annexing

the Saar was to subsume it under "Alsace-Lorraine" meaning the

Alsace-Lorraine of 1814-1815. By insistence on "1871" the President

was really defining the ultimate boundary between Germany and France,

was adverting to the secret treaty, and was casting it aside.

Number nine, a little less subtly, does the same thing in respect to

Italy. "Clearly recognizable lines of nationality" are exactly what

the lines of the Treaty of London were not. Those lines were partly

strategic, partly economic, partly imperialistic, partly ethnic. The

only part of them that could possibly procure allied sympathy was that

which would recover the genuine Italia Irredenta. All the rest, as

everyone who was informed knew, merely delayed the impending Jugoslav

revolt.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the apparently unanimous

enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on

a program. Everyone seemed to find something that he liked and

stressed this aspect and that detail. But no one risked a discussion.

The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the

civilized world, were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but

they evoked a common emotion. And to that extent they played a part in

rallying the western peoples for the desperate ten months of war which

they had still to endure.

As long as the Fourteen Points dealt with that hazy and happy future

when the agony was to be over, the real conflicts of interpretation

were not made manifest. They were plans for the settlement of a wholly

invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups

each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public

hope. For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes's speech, is a

hierarchy of symbols. As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include

more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional

connection though you lose the intellectual. But even the emotion

becomes thinner. As you go further away from experience, you go higher

into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw

more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached

the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made

Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little. Yet

the people whose emotions are entrained do not remain passive. As the

public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the

emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private

meanings are given a universal application. Whatever you want badly is

the Rights of Humanity. For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of

meaning almost anything, soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything.

Mr. Wilson's phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in

every corner of the earth. No document negotiated and made of public

record existed to correct the confusion. [Footnote: The American

interpretation of the fourteen points was explained to the allied

statesmen just before the armistice.] And so, when the day of

settlement came, everybody expected everything. The European authors

of the treaty had a large choice, and they chose to realize those

expectations which were held by those of their countrymen who wielded

the most power at home.

They came down the hierarchy from the Rights of Humanity to the Rights

of France, Britain and Italy. They did not abandon the use of symbols.

They abandoned only those which after the war had no permanent roots

in the imagination of their constituents. They preserved the unity of

France by the use of symbolism, but they would not risk anything for

the unity of Europe. The symbol France was deeply attached, the symbol

Europe had only a recent history. Nevertheless the distinction between

an omnibus like Europe and a symbol like France is not sharp. The

history of states and empires reveals times when the scope of the

unifying idea increases and also times when it shrinks. One cannot say

that men have moved consistently from smaller loyalties to larger

ones, because the facts will not bear out the claim. The Roman Empire

and the Holy Roman Empire bellied out further than those national

unifications in the Nineteenth Century from which believers in a World

State argue by analogy. Nevertheless, it is probably true that the

real integration has increased regardless of the temporary inflation

and deflation of empires.

Such a real integration has undoubtedly occurred in American history.

In the decade before 1789 most men, it seems, felt that their state

and their community were real, but that the confederation of states

was unreal. The idea of their state, its flag, its most conspicuous

leaders, or whatever it was that represented Massachusetts, or

Virginia, were genuine symbols. That is to say, they were fed by

actual experiences from childhood, occupation, residence, and the

like. The span of men's experience had rarely traversed the imaginary

boundaries of their states. The word Virginian was related to pretty

nearly everything that most Virginians had ever known or felt. It was

the most extensive political idea which had genuine contact with their

experience.

Their experience, not their needs. For their needs arose out of their

real environment, which in those days was at least as large as the

thirteen colonies. They needed a common defense. They needed a

financial and economic regime as extensive as the Confederation. But

as long as the pseudo-environment of the state encompassed them, the

state symbols exhausted their political interest. An interstate idea,

like the Confederation, represented a powerless abstraction. It was an

omnibus, rather than a symbol, and the harmony among divergent groups,

which the omnibus creates, is transient.

I have said that the idea of confederation was a powerless

abstraction. Yet the need of unity existed in the decade before the

Constitution was adopted. The need existed, in the sense that affairs

were askew unless the need of unity was taken into account. Gradually

certain classes in each colony began to break through the state

experience. Their personal interests led across the state lines to

interstate experiences, and gradually there was constructed in their

minds a picture of the American environment which was truly national

in scope. For them the idea of federation became a true symbol, and

ceased to be an omnibus. The most imaginative of these men was

Alexander Hamilton. It happened that he had no primitive attachment to

any one state, for he was born in the West Indies, and had, from the

very beginning of his active life, been associated with the common

interests of all the states. Thus to most men of the time the question

of whether the capital should be in Virginia or in Philadelphia was of

enormous importance, because they were locally minded. To Hamilton

this question was of no emotional consequence; what he wanted was the

assumption of the state debts because they would further nationalize

the proposed union. So he gladly traded the site of the capitol for

two necessary votes from men who represented the Potomac district. To

Hamilton the Union was a symbol that represented all his interests and

his whole experience; to White and Lee from the Potomac, the symbol of

their province was the highest political entity they served, and they

served it though they hated to pay the price. They agreed, says

Jefferson, to change their votes, "White with a revulsion of stomach

almost convulsive." [Footnote: _Works,_ Vol. IX, p. 87. Cited by

Beard, _Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy,_ p. 172.]

In the crystallizing of a common will, there is always an Alexander

Hamilton at work.

CHAPTER XIV

YES OR NO

Symbols are often so useful and so mysteriously powerful that the word

itself exhales a magical glamor. In thinking about symbols it is

tempting to treat them as if they possessed independent energy. Yet no

end of symbols which once provoked ecstasy have quite ceased to affect

anybody. The museums and the books of folklore are full of dead

emblems and incantations, since there is no power in the symbol,

except that which it acquires by association in the human mind. The

symbols that have lost their power, and the symbols incessantly

suggested which fail to take root, remind us that if we were patient

enough to study in detail the circulation of a symbol, we should

behold an entirely secular history.

In the Hughes campaign speech, in the Fourteen Points, in Hamilton's

project, symbols are employed. But they are employed by somebody at a

particular moment. The words themselves do not crystallize random

feeling. The words must be spoken by people who are strategically

placed, and they must be spoken at the opportune moment. Otherwise

they are mere wind. The symbols must be earmarked. For in themselves

they mean nothing, and the choice of possible symbols is always so

great that we should, like the donkey who stood equidistant between

two bales of hay, perish from sheer indecision among the symbols that

compete for our attention.

Here, for example, are the reasons for their vote as stated by certain

private citizens to a newspaper just before the election of 1920.

For Harding:

"The patriotic men and women of to-day, who cast their ballots for

Harding and Coolidge will be held by posterity to have signed our

Second Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilmot--, inventor.

"He will see to it that the United States does not enter into

'entangling alliances,' Washington as a city will benefit by changing

the control of the government from the Democrats to the Republicans."

Mr. Clarence--, salesman.

For Cox:

"The people of the United States realize that it is our duty pledged

on the fields of France, to join the League of Nations. We must

shoulder our share of the burden of enforcing peace throughout the

world."

Miss Marie--, stenographer.

"We should lose our own respect and the respect of other nations were

we to refuse to enter the League of Nations in obtaining international

peace."

Mr. Spencer--, statistician.

The two sets of phrases are equally noble, equally true, and almost

reversible. Would Clarence and Wilmot have admitted for an instant

that they intended to default in our duty pledged on the fields of

France; or that they did not desire international peace? Certainly

not. Would Marie and Spencer have admitted that they were in favor of

entangling alliances or the surrender of American independence? They

would have argued with you that the League was, as President Wilson

called it, a disentangling alliance, as well as a Declaration of

Independence for all the world, plus a Monroe Doctrine for the planet.

Since the offering of symbols is so generous, and the meaning that can

be imputed is so elastic, how does any particular symbol take root in

any particular person's mind? It is planted there by another human

being whom we recognize as authoritative. If it is planted deeply

enough, it may be that later we shall call the person authoritative

who waves that symbol at us. But in the first instance symbols are

made congenial and important because they are introduced to us by

congenial and important people.

For we are not born out of an egg at the age of eighteen with a

realistic imagination; we are still, as Mr. Shaw recalls, in the era

of Burge and Lubin, where in infancy we are dependent upon older

beings for our contacts. And so we make our connections with the outer

world through certain beloved and authoritative persons. They are the

first bridge to the invisible world. And though we may gradually

master for ourselves many phases of that larger environment, there

always remains a vaster one that is unknown. To that we still relate

ourselves through authorities. Where all the facts are out of sight a

true report and a plausible error read alike, sound alike, feel alike.

Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot

choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between

trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters. [Footnote: See an

interesting, rather quaint old book: George Cornewall Lewis, _An

Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion_.]

Theoretically we ought to choose the most expert on each subject. But

the choice of the expert, though a good deal easier than the choice of

truth, is still too difficult and often impracticable. The experts

themselves are not in the least certain who among them is the most

expert. And at that, the expert, even when we can identify him, is,

likely as not, too busy to be consulted, or impossible to get at. But

there are people whom we can identify easily enough because they are

the people who are at the head of affairs. Parents, teachers, and

masterful friends are the first people of this sort we encounter. Into

the difficult question of why children trust one parent rather than

another, the history teacher rather than the Sunday school teacher, we

need not try to enter. Nor how trust gradually spreads through a

newspaper or an acquaintance who is interested in public affairs to

public personages. The literature of psychoanalysis is rich in

suggestive hypothesis.

At any rate we do find ourselves trusting certain people, who

constitute our means of junction with pretty nearly the whole realm of

unknown things. Strangely enough, this fact is sometimes regarded as

inherently undignified, as evidence of our sheep-like, ape-like

nature. But complete independence in the universe is simply

unthinkable. If we could not take practically everything for granted,

we should spend our lives in utter triviality. The nearest thing to a

wholly independent adult is a hermit, and the range of a hermit's

action is very short. Acting entirely for himself, he can act only

within a tiny radius and for simple ends. If he has time to think

great thoughts we can be certain that he has accepted without

question, before he went in for being a hermit, a whole repertory of

painfully acquired information about how to keep warm and how to keep

from being hungry, and also about what the great questions are.

On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the

utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the

authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs

our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing

them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a

debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we

are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the

debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has

brought into the argument. We shall see later how the democratic

theory proceeds on the opposite assumption and assumes for the

purposes of government an unlimited supply of self-sufficient

individuals.

The people on whom we depend for contact with the outer world are

those who seem to be running it. [Footnote: _Cf._ Bryce, _Modern

Democracies_ Vol. II, pp. 544-545.] They may be running only a

very small part of the world. The nurse feeds the child, bathes it, and

puts it to bed. That does not constitute the nurse an authority on

physics, zoology, and the Higher Criticism. Mr. Smith runs, or at least

hires, the man who runs the factory. That does not make him an

authority on the Constitution of the United States, nor on the effects

\of the Fordney tariff. Mr. Smoot runs the Republican party in the State

of Utah. That in itself does not prove he is the best man to consult

about taxation. But the nurse may nevertheless determine for a while

what zoology the child shall learn, Mr. Smith will have much to say on

what the Constitution shall mean to his wife, his secretary, and perhaps

even to his parson, and who shall define the limits of Senator Smoot's

authority?

The priest, the lord of the manor, the captains and the kings, the

party leaders, the merchant, the boss, however these men are chosen,

whether by birth, inheritance, conquest or election, they and their

organized following administer human affairs. They are the officers,

and although the same man may be field marshal at home, second

lieutenant at the office, and scrub private in politics, although in many

institutions the hierarchy of rank is vague or concealed, yet in every

institution that requires the cooperation of many persons, some such

hierarchy exists. [Footnote: _Cf._ M. Ostrogorski, _Democracy and the

Organization of Political Parties, passim;_ R. Michels, _Political Parties,

passim;_ and Bryce, _Modern Democracies,_ particularly Chap.

LXXV; also Ross, _Principles of Sociology,_ Chaps. XXII-XXIV. ]

In American politics we call it a machine, or "the organization."

There are a number of important distinctions between the members of

the machine and the rank and file. The leaders, the steering committee

and the inner circle, are in direct contact with their environment.

They may, to be sure, have a very limited notion of what they ought to

define as the environment, but they are not dealing almost wholly with

abstractions. There are particular men they hope to see elected,

particular balance sheets they wish to see improved, concrete

objectives that must be attained. I do not mean that they escape the

human propensity to stereotyped vision. Their stereotypes often make

them absurd routineers. But whatever their limitations, the chiefs are

in actual contact with some crucial part of that larger environment.

They decide. They give orders. They bargain. And something definite,

perhaps not at all what they imagined, actually happens.

Their subordinates are not tied to them by a common conviction. That

is to say the lesser members of a machine do not dispose their loyalty

according to independent judgment about the wisdom of the leaders. In

the hierarchy each is dependent upon a superior and is in turn

superior to some class of his dependents. What holds the machine

together is a system of privileges. These may vary according to the

opportunities and the tastes of those who seek them, from nepotism and

patronage in all their aspects to clannishness, hero-worship or a

fixed idea. They vary from military rank in armies, through land and

services in a feudal system, to jobs and publicity in a modern

democracy. That is why you can breakup a particular machine by

abolishing its privileges. But the machine in every coherent group is,

I believe, certain to reappear. For privilege is entirely relative,

and uniformity is impossible. Imagine the most absolute communism of

which your mind is capable, where no one possessed any object that

everyone else did not possess, and still, if the communist group had

to take any action whatever, the mere pleasure of being the friend of

the man who was going to make the speech that secured the most votes,

would, I am convinced, be enough to crystallize an organization of

insiders around him.

It is not necessary, then, to invent a collective intelligence in

order to explain why the judgments of a group are usually more

coherent, and often more true to form than the remarks of the man in

the street. One mind, or a few can pursue a train of thought, but a

group trying to think in concert can as a group do little more than

assent or dissent. The members of a hierarchy can have a corporate

tradition. As apprentices they learn the trade from the masters, who

in turn learned it when they were apprentices, and in any enduring

society, the change of personnel within the governing hierarchies is

slow enough to permit the transmission of certain great stereotypes

and patterns of behavior. From father to son, from prelate to novice,

from veteran to cadet, certain ways of seeing and doing are taught.

These ways become familiar, and are recognized as such by the mass of

outsiders.

Distance alone lends enchantment to the view that masses of human

beings ever coöperate in any complex affair without a central machine

managed by a very few people. "No one," says Bryce, [Footnote: _Op.

cit._, Vol. II, p. 542.] "can have had some years' experience of

the conduct of affairs in a legislature or an administration without

observing how extremely small is the number of persons by whom the

world is governed." He is referring, of course, to affairs of state.

To be sure if you consider all the affairs of mankind the number of

people who govern is considerable, but if you take any particular

institution, be it a legislature, a party, a trade union, a

nationalist movement, a factory, or a club, the number of those who

govern is a very small percentage of those who are theoretically

supposed to govern.

Landslides can turn one machine out and put another in; revolutions

sometimes abolish a particular machine altogether. The democratic

revolution set up two alternating machines, each of which in the

course of a few years reaps the advantage from the mistakes of the

other. But nowhere does the machine disappear. Nowhere is the idyllic

theory of democracy realized. Certainly not in trades unions, nor in

socialist parties, nor in communist governments. There is an inner

circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into

the disinterested or uninterested rank and file.

Democrats have never come to terms with this commonplace of group

life. They have invariably regarded it as perverse. For there are two

visions of democracy: one presupposes the self-sufficient individual;

the other an Oversoul regulating everything.

Of the two the Oversoul has some advantage because it does at least

recognize that the mass makes decisions that are not spontaneously

born in the breast of every member. But the Oversoul as presiding

genius in corporate behavior is a superfluous mystery if we fix our

attention upon the machine. The machine is a quite prosaic reality. It

consists of human beings who wear clothes and live in houses, who can

be named and described. They perform all the duties usually assigned

to the Oversoul.

The reason for the machine is not the perversity of human nature. It

is that out of the private notions of any group no common idea emerges

by itself. For the number of ways is limited in which a multitude of

people can act directly upon a situation beyond their reach. Some of

them can migrate, in one form or another, they can strike or boycott,

they can applaud or hiss. They can by these means occasionally resist

what they do not like, or coerce those who obstruct what they desire.

But by mass action nothing can be constructed, devised, negotiated, or

administered. A public as such, without an organized hierarchy around

which it can gather, may refuse to buy if the prices are too high, or

refuse to work if wages are too low. A trade union can by mass action

in a strike break an opposition so that the union officials can

negotiate an agreement. It may win, for example, the _right_ to

joint control. But it cannot exercise the right except through an

organization. A nation can clamor for war, but when it goes to war it

must put itself under orders from a general staff.

The limit of direct action is for all practical purposes the power to

say Yes or No on an issue presented to the mass. [Footnote: _Cf_.

James, _Some Problems of Philosophy_, p. 227. "But for most of

our emergencies, fractional solutions are impossible. Seldom can we

act fractionally." _Cf_. Lowell, _Public Opinion and Popular

Government_, pp. 91, 92.] For only in the very simplest cases does

an issue present itself in the same form spontaneously and

approximately at the same time to all the members of a public. There

are unorganized strikes and boycotts, not merely industrial ones,

where the grievance is so plain that virtually without leadership the

same reaction takes place in many people. But even in these

rudimentary cases there are persons who know what they want to do more

quickly than the rest, and who become impromptu ringleaders. Where

they do not appear a crowd will mill about aimlessly beset by all its

private aims, or stand by fatalistically, as did a crowd of fifty

persons the other day, and watch a man commit suicide.

For what we make out of most of the impressions that come to us from

the invisible world is a kind of pantomime played out in revery. The

number of times is small that we consciously decide anything about

events beyond our sight, and each man's opinion of what he could

accomplish if he tried, is slight. There is rarely a practical issue,

and therefore no great habit of decision. This would be more evident

were it not that most information when it reaches us carries with it

an aura of suggestion as to how we ought to feel about the news. That

suggestion we need, and if we do not find it in the news we turn to

the editorials or to a trusted adviser. The revery, if we feel

ourselves implicated, is uncomfortable until we know where we stand,

that is, until the facts have been formulated so that we can feel Yes

or No in regard to them.

When a number of people all say Yes they may have all kinds of reasons

for saying it. They generally do. For the pictures in their minds are,

as we have already noted, varied in subtle and intimate ways. But this

subtlety remains within their minds; it becomes represented publicly

by a number of symbolic phrases which carry the individual emotion

after evacuating most of the intention. The hierarchy, or, if it is a

contest, then the two hierarchies, associate the symbols with a

definite action, a vote of Yes or No, an attitude pro or con. Then

Smith who was against the League and Jones who was against Article X,

and Brown who was against Mr. Wilson and all his works, each for his

own reason, all in the name of more or less the same symbolic phrase,

Republicans. A common will has been expressed.

A concrete choice had to be presented, the choice had to be connected,

by the transfer of interest through the symbols, with individual

opinion. The professional politicians learned this long before the

democratic philosophers. And so they organized the caucus, the

nominating convention, and the steering committee, as the means of

formulating a definite choice. Everyone who wishes to accomplish

anything that requires the cooperation of a large number of people

follows their example. Sometimes it is done rather brutally as when

the Peace Conference reduced itself to the Council of Ten, and the

Council of Ten to the Big Three or Four; and wrote a treaty which the

minor allies, their own constituents, and the enemy were permitted to

take or leave. More consultation than that is generally possible and

desirable. But the essential fact remains that a small number of heads

present a choice to a large group.

The abuses of the steering committee have led to various proposals

such as the initiative, referendum and direct primary. But these

merely postponed or obscured the need for a machine by complicating

the elections, or as H. G. Wells once said with scrupulous accuracy,

the selections. For no amount of balloting can obviate the need of

creating an issue, be it a measure or a candidate, on which the voters

can say Yes, or No. There is, in fact, no such thing as "direct

legislation." For what happens where it is supposed to exist? The

citizen goes to the polls, receives a ballot on which a number of

measures are printed, almost always in abbreviated form, and, if he

says anything at all, he says Yes or No. The most brilliant amendment

in the world may occur to him. He votes Yes or No on that bill and no

other. You have to commit violence against the English language to

call that legislation. I do not argue, of course, that there are no

benefits, whatever you call the process. I think that for certain

kinds of issues there are distinct benefits. But the necessary

simplicity of any mass decision is a very important fact in view of

the inevitable complexity of the world in which those decisions

operate. The most complicated form of voting that anyone proposes is,

I suppose, the preferential ballot. Among a number of candidates

presented the voter under that system, instead of saying yes to one

candidate and no to all the others, states the order of his choice.

But even here, immensely more flexible though it is, the action of the

mass depends upon the quality of the choices presented. [Footnote:

_Cf._ H. J. Laski, _Foundations of Sovereignty,_ p. 224. "...

proportional representation... by leading, as it seems to lead, to the

group system... may deprive the electors of their choice of leaders."

The group system undoubtedly tends, as Mr. Laski says, to make the

selection of the executive more indirect, but there is no doubt also

that it tends to produce legislative assemblies in which currents of

opinion are more fully represented. Whether that is good or bad

cannot be determined a priori. But one can say that successful

cooperation and responsibility in a more accurately representative

assembly require a higher organization of political intelligence and

political habit, than in a rigid two-party house. It is a more complex

political form and may therefore work less well.] And those choices

are presented by the energetic coteries who hustle about with

petitions and round up the delegates. The Many can elect after the Few

have nominated.

CHAPTER XV

LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE

BECAUSE of their transcendent practical importance, no successful

leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols which organize

his following. What privileges do within the hierarchy, symbols do for

the rank and file. They conserve unity. From the totem pole to the

national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from

the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham,

symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves

unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged.

The detached observer may scorn the "star-spangled" ritual which

hedges the symbol, perhaps as much as the king who told himself that

Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows by experience that

only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to

move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target,

and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates

what he calls destructive criticism, sometimes called by free spirits

the elimination of buncombe. "Above all things," says Bagehot, "our

royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you

cannot reverence it." [Footnote: _The English Constitution,_ p.

127. D. Appleton & Company, 1914.] For poking about with clear

definitions and candid statements serves all high purposes known to

man, except the easy conservation of a common will. Poking about, as

every responsible leader suspects, tends to break the transference of

emotion from the individual mind to the institutional symbol. And the

first result of that is, as he rightly says, a chaos of individualism

and warring sects. The disintegration of a symbol, like Holy Russia,

or the Iron Diaz, is always the beginning of a long upheaval.

These great symbols possess by transference all the minute and

detailed loyalties of an ancient and stereotyped society. They evoke

the feeling that each individual has for the landscape, the furniture,

the faces, the memories that are his first, and in a static society,

his only reality. That core of images and devotions without which he

is unthinkable to himself, is nationality. The great symbols take up

these devotions, and can arouse them without calling forth the

primitive images. The lesser symbols of public debate, the more casual

chatter of politics, are always referred back to these proto-symbols,

and if possible associated with them. The question of a proper fare on

a municipal subway is symbolized as an issue between the People and

the Interests, and then the People is inserted in the symbol American,

so that finally in the heat of a campaign, an eight cent fare becomes

unAmerican. The Revolutionary fathers died to prevent it. Lincoln

suffered that it might not come to pass, resistance to it was implied

in the death of those who sleep in France.

Because of its power to siphon emotion out of distinct ideas, the

symbol is both a mechanism of solidarity, and a mechanism of

exploitation. It enables people to work for a common end, but just

because the few who are strategically placed must choose the concrete

objectives, the symbol is also an instrument by which a few can fatten

on many, deflect criticism, and seduce men into facing agony for

objects they do not understand.

Many aspects of our subjection to symbols are not flattering if we

choose to think of ourselves as realistic, self-sufficient, and

self-governing personalities. Yet it is impossible to conclude that

symbols are altogether instruments of the devil. In the realm of

science and contemplation they are undoubtedly the tempter himself.

But in the world of action they may be beneficent, and are sometimes a

necessity. The necessity is often imagined, the peril manufactured.

But when quick results are imperative, the manipulation of masses

through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing

done. It is often more important to act than to understand. It is

sometimes true that the action would fail if everyone understood it.

There are many affairs which cannot wait for a referendum or endure

publicity, and there are times, during war for example, when a nation,

an army, and even its commanders must trust strategy to a very few

minds; when two conflicting opinions, though one happens to be right,

are more perilous than one opinion which is wrong. The wrong opinion

may have bad results, but the two opinions may entail disaster by

dissolving unity. [Footnote: Captain Peter S. Wright, Assistant

Secretary of the Supreme War Council, _At the Supreme War

Council,_ is well worth careful reading on secrecy and unity of

command, even though in respect to the allied leaders he wages a

passionate polemic.]

Thus Foch and Sir Henry Wilson, who foresaw the impending disaster to

Cough's army, as a consequence of the divided and scattered reserves,

nevertheless kept their opinions well within a small circle, knowing

that even the risk of a smashing defeat was less certainly

destructive, than would have been an excited debate in the newspapers.

For what matters most under the kind of tension which prevailed in

March, 1918, is less the rightness of a particular move than the

unbroken expectation as to the source of command. Had Foch "gone to

the people" he might have won the debate, but long before he could

have won it, the armies which he was to command would have dissolved.

For the spectacle of a row on Olympus is diverting and destructive.

But so also is a conspiracy of silence. Says Captain Wright: "It is in

the High Command and not in the line, that the art of camouflage is

most practiced, and reaches to highest flights. All chiefs everywhere

are now kept painted, by the busy work of numberless publicists, so as

to be mistaken for Napoleons--at a distance....It becomes almost

impossible to displace these Napoleons, whatever their incompetence,

because of the enormous public support created by hiding or glossing

failure, and exaggerating or inventing success.... But the most

insidious and worst effect of this so highly organized falsity is on

the generals themselves: modest and patriotic as they mostly are, and

as most men must be to take up and follow the noble profession of

arms, they themselves are ultimately affected by these universal

illusions, and reading it every morning in the paper, they also grow

persuaded they are thunderbolts of war and infallible, however much

they fail, and that their maintenance in command is an end so sacred

that it justifies the use of any means.... These various conditions,

of which this great deceit is the greatest, at last emancipate all

General Staffs from all control. They no longer live for the nation:

the nation lives, or rather dies, for them. Victory or defeat ceases

to be the prime interest. What matters to these semi-sovereign

corporations is whether dear old Willie or poor old Harry is going to

be at their head, or the Chantilly party prevail over the Boulevard

des Invalides party." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 98, 101-105.]

Yet Captain Wright who can be so eloquent and so discerning about the

dangers of silence is forced nevertheless to approve the silence of

Foch in not publicly destroying the illusions. There is here a

complicated paradox, arising as we shall see more fully later on,

because the traditional democratic view of life is conceived, not for

emergencies and dangers, but for tranquillity and harmony. And so

where masses of people must coöperate in an uncertain and eruptive

environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility

without real consent. The symbol does that. It obscures personal

intention, neutralizes discrimination, and obfuscates individual

purpose. It immobilizes personality, yet at the same time it

enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group,

as nothing else in a crisis can weld it, to purposeful action. It

renders the mass mobile though it immobilizes personality. The symbol

is the instrument by which in the short run the mass escapes from its

own inertia, the inertia of indecision, or the inertia of headlong

movement, and is rendered capable of being led along the zigzag of a

complex situation.

But in the longer run, the give and take increases between the leaders

and the led. The word most often used to describe the state of mind in

the rank and file about its leaders is morale. That is said to be good

when the individuals do the part allotted to them with all their

energy; when each man's whole strength is evoked by the command from

above. It follows that every leader must plan his policy with this in

mind. He must consider his decision not only on "the merits," but also

in its effect on any part of his following whose continued support he

requires. If he is a general planning an attack, he knows that his

organized military units will scatter into mobs if the percentage of

casualties rises too high.

In the Great War previous calculations were upset to an extraordinary

degree, for "out of every nine men who went to France five became

casualties." [Footnote: _Op. cit_., p. 37. Figures taken by

Captain Wright from the statistical abstract of the war in the

Archives of the War Office. The figures refer apparently to the

English losses alone, possibly to the English and French.] The limit

of endurance was far greater than anyone had supposed. But there was a

limit somewhere. And so, partly because of its effect on the enemy,

but also in great measure because of its effect on the troops and

their families, no command in this war dared to publish a candid

statement of its losses. In France the casualty lists were never

published. In England, America, and Germany publication of the losses

of a big battle were spread out over long periods so as to destroy a

unified impression of the total. Only the insiders knew until long

afterwards what the Somme had cost, or the Flanders battles;

[Footnote: _Op cit._, p. 34, the Somme cost nearly 500,000

casualties; the Arras and Flanders offensives of 1917 cost 650,000

British casualties.] and Ludendorff undoubtedly had a very much more

accurate idea of these casualties than any private person in London,

Paris or Chicago. All the leaders in every camp did their best to

limit the amount of actual war which any one soldier or civilian could

vividly conceive. But, of course, among old veterans like the French

troops of 1917, a great deal more is known about war than ever reaches

the public. Such an army begins to judge its commanders in terms of

its own suffering. And then, when another extravagant promise of

victory turns out to be the customary bloody defeat, you may find that

a mutiny breaks out over some comparatively minor blunder, [Footnote:

The Allies suffered many bloodier defeats than that on the Chemin des

Dames.] like Nivelle's offensive of 1917, because it is a cumulative

blunder. Revolutions and mutinies generally follow a small sample of a

big series of evils. [Footnote: _Cf._ Pierrefeu's account, _op.

cit._, on the causes of the Soissons mutinies, and the method

adopted by Pétain to deal with them. Vol. I, Part III, _et seq._]

The incidence of policy determines the relation between leader and

following. If those whom he needs in his plan are remote from the

place where the action takes place, if the results are hidden or

postponed, if the individual obligations are indirect or not yet due,

above all if assent is an exercise of some pleasurable emotion, the

leader is likely to have a free hand. Those programs are immediately

most popular, like prohibition among teetotalers, which do not at once

impinge upon the private habits of the followers. That is one great

reason why governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs. Most

of the frictions between two states involve a series of obscure and

long-winded contentions, occasionally on the frontier, but far more

often in regions about which school geographies have supplied no

precise ideas. In Czechoslovakia America is regarded as the Liberator;

in American newspaper paragraphs and musical comedy, in American

conversation by and large, it has never been finally settled whether

the country we liberated is Czechoslavia or Jugoslovakia.

In foreign affairs the incidence of policy is for a very long time

confined to an unseen environment. Nothing that happens out there is

felt to be wholly real. And so, because in the ante-bellum period,

nobody has to fight and nobody has to pay, governments go along

according to their lights without much reference to their people. In

local affairs the cost of a policy is more easily visible. And

therefore, all but the most exceptional leaders prefer policies in

which the costs are as far as possible indirect.

They do not like direct taxation. They do not like to pay as they go.

They like long term debts. They like to have the voters believe that

the foreigner will pay. They have always been compelled to calculate

prosperity in terms of the producer rather than in terms of the

consumer, because the incidence on the consumer is distributed over so

many trivial items. Labor leaders have always preferred an increase of

money wages to a decrease in prices. There has always been more

popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but

comparatively unimportant, than in the wastes of the industrial

system, which are huge but elusive. A legislature dealing with a

shortage of houses, such as exists when this is written, illustrates

this rule, first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses,

second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by

investigating the profiteering builders and working men. For a

constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while

a greedy landlord, or a profiteering plumber is visible and immediate.

But while people will readily believe that in an unimagined future and

in unseen places a certain policy will benefit them, the actual

working out of policy follows a different logic from their opinions. A

nation may be induced to believe that jacking up the freight rates

will make the railroads prosperous. But that belief will not make the

roads prosperous, if the impact of those rates on farmers and shippers

is such as to produce a commodity price beyond what the consumer can

pay. Whether the consumer will pay the price depends not upon whether

he nodded his head nine months previously at the proposal to raise

rates and save business, but on whether he now wants a new hat or a

new automobile enough to pay for them.

Leaders often pretend that they have merely uncovered a program which

existed in the minds of their public. When they believe it, they are

usually deceiving themselves. Programs do not invent themselves

synchronously in a multitude of minds. That is not because a multitude

of minds is necessarily inferior to that of the leaders, but because

thought is the function of an organism, and a mass is not an organism.

This fact is obscured because the mass is constantly exposed to

suggestion. It reads not the news, but the news with an aura of

suggestion about it, indicating the line of action to be taken. It

hears reports, not objective as the facts are, but already stereotyped

to a certain pattern of behavior. Thus the ostensible leader often

finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor. But if,

as in a laboratory, one could remove all suggestion and leading from

the experience of a multitude, one would, I think, find something like

this: A mass exposed to the same stimuli would develop responses that

could theoretically be charted in a polygon of error. There would be a

certain group that felt sufficiently alike to be classified together.

There would be variants of feeling at both ends. These classifications

would tend to harden as individuals in each of the classifications

made their reactions vocal. That is to say, when the vague feelings of

those who felt vaguely had been put into words, they would know more

definitely what they felt, and would then feel it more definitely.

Leaders in touch with popular feeling are quickly conscious of these

reactions. They know that high prices are pressing upon the mass, or

that certain classes of individuals are becoming unpopular, or that

feeling towards another nation is friendly or hostile. But, always

barring the effect of suggestion which is merely the assumption of

leadership by the reporter, there would be nothing in the feeling of

the mass that fatally determined the choice of any particular policy.

All that the feeling of the mass demands is that policy as it is

developed and exposed shall be, if not logically, then by analogy and

association, connected with the original feeling.

So when a new policy is to be launched, there is a preliminary bid for

community of feeling, as in Mark Antony's speech to the followers of

Brutus. [Footnote: Excellently analyzed in Martin, _The Behavior of

Crowds,_ pp. 130-132,] In the first phase, the leader vocalizes the

prevalent opinion of the mass. He identifies himself with the familiar

attitudes of his audience, sometimes by telling a good story,

sometimes by brandishing his patriotism, often by pinching a

grievance. Finding that he is trustworthy, the multitude milling

hither and thither may turn in towards him. He will then be expected

to set forth a plan of campaign. But he will not find that plan in the

slogans which convey the feelings of the mass. It will not even always

be indicated by them. Where the incidence of policy is remote, all

that is essential is that the program shall be verbally and

emotionally connected at the start with what has become vocal in the

multitude. Trusted men in a familiar role subscribing to the accepted

symbols can go a very long way on their own initiative without

explaining the substance of their programs.

But wise leaders are not content to do that. Provided they think

publicity will not strengthen opposition too much, and that debate

will not delay action too long, they seek a certain measure of

consent. They take, if not the whole mass, then the subordinates of

the hierarchy sufficiently into their confidence to prepare them for

what might happen, and to make them feel that they have freely willed

the result. But however sincere the leader may be, there is always,

when the facts are very complicated, a certain amount of illusion in

these consultations. For it is impossible that all the contingencies

shall be as vivid to the whole public as they are to the more

experienced and the more imaginative. A fairly large percentage are

bound to agree without having taken the time, or without possessing

the background, for appreciating the choices which the leader presents

to them. No one, however, can ask for more. And only theorists do. If

we have had our day in court, if what we had to say was heard, and

then if what is done comes out well, most of us do not stop to

consider how much our opinion affected the business in hand.

And therefore, if the established powers are sensitive and

well-informed, if they are visibly trying to meet popular feeling, and

actually removing some of the causes of dissatisfaction, no matter how

slowly they proceed, provided they are seen to be proceeding, they

have little to fear. It takes stupendous and persistent blundering,

plus almost infinite tactlessness, to start a revolution from below.

Palace revolutions, interdepartmental revolutions, are a different

matter. So, too, is demagogy. That stops at relieving the tension by

expressing the feeling. But the statesman knows that such relief is

temporary, and if indulged too often, unsanitary. He, therefore, sees

to it that he arouses no feeling which he cannot sluice into a program

that deals with the facts to which the feelings refer.

But all leaders are not statesmen, all leaders hate to resign, and

most leaders find it hard to believe that bad as things are, the other

fellow would not make them worse. They do not passively wait for the

public to feel the incidence of policy, because the incidence of that

discovery is generally upon their own heads. They are, therefore,

intermittently engaged in mending their fences and consolidating their

position.

The mending of fences consists in offering an occasional scapegoat, in

redressing a minor grievance affecting a powerful individual or

faction, rearranging certain jobs, placating a group of people who

want an arsenal in their home town, or a law to stop somebody's vices.

Study the daily activity of any public official who depends on

election and you can enlarge this list. There are Congressmen elected

year after year who never think of dissipating their energy on public

affairs. They prefer to do a little service for a lot of people on a

lot of little subjects, rather than to engage in trying to do a big

service out there in the void. But the number of people to whom any

organization can be a successful valet is limited, and shrewd

politicians take care to attend either the influential, or somebody so

blatantly uninfluential that to pay any attention to him is a mark of

sensational magnanimity. The far greater number who cannot be held by

favors, the anonymous multitude, receive propaganda.

The established leaders of any organization have great natural

advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information.

The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the

important conferences. They met the important people. They have

responsibility. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention

and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great

deal of control over the access to the facts. Every official is in

some degree a censor. And since no one can suppress information,

either by concealing it or forgetting to mention it, without some

notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some

degree a propagandist. Strategically placed, and compelled often to

choose even at the best between the equally cogent though conflicting

ideals of safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the

official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts,

in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no

one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is

certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and

the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the

process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which

was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it

has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic,

because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And

so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern

means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner.

A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any

shifting of economic power.

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs,

persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of

popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences,

but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to

create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every

political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in

the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our

thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example,

to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge

needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from

the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to

self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It

has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience,

or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world

beyond our reach.

PART VI

THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY

"I confess that in America I saw more than America;

I sought the image of democracy itself."

Alexis de Tocqueville.

CHAPTER 16. THE SELF-CENTERED MAN

" 17. THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY

" 18. THE ROLE OF FORCE, PATRONAGE AND PRIVILEGE

" 19. THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM: GUILD SOCIALISM

" 20. A NEW IMAGE

CHAPTER XVI

THE SELF-CENTERED MAN

SINCE Public Opinion is supposed to be the prime mover in democracies,

one might reasonably expect to find a vast literature. One does not

find it. There are excellent books on government and parties, that is,

on the machinery which in theory registers public opinions after they

are formed. But on the sources from which these public opinions arise,

on the processes by which they are derived, there is relatively

little. The existence of a force called Public Opinion is in the main

taken for granted, and American political writers have been most

interested either in finding out how to make government express the

common will, or in how to prevent the common will from subverting the

purposes for which they believe the government exists. According to

their traditions they have wished either to tame opinion or to obey

it. Thus the editor of a notable series of text-books writes that "the

most difficult and the most momentous question of government (is) how

to transmit the force of individual opinion into public

action." [Footnote: Albert Bushnell Hart in the Introductory note to A.

Lawrence Lowell's _Public Opinion and Popular Government. _]

But surely there is a still more momentous question, the question of

how to validate our private versions of the political scene. There is,

as I shall try to indicate further on, the prospect of radical

improvement by the development of principles already in operation. But

this development will depend on how well we learn to use knowledge of

the way opinions are put together to watch over our own opinions when

they are being put together. For casual opinion, being the product of

partial contact, of tradition, and personal interests, cannot in the

nature of things take kindly to a method of political thought which is

based on exact record, measurement, analysis and comparison. Just

those qualities of the mind which determine what shall seem

interesting, important, familiar, personal, and dramatic, are the

qualities which in the first instance realistic opinion frustrates.

Therefore, unless there is in the community at large a growing

conviction that prejudice and intuition are not enough, the working

out of realistic opinion, which takes time, money, labor, conscious

effort, patience, and equanimity, will not find enough support. That

conviction grows as self-criticism increases, and makes us conscious

of buncombe, contemptuous of ourselves when we employ it, and on guard

to detect it. Without an ingrained habit of analyzing opinion when we

read, talk, and decide, most of us would hardly suspect the need of

better ideas, nor be interested in them when they appear, nor be able

to prevent the new technic of political intelligence from being

manipulated.

Yet democracies, if we are to judge by the oldest and most powerful of

them, have made a mystery out of public opinion. There have been

skilled organizers of opinion who understood the mystery well enough

to create majorities on election day. But these organizers have been

regarded by political science as low fellows or as "problems," not as

possessors of the most effective knowledge there was on how to create

and operate public opinion. The tendency of the people who have voiced

the ideas of democracy, even when they have not managed its action,

the tendency of students, orators, editors, has been to look upon

Public Opinion as men in other societies looked upon the uncanny

forces to which they ascribed the last word in the direction of

events.

For in almost every political theory there is an inscrutable element

which in the heyday of that theory goes unexamined. Behind the

appearances there is a Fate, there are Guardian Spirits, or Mandates

to a Chosen People, a Divine Monarchy, a Vice-Regent of Heaven, or a

Class of the Better Born. The more obvious angels, demons, and kings

are gone out of democratic thinking, but the need for believing that

there are reserve powers of guidance persists. It persisted for those

thinkers of the Eighteenth Century who designed the matrix of

democracy. They had a pale god, but warm hearts, and in the doctrine

of popular sovereignty they found the answer to their need of an

infallible origin for the new social order. There was the mystery, and

only enemies of the people touched it with profane and curious hands.

They did not remove the veil because they were practical politicians

in a bitter and uncertain struggle. They had themselves felt the

aspiration of democracy, which is ever so much deeper, more intimate

and more important than any theory of government. They were engaged,

as against the prejudice of ages, in the assertion of human dignity.

What possessed them was not whether John Smith had sound views on any

public question, but that John Smith, scion of a stock that had always

been considered inferior, would now bend his knee to no other man. It

was this spectacle that made it bliss "in that dawn to be alive." But

every analyst seems to degrade that dignity, to deny that all men are

reasonable all the time, or educated, or informed, to note that people

are fooled, that they do not always know their own interests, and that

all men are not equally fitted to govern.

The critics were about as welcome as a small boy with a drum. Every

one of these observations on the fallibility of man was being

exploited ad nauseam. Had democrats admitted there was truth in any of

the aristocratic arguments they would have opened a breach in the

defenses. And so just as Aristotle had to insist that the slave was a

slave by nature, the democrats had to insist that the free man was a

legislator and administrator by nature. They could not stop to explain

that a human soul might not yet have, or indeed might never have, this

technical equipment, and that nevertheless it had an inalienable right

not to be used as the unwilling instrument of other men. The superior

people were still too strong and too unscrupulous to have refrained

from capitalizing so candid a statement.

So the early democrats insisted that a reasoned righteousness welled

up spontaneously out of the mass of men. All of them hoped that it

would, many of them believed that it did, although the cleverest, like

Thomas Jefferson, had all sorts of private reservations. But one thing

was certain: if public opinion did not come forth spontaneously,

nobody in that age believed it would come forth at all. For in one

fundamental respect the political science on which democracy was based

was the same science that Aristotle formulated. It was the same

science for democrat and aristocrat, royalist and republican, in that

its major premise assumed the art of government to be a natural

endowment. Men differed radically when they tried to name the men so

endowed; but they agreed in thinking that the greatest question of all

was to find those in whom political wisdom was innate. Royalists were

sure that kings were born to govern. Alexander Hamilton thought that

while "there are strong minds in every walk of life... the

representative body, with too few exceptions to have any influence on

the spirit of the government, will be composed of landholders,

merchants, and men of the learned professions." [Footnote: _The

Federalist_, Nos. 35, 36. _Cf_. comment by Henry Jones Ford in

his _Rise and Growth of American Politics_. Ch. V.] Jefferson

thought the political faculties were deposited by God in farmers and

planters, and sometimes spoke as if they were found in all the people.

[Footnote: See below p. 268.] The main premise was the same: to govern

was an instinct that appeared, according to your social preferences,

in one man or a chosen few, in all males, or only in males who were

white and twenty-one, perhaps even in all men and all women.

In deciding who was most fit to govern, knowledge of the world was

taken for granted. The aristocrat believed that those who dealt with

large affairs possessed the instinct, the democrats asserted that all

men possessed the instinct and could therefore deal with large

affairs. It was no part of political science in either case to think

out how knowledge of the world could be brought to the ruler. If you

were for the people you did not try to work out the question of how to

keep the voter informed. By the age of twenty-one he had his political

faculties. What counted was a good heart, a reasoning mind, a balanced

judgment. These would ripen with age, but it was not necessary to

consider how to inform the heart and feed the reason. Men took in

their facts as they took in their breath.

But the facts men could come to possess in this effortless way were

limited. They could know the customs and more obvious character of the

place where they lived and worked. But the outer world they had to

conceive, and they did not conceive it instinctively, nor absorb

trustworthy knowledge of it just by living. Therefore, the only

environment in which spontaneous politics were possible was one

confined within the range of the ruler's direct and certain knowledge.

There is no escaping this conclusion, wherever you found government on

the natural range of men's faculties. "If," as Aristotle said,

[Footnote: _Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. 4.] "the citizens of a state

are to judge and distribute offices according to merit, then they must

know each other's characters; where they do not possess this

knowledge, both the election to offices and the decision of law suits

will go wrong."

Obviously this maxim was binding upon every school of political

thought. But it presented peculiar difficulties to the democrats.

Those who believed in class government could fairly claim that in the

court of the king, or in the country houses of the gentry, men did

know each other's characters, and as long as the rest of mankind was

passive, the only characters one needed to know were the characters of

men in the ruling class. But the democrats, who wanted to raise the

dignity of all men, were immediately involved by the immense size and

confusion of their ruling class--the male electorate. Their science

told them that politics was an instinct, and that the instinct worked

in a limited environment. Their hopes bade them insist that all men in

a very large environment could govern. In this deadly conflict between

their ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without

much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of God.

The paradox was too great, the stakes too big, their ideal too

precious for critical examination. They could not show how a citizen

of Boston was to stay in Boston and conceive the views of a Virginian,

how a Virginian in Virginia could have real opinions about the

government at Washington, how Congressmen in Washington could have

opinions about China or Mexico. For in that day it was not possible

for many men to have an unseen environment brought into the field of

their judgment. There had been some advances, to be sure, since

Aristotle. There were a few newspapers, and there were books, better

roads perhaps, and better ships. But there was no great advance, and

the political assumptions of the Eighteenth Century had essentially to

be those that had prevailed in political science for two thousand

years. The pioneer democrats did not possess the material for

resolving the conflict between the known range of man's attention and

their illimitable faith in his dignity.

Their assumptions antedated not only the modern newspaper, the

world-wide press services, photography and moving pictures, but, what

is really more significant, they antedated measurement and record,

quantitative and comparative analysis, the canons of evidence, and the

ability of psychological analysis to correct and discount the

prejudices of the witness. I do not mean to say that our records are

satisfactory, our analysis unbiased, our measurements sound. I do mean

to say that the key inventions have been made for bringing the unseen

world into the field of judgment. They had not been made in the time

of Aristotle, and they were not yet important enough to be visible for

political theory in the age of Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Thomas

Jefferson. In a later chapter I think we shall see that even in the

latest theory of human reconstruction, that of the English Guild

Socialists, all the deeper premises have been taken over from this

older system of political thought.

That system, whenever it was competent and honest, had to assume that

no man could have more than a very partial experience of public

affairs. In the sense that he can give only a little time to them,

that assumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence. But

ancient theory was compelled to assume, not only that men could give

little attention to public questions, but that the attention available

would have to be confined to matters close at hand. It would have been

visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and

complicated events could conceivably be reported, analyzed, and

presented in such a form that a really valuable choice could be made

by an amateur. That time is now in sight. There is no longer any doubt

that the continuous reporting of an unseen environment is feasible. It

is often done badly, but the fact that it is done at all shows that it

can be done, and the fact that we begin to know how badly it is often

done, shows that it can be done better. With varying degrees of skill

and honesty distant complexities are reported every day by engineers

and accountants for business men, by secretaries and civil servants

for officials, by intelligence officers for the General Staff, by some

journalists for some readers. These are crude beginnings but radical,

far more radical in the literal meaning of that word than the

repetition of wars, revolutions, abdications and restorations; as

radical as the change in the scale of human life which has made it

possible for Mr. Lloyd George to discuss Welsh coal mining after

breakfast in London, and the fate of the Arabs before dinner in Paris.

For the possibility of bringing any aspect of human affairs within the

range of judgment breaks the spell which has lain upon political

ideas. There have, of course, been plenty of men who did not realize

that the range of attention was the main premise of political science.

They have built on sand. They have demonstrated in their own persons

the effects of a very limited and self-centered knowledge of the

world. But for the political thinkers who have counted, from Plato and

Aristotle through Machiavelli and Hobbes to the democratic theorists,

speculation has revolved around the self-centered man who had to see

the whole world by means of a few pictures in his head.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY

THAT groups of self-centered people would engage in a struggle for

existence if they rubbed against each other has always been evident.

This much truth there is at any rate in that famous passage in the

Leviathan where Hobbes says that "though there had never been any time

wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another,

yet at all times kings and _persons_ of _sovereign authority

because_ of their _independency_, are in continual jealousies

and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons

pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another..." [Footnote:

_Leviathan_, Ch. XIII. Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as

concerning their Felicity and Misery.]

To circumvent this conclusion one great branch of human thought, which

had and has many schools, proceeded in this fashion: it conceived an

ideally just pattern of human relations in which each person had well

defined functions and rights. If he conscientiously filled the role

allotted to him, it did not matter whether his opinions were right or

wrong. He did his duty, the next man did his, and all the dutiful

people together made a harmonious world. Every caste system

illustrates this principle; you find it in Plato's Republic and in

Aristotle, in the feudal ideal, in the circles of Dante's Paradise, in

the bureaucratic type of socialism, and in laissez-faire, to an

amazing degree in syndicalism, guild socialism, anarchism, and in the

system of international law idealized by Mr. Robert Lansing. All of

them assume a pre-established harmony, inspired, imposed, or innate,

by which the self-opinionated person, class, or community is

orchestrated with the rest of mankind. The more authoritarian imagine

a conductor for the symphony who sees to it that each man plays his

part; the anarchistic are inclined to think that a more divine concord

would be heard if each player improvised as he went along.

But there have also been philosophers who were bored by these schemes

of rights and duties, took conflict for granted, and tried to see how

their side might come out on top. They have always seemed more

realistic, even when they seemed alarming, because all they had to do

was to generalize the experience that nobody could escape. Machiavelli

is the classic of this school, a man most mercilessly maligned,

because he happened to be the first naturalist who used plain language

in a field hitherto preempted by supernaturalists. [Footnote: F. S.

Oliver in his _Alexander Hamilton_, says of Machiavelli (p. 174):

"Assuming the conditions which exist--the nature of man and of

things--to be unchangeable, he proceeds in a calm, unmoral way, like a

lecturer on frogs, to show how a valiant and sagacious ruler can best

turn events to his own advantage and the security of his dynasty."] He

has a worse name and more disciples than any political thinker who

ever lived. He truly described the technic of existence for the

self-contained state. That is why he has the disciples. He has the bad

name chiefly because he cocked his eye at the Medici family, dreamed

in his study at night where he wore his "noble court dress" that

Machiavelli was himself the Prince, and turned a pungent description

of the way things are done into an eulogy on that way of doing them.

In his most infamous chapter [Footnote: _The Prince_, Ch. XVIII.

"Concerning the way in which Princes should keep faith." Translation

by W. K. Marriott.] he wrote that "a prince ought to take care that he

never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the

above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who hears and

sees him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and

religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this

last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by

the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come

in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really

know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the

opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them;

and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is

not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.... One prince of

the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything

else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and

either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and

kingdom many a time."

That is cynical. But it is the cynicism of a man who saw truly without

knowing quite why he saw what he saw. Machiavelli is thinking of the

run of men and princes "who judge generally more by the eye than by

the hand," which is his way of saying that their judgments are

subjective. He was too close to earth to pretend that the Italians of

his day saw the world steadily and saw it whole. He would not indulge

in fantasies, and he had not the materials for imagining a race of men

that had learned how to correct their vision.

The world, as he found it, was composed of people whose vision could

rarely be corrected, and Machiavelli knew that such people, since they

see all public relations in a private way, are involved in perpetual

strife. What they see is their own personal, class, dynastic, or

municipal version of affairs that in reality extend far beyond the

boundaries of their vision. They see their aspect. They see it as

right. But they cross other people who are similarly self-centered.

Then their very existence is endangered, or at least what they, for

unsuspected private reasons, regard as their existence and take to be

a danger. The end, which is impregnably based on a real though private

experience justifies the means. They will sacrifice any one of these

ideals to save all of them,... "one judges by the result..."

These elemental truths confronted the democratic philosophers.

Consciously or otherwise, they knew that the range of political

knowledge was limited, that the area of self-government would have to

be limited, and that self-contained states when they rubbed against

each other were in the posture of gladiators. But they knew just as

certainly, that there was in men a will to decide their own fate, and

to find a peace that was not imposed by force. How could they

reconcile the wish and the fact?

They looked about them. In the city states of Greece and Italy they

found a chronicle of corruption, intrigue and war. [Footnote:

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention...

and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been

violent in their deaths." Madison, _Federalist_, No. 10.] In

their own cities they saw faction, artificiality, fever. This was no

environment in which the democratic ideal could prosper, no place

where a group of independent and equally competent people managed

their own affairs spontaneously. They looked further, guided somewhat

perhaps by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to remote, unspoiled country

villages. They saw enough to convince themselves that there the ideal

was at home. Jefferson in particular felt this, and Jefferson more

than any other man formulated the American image of democracy. From

the townships had come the power that had carried the American

Revolution to victory. From the townships were to come the votes that

carried Jefferson's party to power. Out there in the farming

communities of Massachusetts and Virginia, if you wore glasses that

obliterated the slaves, you could see with your mind's eye the image

of what democracy was to be.

"The American Revolution broke out," says de Tocqueville, [Footnote:

_Democracy in America,_ Vol. I, p. 51. Third Edition] "and the

doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in

the townships, took possession of the state." It certainly took

possession of the minds of those men who formulated and popularized

the stereotypes of democracy. "The cherishment of the people was our

principle," wrote Jefferson. [Footnote: Cited in Charles Beard,

_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy._ Ch. XIV. ] But the

people he cherished almost exclusively were the small landowning

farmers: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,

if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar

deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which

He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the

face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is

a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example."

However much of the romantic return to nature may have entered into

this exclamation, there was also an element of solid sense. Jefferson

was right in thinking that a group of independent farmers comes nearer

to fulfilling the requirements of spontaneous democracy than any other

human society. But if you are to preserve the ideal, you must fence

off these ideal communities from the abominations of the world. If the

farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine affairs to

those they are accustomed to managing. Jefferson drew all these

logical conclusions. He disapproved of manufacture, of foreign

commerce, and a navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory

of any form of government that was not centered in the small

self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked

that "wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough,

in reality, to defend ourselves against every invader, we might enjoy

an eternal rusticity and live, forever, thus apathized and vulgar

under the shelter of a selfish, satisfied indifference." [Footnote:

_Op. cit_., p. 426.]

The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisting of an ideal

environment and a selected class, did not conflict with the political

science of his time. It did conflict with the realities. And when the

ideal was stated in absolute terms, partly through exuberance and

partly for campaign purposes, it was soon forgotten that the theory

was originally devised for very special conditions. It became the

political gospel, and supplied the stereotypes through which Americans

of all parties have looked at politics.

That gospel was fixed by the necessity that in Jefferson's time no one

could have conceived public opinions that were not spontaneous and

subjective. The democratic tradition is therefore always trying to see

a world where people are exclusively concerned with affairs of which

the causes and effects all operate within the region they inhabit.

Never has democratic theory been able to conceive itself in the

context of a wide and unpredictable environment. The mirror is

concave. And although democrats recognize that they are in contact

with external affairs, they see quite surely that every contact

outside that self-contained group is a threat to democracy as

originally conceived. That is a wise fear. If democracy is to be

spontaneous, the interests of democracy must remain simple,

intelligible, and easily managed. Conditions must approximate those of

the isolated rural township if the supply of information is to be left

to casual experience. The environment must be confined within the

range of every man's direct and certain knowledge.

The democrat has understood what an analysis of public opinion seems

to demonstrate: that in dealing with an unseen environment decisions

"are manifestly settled at haphazard, which clearly they ought not to

be." [Footnote: Aristotle, _Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. IV.] So he

has always tried in one way or another to minimize the importance of

that unseen environment. He feared foreign trade because trade

involves foreign connections; he distrusted manufactures because they

produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had nevertheless to

have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of

self-sufficiency. When he could not find these conditions in the real

world, he went passionately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian

communities far from foreign contacts. His slogans reveal his

prejudice. He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination,

Independence. Not one of these ideas carries with it any notion of

consent or community beyond the frontiers of the self-governing

groups. The field of democratic action is a circumscribed area. Within

protected boundaries the aim has been to achieve self-sufficiency and

avoid entanglement. This rule is not confined to foreign policy, but

it is plainly evident there, because life outside the national

boundaries is more distinctly alien than any life within. And as

history shows, democracies in their foreign policy have had generally

to choose between splendid isolation and a diplomacy that violated

their ideals. The most successful democracies, in fact, Switzerland,

Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and America until recently, have had

no foreign policy in the European sense of that phrase. Even a rule

like the Monroe Doctrine arose from the desire to supplement the two

oceans by a glacis of states that were sufficiently republican to have

no foreign policy.

Whereas danger is a great, perhaps an indispensable condition of

autocracy, [Footnote: Fisher Ames, frightened by the democratic

revolution of 1800, wrote to Rufus King in 1802: "We need, as all

nations do, the compression on the outside of our circle of a

formidable neighbor, whose presence shall at all times excite stronger

fears than demagogues can inspire the people with towards their

government." Cited by Ford, _Rise and Growth of American

Politics,_ p. 69.] security was seen to be a necessity if democracy

was to work. There must be as little disturbance as possible of the

premise of a self-contained community. Insecurity involves surprises.

It means that there are people acting upon your life, over whom you

have no control, with whom you cannot consult. It means that forces

are at large which disturb the familiar routine, and present novel

problems about which quick and unusual decisions are required. Every

democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are incompatible

with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of masses is such

that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow rather

blindly. This has not made non-resistants out of democrats, but it has

resulted in all democratic wars being fought for pacifist aims. Even

when the wars are in fact wars of conquest, they are sincerely

believed to be wars in defense of civilization.

These various attempts to enclose a part of the earth's surface were

not inspired by cowardice, apathy, or, what one of Jefferson's critics

called a willingness to live under monkish discipline. The democrats

had caught sight of a dazzling possibility, that every human being

should rise to his full stature, freed from man-made limitations. With

what they knew of the art of government, they could, no more than

Aristotle before them, conceive a society of autonomous individuals,

except an enclosed and simple one. They could, then, select no other

premise if they were to reach the conclusion that all the people could

spontaneously manage their public affairs.

Having adopted the premise because it was necessary to their keenest

hope, they drew other conclusions as well. Since in order to have

spontaneous self-government, you had to have a simple self-contained

community, they took it for granted that one man was as competent as

the next to manage these simple and self-contained affairs. Where the

wish is father to the thought such logic is convincing. Moreover, the

doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes

true in the rural township. Everybody in a village sooner or later

tries his hand at everything the village does. There is rotation in

office by men who are jacks of all trades. There was no serious

trouble with the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen until the

democratic stereotype was universally applied, so that men looked at a

complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.

Not only was the individual citizen fitted to deal with all public

affairs, but he was consistently public-spirited and endowed with

unflagging interest. He was public-spirited enough in the township,

where he knew everybody and was interested in everybody's business.

The idea of enough for the township turned easily into the idea of

enough for any purpose, for as we have noted, quantitative thinking

does not suit a stereotype. But there was another turn to the circle.

Since everybody was assumed to be interested enough in important

affairs, only those affairs came to seem important in which everybody

was interested.

This meant that men formed their picture of the world outside from the

unchallenged pictures in their heads. These pictures came to them well

stereotyped by their parents and teachers, and were little corrected

by their own experience. Only a few men had affairs that took them

across state lines. Even fewer had reason to go abroad. Most voters

lived their whole lives in one environment, and with nothing but a few

feeble newspapers, some pamphlets, political speeches, their religious

training, and rumor to go on, they had to conceive that larger

environment of commerce and finance, of war and peace. The number of

public opinions based on any objective report was very small in

proportion to those based on casual fancy.

And so for many different reasons, self-sufficiency was a spiritual

ideal in the formative period. The physical isolation of the township,

the loneliness of the pioneer, the theory of democracy, the Protestant

tradition, and the limitations of political science all converged to

make men believe that out of their own consciences they must extricate

political wisdom. It is not strange that the deduction of laws from

absolute principles should have usurped so much of their free energy.

The American political mind had to live on its capital. In legalism it

found a tested body of rules from which new rules could be spun

without the labor of earning new truths from experience. The formulae

became so curiously sacred that every good foreign observer has been

amazed at the contrast between the dynamic practical energy of the

American people and the static theorism of their public life. That

steadfast love of fixed principles was simply the only way known of

achieving self-sufficiency. But it meant that the public opinions of

any one community about the outer world consisted chiefly of a few

stereotyped images arranged in a pattern deduced from their legal and

their moral codes, and animated by the feeling aroused by local

experiences.

Thus democratic theory, starting from its fine vision of ultimate

human dignity, was forced by lack of the instruments of knowledge for

reporting its environment, to fall back upon the wisdom and experience

which happened to have accumulated in the voter. God had, in the words

of Jefferson, made men's breasts "His peculiar deposit for substantial

and genuine virtue." These chosen people in their self-contained

environment had all the facts before them. The environment was so

familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking

about substantially the same things. The only real disagreements,

therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts. There was no

need to guarantee the sources of information. They were obvious, and

equally accessible to all men. Nor was there need to trouble about the

ultimate criteria. In the self-contained community one could assume,

or at least did assume, a homogeneous code of morals. The only place,

therefore, for differences of opinion was in the logical application

of accepted standards to accepted facts. And since the reasoning

faculty was also well standardized, an error in reasoning would be

quickly exposed in a free discussion. It followed that truth could be

obtained by liberty within these limits. The community could take its

supply of information for granted; its codes it passed on through

school, church, and family, and the power to draw deductions from a

premise, rather than the ability to find the premise, was regarded as

the chief end of intellectual training.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE ROLE OF FORCE, PATRONAGE AND PRIVILEGE

Within limits that vary, the emotion is transferable both as regards