Fortunately the suffragists, as distinct from the feminists, had a

perfectly concrete objective, and a very simple one. What the vote

symbolizes is not simple, as the ablest advocates and the ablest

opponents knew. But the right to vote is a simple and familiar right.

Now in labor disputes, which are probably the chief item in the

charges against newspapers, the right to strike, like the right to

vote, is simple enough. But the causes and objects of a particular

strike are like the causes and objects of the woman's movement,

extremely subtle.

Let us suppose the conditions leading up to a strike are bad. What is

the measure of evil? A certain conception of a proper standard of

living, hygiene, economic security, and human dignity. The industry

may be far below the theoretical standard of the community, and the

workers may be too wretched to protest. Conditions may be above the

standard, and the workers may protest violently. The standard is at

best a vague measure. However, we shall assume that the conditions are

below par, as par is understood by the editor. Occasionally without

waiting for the workers to threaten, but prompted say by a social

worker, he will send reporters to investigate, and will call attention

to bad conditions. Necessarily he cannot do that often. For these

investigations cost time, money, special talent, and a lot of space.

To make plausible a report that conditions are bad, you need a good

many columns of print. In order to tell the truth about the steel

worker in the Pittsburgh district, there was needed a staff of

investigators, a great deal of time, and several fat volumes of print.

It is impossible to suppose that any daily newspaper could normally

regard the making of Pittsburgh Surveys, or even Interchurch Steel

Reports, as one of its tasks. News which requires so much trouble as

that to obtain is beyond the resources of a daily press. [Footnote: Not

long ago Babe Ruth was jailed for speeding. Released from jail just

before the afternoon game started, he rushed into his waiting

automobile, and made up for time lost in jail by breaking the speed

laws on his way to the ball grounds. No policeman stopped him, but a

reporter timed him, and published his speed the next morning. Babe

Ruth is an exceptional man. Newspapers cannot time all motorists. They

have to take their news about speeding from the police.]

The bad conditions as such are not news, because in all but

exceptional cases, journalism is not a first hand report of the raw

material. It is a report of that material after it has been stylized.

Thus bad conditions might become news if the Board of Health reported

an unusually high death rate in an industrial area. Failing an

intervention of this sort, the facts do not become news, until the

workers organize and make a demand upon their employers. Even then, if

an easy settlement is certain the news value is low, whether or not

the conditions themselves are remedied in the settlement. But if

industrial relations collapse into a strike or lockout the news value

increases. If the stoppage involves a service on which the readers of

the newspapers immediately depend, or if it involves a breach of

order, the news value is still greater.

The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily

recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of

view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the

demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a

process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the

immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the

reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are

supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an

overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or

a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people

have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its

own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then

animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter.

Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the

strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the

nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the

drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess

of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these

feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and

some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings

may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping

goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher

prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are

realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike

has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at

a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing

system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or

hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt

attack on production.

You have, therefore, the circumstances in all their sprawling

complexity, the overt act which signalizes them, the stereotyped

bulletin which publishes the signal, and the meaning that the reader

himself injects, after he has derived that meaning from the experience

which directly affects him. Now the reader's experience of a strike

may be very important indeed, but from the point of view of the

central trouble which caused the strike, it is eccentric. Yet this

eccentric meaning is automatically the most interesting. [Footnote:

_Cf_. Ch. XI, "The Enlisting of Interest."] To enter imaginatively

into the central issues is for the reader to step out of himself, and into

very different lives.

It follows that in the reporting of strikes, the easiest way is to let

the news be uncovered by the overt act, and to describe the event as

the story of interference with the reader's life. That is where his

attention is first aroused, and his interest most easily enlisted. A

great deal, I think myself the crucial part, of what looks to the

worker and the reformer as deliberate misrepresentation on the part of

newspapers, is the direct outcome of a practical difficulty in

uncovering the news, and the emotional difficulty of making distant

facts interesting unless, as Emerson says, we can "perceive (them) to

be only a new version of our familiar experience" and can "set about

translating (them) at once into our parallel facts." [Footnote: From

his essay entitled _Art and Criticism_. The quotation occurs in a

passage cited on page 87 of Professor R. W. Brown's, _The Writer's

Art._]

If you study the way many a strike is reported in the press, you will

find, very often, that the issues are rarely in the headlines, barely

in the leading paragraphs, and sometimes not even mentioned anywhere.

A labor dispute in another city has to be very important before the

news account contains any definite information as to what is in

dispute. The routine of the news works that way, with modifications it

works that way in regard to political issues and international news as

well. The news is an account of the overt phases that are interesting,

and the pressure on the newspaper to adhere to this routine comes from

many sides. It comes from the economy of noting only the stereotyped

phase of a situation. It comes from the difficulty of finding

journalists who can see what they have not learned to see. It comes

from the almost unavoidable difficulty of finding sufficient space in

which even the best journalist can make plausible an unconventional

view. It comes from the economic necessity of interesting the reader

quickly, and the economic risk involved in not interesting him at all,

or of offending him by unexpected news insufficiently or clumsily

described. All these difficulties combined make for uncertainty in the

editor when there are dangerous issues at stake, and cause him

naturally to prefer the indisputable fact and a treatment more readily

adapted to the reader's interest. The indisputable fact and the easy

interest, are the strike itself and the reader's inconvenience.

All the subtler and deeper truths are in the present organization of

industry very unreliable truths. They involve judgments about

standards of living, productivity, human rights that are endlessly

debatable in the absence of exact record and quantitative analysis.

And as long as these do not exist in industry, the run of news about

it will tend, as Emerson said, quoting from Isocrates, "to make of

moles mountains, and of mountains moles." [Footnote: _Id.,

supra_] Where there is no constitutional procedure in industry, and

no expert sifting of evidence and the claims, the fact that is

sensational to the reader is the fact that almost every journalist

will seek. Given the industrial relations that so largely prevail,

even where there is conference or arbitration, but no independent

filtering of the facts for decision, the issue for the newspaper

public will tend not to be the issue for the industry. And so to try

disputes by an appeal through the newspapers puts a burden upon

newspapers and readers which they cannot and ought not to carry. As

long as real law and order do not exist, the bulk of the news will,

unless consciously and courageously corrected, work against those who

have no lawful and orderly method of asserting themselves. The

bulletins from the scene of action will note the trouble that arose

from the assertion, rather than the reasons which led to it. The

reasons are intangible.

4

The editor deals with these bulletins. He sits in his office, reads

them, rarely does he see any large portion of the events themselves.

He must, as we have seen, woo at least a section of his readers every

day, because they will leave him without mercy if a rival paper

happens to hit their fancy. He works under enormous pressure, for the

competition of newspapers is often a matter of minutes. Every bulletin

requires a swift but complicated judgment. It must be understood, put

in relation to other bulletins also understood, and played up or

played down according to its probable interest for the public, as the

editor conceives it. Without standardization, without stereotypes,

without routine judgments, without a fairly ruthless disregard of

subtlety, the editor would soon die of excitement. The final page is

of a definite size, must be ready at a precise moment; there can be

only a certain number of captions on the items, and in each caption

there must be a definite number of letters. Always there is the

precarious urgency of the buying public, the law of libel, and the

possibility of endless trouble. The thing could not be managed at all

without systematization, for in a standardized product there is

economy of time and effort, as well as a partial guarantee against

failure.

It is here that newspapers influence each other most deeply. Thus when

the war broke out, the American newspapers were confronted with a

subject about which they had no previous experience. Certain dailies,

rich enough to pay cable tolls, took the lead in securing news, and

the way that news was presented became a model for the whole press.

But where did that model come from? It came from the English press,

not because Northcliffe owned American newspapers, but because at

first it was easier to buy English correspondence, and because, later,

it was easier for American journalists to read English newspapers than

it was for them to read any others. London was the cable and news

center, and it was there that a certain technic for reporting the war

was evolved. Something similar occurred in the reporting of the

Russian Revolution. In that instance, access to Russia was closed by

military censorship, both Russian and Allied, and closed still more

effectively by the difficulties of the Russian language. But above all

it was closed to effective news reporting by the fact that the hardest

thing to report is chaos, even though it is an evolving chaos. This

put the formulating of Russian news at its source in Helsingfors,

Stockholm, Geneva, Paris and London, into the hands of censors and

propagandists. They were for a long time subject to no check of any

kind. Until they had made themselves ridiculous they created, let us

admit, out of some genuine aspects of the huge Russian maelstrom, a

set of stereotypes so evocative of hate and fear, that the very best

instinct of journalism, its desire to go and see and tell, was for a

long time crushed. [Footnote: _Cf. A Test of the News,_ by Walter

Lippmann and Charles Merz, assisted by Faye Lippmann, _New

Republic,_ August 4, 1920.]

5

Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole

series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what

position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what

emphasis each shall have. There are no objective standards here. There

are conventions. Take two newspapers published in the same city on the

same morning. The headline of one reads: "Britain pledges aid to

Berlin against French aggression; France openly backs Poles." The

headline of the second is "Mrs. Stillman's Other Love." Which you

prefer is a matter of taste, but not entirely a matter of the editor's

taste. It is a matter of his judgment as to what will absorb the half

hour's attention a certain set of readers will give to his newspaper.

Now the problem of securing attention is by no means equivalent to

displaying the news in the perspective laid down by religious teaching

or by some form of ethical culture. It is a problem of provoking

feeling in the reader, of inducing him to feel a sense of personal

identification with the stories he is reading. News which does not

offer this opportunity to introduce oneself into the struggle which it

depicts cannot appeal to a wide audience. The audience must

participate in the news, much as it participates in the drama, by

personal identification. Just as everyone holds his breath when the

heroine is in danger, as he helps Babe Ruth swing his bat, so in

subtler form the reader enters into the news. In order that he shall

enter he must find a familiar foothold in the story, and this is

supplied to him by the use of stereotypes. They tell him that if an

association of plumbers is called a "combine" it is appropriate to

develop his hostility; if it is called a "group of leading business

men" the cue is for a favorable reaction.

It is in a combination of these elements that the power to create

opinion resides. Editorials reinforce. Sometimes in a situation that

on the news pages is too confusing to permit of identification, they

give the reader a clue by means of which he engages himself. A clue he

must have if, as most of us must, he is to seize the news in a hurry.

A suggestion of some sort he demands, which tells him, so to speak,

where he, a man conceiving himself to be such and such a person, shall

integrate his feelings with the news he reads.

"It has been said" writes Walter Bagehot, [Footnote: On the Emotion of

Conviction, _Literary Studies_, Vol. Ill, p. 172.] "that if you

can only get a middleclass Englishman to think whether there are

'snails in Sirius,' he will soon have an opinion on it. It will be

difficult to make him think, but if he does think, he cannot rest in a

negative, he will come to some decision. And on any ordinary topic, of

course, it is so. A grocer has a full creed as to foreign policy, a

young lady a complete theory of the sacraments, as to which neither

has any doubt whatever."

Yet that same grocer will have many doubts about his groceries, and

that young lady, marvelously certain about the sacraments, may have

all kinds of doubts as to whether to marry the grocer, and if not

whether it is proper to accept his attentions. The ability to rest in

the negative implies either a lack of interest in the result, or a

vivid sense of competing alternatives. In the case of foreign policy

or the sacraments, the interest in the results is intense, while means

for checking the opinion are poor. This is the plight of the reader of

the general news. If he is to read it at all he must be interested,

that is to say, he must enter into the situation and care about the

outcome. But if he does that he cannot rest in a negative, and unless

independent means of checking the lead given him by his newspaper

exists, the very fact that he is interested may make it difficult to

arrive at that balance of opinions which may most nearly approximate

the truth. The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will

tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of

news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked

the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the

editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is

necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and

delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a

performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject

taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.

CHAPTER XXIV

NEWS, TRUTH, AND A CONCLUSION

As we begin to make more and more exact studies of the press, much

will depend upon the hypothesis we hold. If we assume with Mr.

Sinclair, and most of his opponents, that news and truth are two words

for the same thing, we shall, I believe, arrive nowhere. We shall

prove that on this point the newspaper lied. We shall prove that on

that point Mr. Sinclair's account lied. We shall demonstrate that Mr.

Sinclair lied when he said that somebody lied, and that somebody lied

when he said Mr. Sinclair lied. We shall vent our feelings, but we

shall vent them into air.

The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and

truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.

[Footnote: When I wrote _Liberty and the News,_ I did not

understand this distinction clearly enough to state it, but _cf._

p. 89 ff.] The function of news is to signalize an event, the function

of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into

relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men

can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take

recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body

of news coincide. That is a comparatively small part of the whole

field of human interest. In this sector, and only in this sector, the

tests of the news are sufficiently exact to make the charges of

perversion or suppression more than a partisan judgment. There is no

defense, no extenuation, no excuse whatever, for stating six times

that Lenin is dead, when the only information the paper possesses is a

report that he is dead from a source repeatedly shown to be

unreliable. The news, in that instance, is not "Lenin Dead" but

"Helsingfors Says Lenin is Dead." And a newspaper can be asked to take

the responsibility of not making Lenin more dead than the source of

the news is reliable; if there is one subject on which editors are

most responsible it is in their judgment of the reliability of the

source. But when it comes to dealing, for example, with stories of

what the Russian people want, no such test exists.

The absence of these exact tests accounts, I think, for the character

of the profession, as no other explanation does. There is a very small

body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or

training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion.

Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the

County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all

fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his

human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he

was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways.

There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline

in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct

the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm

of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons

that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of

the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he

sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis

can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street.

And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is

to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in

some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according

to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that

he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that

he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which

stains the white radiance of eternity.

And by this knowledge his assurance is tempered. He may have all kinds

of moral courage, and sometimes has, but he lacks that sustaining

conviction of a certain technic which finally freed the physical

sciences from theological control. It was the gradual development of

an irrefragable method that gave the physicist his intellectual

freedom as against all the powers of the world. His proofs were so

clear, his evidence so sharply superior to tradition, that he broke

away finally from all control. But the journalist has no such support

in his own conscience or in fact. The control exercised over him by

the opinions of his employers and his readers, is not the control of

truth by prejudice, but of one opinion by another opinion that it is

not demonstrably less true. Between Judge Gary's assertion that the

unions will destroy American institutions, and Mr. Gomper's assertion

that they are agencies of the rights of man, the choice has, in large

measure, to be governed by the will to believe.

The task of deflating these controversies, and reducing them to a

point where they can be reported as news, is not a task which the

reporter can perform. It is possible and necessary for journalists to

bring home to people the uncertain character of the truth on which

their opinions are founded, and by criticism and agitation to prod

social science into making more usable formulations of social facts,

and to prod statesmen into establishing more visible institutions. The

press, in other words, can fight for the extension of reportable

truth. But as social truth is organized to-day, the press is not

constituted to furnish from one edition to the next the amount of

knowledge which the democratic theory of public opinion demands. This

is not due to the Brass Check, as the quality of news in radical

papers shows, but to the fact that the press deals with a society in

which the governing forces are so imperfectly recorded. The theory

that the press can itself record those forces is false. It can

normally record only what has been recorded for it by the working of

institutions. Everything else is argument and opinion, and fluctuates

with the vicissitudes, the self-consciousness, and the courage of the

human mind.

If the press is not so universally wicked, nor so deeply conspiring,

as Mr. Sinclair would have us believe, it is very much more frail than

the democratic theory has as yet admitted. It is too frail to carry

the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the

truth which democrats hoped was inborn. And when we expect it to

supply such a body of truth we employ a misleading standard of

judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the illimitable

complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance, public

spirit, and all-round competence. We suppose an appetite for

uninteresting truths which is not discovered by any honest analysis of

our own tastes.

If the newspapers, then, are to be charged with the duty of

translating the whole public life of mankind, so that every adult can

arrive at an opinion on every moot topic, they fail, they are bound to

fail, in any future one can conceive they will continue to fail. It is

not possible to assume that a world, carried on by division of labor

and distribution of authority, can be governed by universal opinions

in the whole population. Unconsciously the theory sets up the single

reader as theoretically omnicompetent, and puts upon the press the

burden of accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial

organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish. Acting upon

everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours, the press is asked

to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the

slack in public institutions. The press has often mistakenly pretended

that it could do just that. It has at great moral cost to itself,

encouraged a democracy, still bound to its original premises, to

expect newspapers to supply spontaneously for every organ of

government, for every social problem, the machinery of information

which these do not normally supply themselves. Institutions, having

failed to furnish themselves with instruments of knowledge, have

become a bundle of "problems," which the population as a whole,

reading the press as a whole, is supposed to solve.

The press, in other words, has come to be regarded as an organ of

direct democracy, charged on a much wider scale, and from day to day,

with the function often attributed to the initiative, referendum, and

recall. The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay

down the law for everything all the time. It is not workable. And when

you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable. For the

news, as we have seen, is precise in proportion to the precision with

which the event is recorded. Unless the event is capable of being

named, measured, given shape, made specific, it either fails to take

on the character of news, or it is subject to the accidents and

prejudices of observation.

Therefore, on the whole, the quality of the news about modern society

is an index of its social organization. The better the institutions,

the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more

issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced,

the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news. At its best the

press is a servant and guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a

means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends.

In the degree to which institutions fail to function, the unscrupulous

journalist can fish in troubled waters, and the conscientious one must

gamble with uncertainties.

The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a

searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then

another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the

world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes,

incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light

of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a

situation intelligible enough for a popular decision. The trouble lies

deeper than the press, and so does the remedy. It lies in social

organization based on a system of analysis and record, and in all the

corollaries of that principle; in the abandonment of the theory of the

omnicompetent citizen, in the decentralization of decision, in the

coordination of decision by comparable record and analysis. If at the

centers of management there is a running audit, which makes work

intelligible to those who do it, and those who superintend it, issues

when they arise are not the mere collisions of the blind. Then, too,

the news is uncovered for the press by a system of intelligence that

is also a check upon the press.

That is the radical way. For the troubles of the press, like the

troubles of representative government, be it territorial or

functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist,

cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure

of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and

their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of

knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable

picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and

churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of

democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the

curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for

sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of

popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its

other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one.

PART VIII

ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE

CHAPTER XXV. THE ENTERING WEDGE

" XXVI. INTELLIGENCE WORK

" XXVII. THE APPEAL TO THE PUBLIC

" XXVIII. THE APPEAL TO REASON

CHAPTER XXV

THE ENTERING WEDGE

1

If the remedy were interesting, American pioneers like Charles

McCarthy, Robert Valentine, and Frederick W. Taylor would not have had

to fight so hard for a hearing. But it is clear why they had to fight,

and why bureaus of governmental research, industrial audits, budgeting

and the like are the ugly ducklings of reform. They reverse the

process by which interesting public opinions are built up. Instead of

presenting a casual fact, a large screen of stereotypes, and a

dramatic identification, they break down the drama, break through the

stereotypes, and offer men a picture of facts, which is unfamiliar and

to them impersonal. When this is not painful, it is dull, and those to

whom it is painful, the trading politician and the partisan who has

much to conceal, often exploit the dullness that the public feels, in

order to remove the pain that they feel.

2

Yet every complicated community has sought the assistance of special

men, of augurs, priests, elders. Our own democracy, based though it

was on a theory of universal competence, sought lawyers to manage its

government, and to help manage its industry. It was recognized that

the specially trained man was in some dim way oriented to a wider

system of truth than that which arises spontaneously in the amateur's

mind. But experience has shown that the traditional lawyer's equipment

was not enough assistance. The Great Society had grown furiously and

to colossal dimensions by the application of technical knowledge. It

was made by engineers who had learned to use exact measurements and

quantitative analysis. It could not be governed, men began to

discover, by men who thought deductively about rights and wrongs. It

could be brought under human control only by the technic which had

created it. Gradually, then, the more enlightened directing minds have

called in experts who were trained, or had trained themselves, to make

parts of this Great Society intelligible to those who manage it. These

men are known by all kinds of names, as statisticians, accountants,

auditors, industrial counsellors, engineers of many species,

scientific managers, personnel administrators, research men,

"scientists," and sometimes just as plain private secretaries. They

have brought with them each a jargon of his own, as well as filing

cabinets, card catalogues, graphs, loose-leaf contraptions, and above

all the perfectly sound ideal of an executive who sits before a

flat-top desk, one sheet of typewritten paper before him, and decides

on matters of policy presented in a form ready for his rejection or

approval.

This whole development has been the work, not so much of a spontaneous

creative evolution, as of blind natural selection. The statesman, the

executive, the party leader, the head of a voluntary association,

found that if he had to discuss two dozen different subjects in the

course of the day, somebody would have to coach him. He began to

clamor for memoranda. He found he could not read his mail. He demanded

somebody who would blue-pencil the interesting sentences in the

important letters. He found he could not digest the great stacks of

type-written reports that grew mellow on his desk. He demanded

summaries. He found he could not read an unending series of figures.

He embraced the man who made colored pictures of them. He found that

he really did not know one machine from another. He hired engineers to

pick them, and tell him how much they cost and what they could do. He

peeled off one burden after another, as a man will take off first his

hat, then his coat, then his collar, when he is struggling to move an

unwieldy load.

3

Yet curiously enough, though he knew that he needed help, he was slow

to call in the social scientist. The chemist, the physicist, the

geologist, had a much earlier and more friendly reception.

Laboratories were set up for them, inducements offered, for there was

quick appreciation of the victories over nature. But the scientist who

has human nature as his problem is in a different case. There are many

reasons for this: the chief one, that he has so few victories to

exhibit. He has so few, because unless he deals with the historic

past, he cannot prove his theories before offering them to the public.

The physical scientist can make an hypothesis, test it, revise the

hypothesis hundreds of times, and, if after all that, he is wrong, no

one else has to pay the price. But the social scientist cannot begin

to offer the assurance of a laboratory test, and if his advice is

followed, and he is wrong, the consequences may be incalculable. He is

in the nature of things far more responsible, and far less certain.

But more than that. In the laboratory sciences the student has

conquered the dilemma of thought and action. He brings a sample of the

action to a quiet place, where it can be repeated at will, and

examined at leisure. But the social scientist is constantly being

impaled on a dilemma. If he stays in his library, where he has the

leisure to think, he has to rely upon the exceedingly casual and

meager printed record that comes to him through official reports,

newspapers, and interviews. If he goes out into "the world" where

things are happening, he has to serve a long, often wasteful,

apprenticeship, before he is admitted to the sanctum where they are

being decided. What he cannot do is to dip into action and out again

whenever it suits him. There are no privileged listeners. The man of

affairs, observing that the social scientist knows only from the

outside what he knows, in part at least, from the inside, recognizing

that the social scientist's hypothesis is not in the nature of things

susceptible of laboratory proof, and that verification is possible

only in the "real" world, has developed a rather low opinion of social

scientists who do not share his views of public policy.

In his heart of hearts the social scientist shares this estimate of

himself. He has little inner certainty about his own work. He only

half believes in it, and being sure of nothing, he can find no

compelling reason for insisting on his own freedom of thought. What

can he actually claim for it, in the light of his own conscience?

[Footnote: Cf. Charles E. Merriam, _The Present State of the Study

of Politics_, _American Political Science Review_, Vol. XV.

No. 2, May, 1921.] His data are uncertain, his means of verification

lacking. The very best qualities in him are a source of frustration.

For if he is really critical and saturated in the scientific spirit,

he cannot be doctrinaire, and go to Armageddon against the trustees

and the students and the Civic Federation and the conservative press

for a theory of which he is not sure. If you are going to Armageddon,

you have to battle for the Lord, but the political scientist is always

a little doubtful whether the Lord called him.

Consequently if so much of social science is apologetic rather than

constructive, the explanation lies in the opportunities of social

science, not in "capitalism." The physical scientists achieved their

freedom from clericalism by working out a method that produced

conclusions of a sort that could not be suppressed or ignored. They

convinced themselves and acquired dignity, and knew what they were

fighting for. The social scientist will acquire his dignity and his

strength when he has worked out his method. He will do that by turning

into opportunity the need among directing men of the Great Society for

instruments of analysis by which an invisible and made intelligible.

But as things go now, the social scientist assembles his data out of a

mass of unrelated material. Social processes are recorded

spasmodically, quite often as accidents of administration. A report to

Congress, a debate, an investigation, legal briefs, a census, a

tariff, a tax schedule; the material, like the skull of the Piltdown

man, has to be put together by ingenious inference before the student

obtains any sort of picture of the event he is studying. Though it

deals with the conscious life of his fellow citizens, it is all too

often distressingly opaque, because the man who is trying to

generalize has practically no supervision of the way his data are

collected. Imagine medical research conducted by students who could

rarely go into a hospital, were deprived of animal experiment, and

compelled to draw conclusions from the stories of people who had been

ill, the reports of nurses, each of whom had her own system of

diagnosis, and the statistics compiled by the Bureau of Internal

Revenue on the excess profits of druggists. The social scientist has

usually to make what he can out of categories that were uncritically

in the mind of an official who administered some part of a law, or who

was out to justify, to persuade, to claim, or to prove. The student

knows this, and, as a protection against it, has developed that branch

of scholarship which is an elaborated suspicion about where to

discount his information.

That is a virtue, but it becomes a very thin virtue when it is merely

a corrective for the unwholesome position of social science. For the

scholar is condemned to guess as shrewdly as he can why in a situation

not clearly understood something or other may have happened. But the

expert who is employed as the mediator among representatives, and as

the mirror and measure of administration, has a very different control

of the facts. Instead of being the man who generalizes from the facts

dropped to him by the men of action, he becomes the man who prepares

the facts for the men of action. This is a profound change in his

strategic position. He no longer stands outside, chewing the cud

provided by busy men of affairs, but he takes his place in front of

decision instead of behind it. To-day the sequence is that the man of

affairs finds his facts, and decides on the basis of them; then, some

time later, the social scientist deduces excellent reasons why he did

or did not decide wisely. This ex post facto relationship is academic

in the bad sense of that fine word. The real sequence should be one

where the disinterested expert first finds and formulates the facts

for the man of action, and later makes what wisdom he can out of

comparison between the decision, which he understands, and the facts,

which he organized.

4

For the physical sciences this change in strategic position began

slowly, and then accelerated rapidly. There was a time when the

inventor and the engineer were romantic half-starved outsiders,

treated as cranks. The business man and the artisan knew all the

mysteries of their craft. Then the mysteries grew more mysterious, and

at last industry began to depend upon physical laws and chemical

combinations that no eye could see, and only a trained mind could

conceive. The scientist moved from his noble garret in the Latin

Quarter into office buildings and laboratories. For he alone could

construct a working image of the reality on which industry rested.

From the new relationship he took as much as he gave, perhaps more:

pure science developed faster than applied, though it drew its

economic support, a great deal of its inspiration, and even more of

its relevancy, from constant contact with practical decision. But

physical science still labored under the enormous limitation that the

men who made decisions had only their commonsense to guide them. They

administered without scientific aid a world complicated by scientists.

Again they had to deal with facts they could not apprehend, and as

once they had to call in engineers, they now have to call in

statisticians, accountants, experts of all sorts.

These practical students are the true pioneers of a new social

science. They are "in mesh with the driving wheels" [Footnote: Cf. The

Address of the President of the American Philosophical Association,

Mr. Ralph Barton Perry, Dec. 28, 1920. Published in the Proceedings of

the Twentieth Annual Meeting.] and from this practical engagement of

science and action, both will benefit radically: action by the

clarification of its beliefs; beliefs by a continuing test in action.

We are in the earliest beginnings. But if it is conceded that all

large forms of human association must, because of sheer practical

difficulty, contain men who will come to see the need for an expert

reporting of their particular environment, then the imagination has a

premise on which to work. In the exchange of technic and result among

expert staffs, one can see, I think, the beginning of experimental

method in social science. When each school district and budget, and

health department, and factory, and tariff schedule, is the material

of knowledge for every other, the number of comparable experiences

begins to approach the dimensions of genuine experiment. In

forty-eight states, and 2400 cities, and 277,000 school houses,

270,000 manufacturing establishments, 27,000 mines and quarries, there

is a wealth of experience, if only it were recorded and available. And

there is, too, opportunity for trial and error at such slight risk

that any reasonable hypothesis might be given a fair test without

shaking the foundations of society.

The wedge has been driven, not only by some directors of industry and

some statesmen who had to have help, but by the bureaus of municipal

research, [Footnote: The number of these organizations in the United

States is very great. Some are alive, some half dead. They are in

rapid flux. Lists of them supplied to me by Dr. L. D. Upson of the

Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, Miss Rebecca B. Rankin of the

Municipal Reference Library of New York City, Mr. Edward A.

Fitzpatrick, Secretary of the State Board of Education (Wisconsin),

Mr. Savel Zimand of the Bureau of Industrial Research (New York City),

run into the hundreds.] the legislative reference libraries, the

specialized lobbies of corporations and trade unions and public

causes, and by voluntary organizations like the League of Women

Voters, the Consumers' League, the Manufacturers' Associations: by

hundreds of trade associations, and citizens' unions; by publications

like the _Searchlight on Congress_ and the _Survey_; and by

foundations like the General Education Board. Not all by any means are

disinterested. That is not the point. All of them do begin to

demonstrate the need for interposing some form of expertness between

the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled.

CHAPTER XXVI

INTELLIGENCE WORK

1

THE practice of democracy has been ahead of its theory. For the theory

holds that the adult electors taken together make decisions out of a

will that is in them. But just as there grew up governing hierarchies

which were invisible in theory, so there has been a large amount of

constructive adaptation, also unaccounted for in the image of

democracy. Ways have been found to represent many interests and

functions that are normally out of sight.

We are most conscious of this in our theory of the courts, when we

explain their legislative powers and their vetoes on the theory that

there are interests to be guarded which might be forgotten by the

elected officials. But the Census Bureau, when it counts, classifies,

and correlates people, things, and changes, is also speaking for

unseen factors in the environment. The Geological Survey makes mineral

resources evident, the Department of Agriculture represents in the

councils of the nation factors of which each farmer sees only an

infinitesimal part. School authorities, the Tariff Commission, the

consular service, the Bureau of Internal Revenue give representation

to persons, ideas, and objects which would never automatically find

themselves represented in this perspective by an election. The

Children's Bureau is the spokesman of a whole complex of interests and

functions not ordinarily visible to the voter, and, therefore,

incapable of becoming spontaneously a part of his public opinions.

Thus the printing of comparative statistics of infant mortality is

often followed by a reduction of the death rate of babies. Municipal

officials and voters did not have, before publication, a place in

their picture of the environment for those babies. The statistics made

them visible, as visible as if the babies had elected an alderman to

air their grievances.

In the State Department the government maintains a Division of Far

Eastern Affairs. What is it for? The Japanese and the Chinese

Governments both maintain ambassadors in Washington. Are they not

qualified to speak for the Far East? They are its representatives. Yet

nobody would argue that the American Government could learn all that

it needed to know about the Far East by consulting these ambassadors.

Supposing them to be as candid as they know how to be, they are still

limited channels of information. Therefore, to supplement them we

maintain embassies in Tokio and Peking, and consular agents at many

points. Also, I assume, some secret agents. These people are supposed

to send reports which pass through the Division of Far Eastern Affairs

to the Secretary of State. Now what does the Secretary expect of the

Division? I know one who expected it to spend its appropriation. But

there are Secretaries to whom special revelation is denied, and they

turn to their divisions for help. The last thing they expect to find

is a neat argument justifying the American position.

What they demand is that the experts shall bring the Far East to the

Secretary's desk, with all the elements in such relation that it is as

if he were in contact with the Far East itself. The expert must

translate, simplify, generalize, but the inference from the result

must apply in the East, not merely on the premises of the report. If

the Secretary is worth his salt, the very last thing he will tolerate

in his experts is the suspicion that they have a "policy." He does not

want to know from them whether they like Japanese policy in China. He

wants to know what different classes of Chinese and Japanese, English,

Frenchmen, Germans, and Russians, think about it, and what they are

likely to do because of what they think. He wants all that represented

to him as the basis of his decision. The more faithfully the Division

represents what is not otherwise represented, either by the Japanese

or American ambassadors, or the Senators and Congressmen from the

Pacific coast, the better Secretary of State he will be. He may decide

to take his policy from the Pacific Coast, but he will take his view

of Japan from Japan.

2

It is no accident that the best diplomatic service in the world is the

one in which the divorce between the assembling of knowledge and the

control of policy is most perfect. During the war in many British

Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always

men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite

successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the

rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and

pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left

that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard

an ambassador say that he never reported anything to Washington which

would not cheer up the folks at home. He charmed all those who met

him, helped many a stranded war worker, and was superb when he

unveiled a monument.

He did not understand that the power of the expert depends upon

separating himself from those who make the decisions, upon not caring,

in his expert self, what decision is made. The man who, like the

ambassador, takes a line, and meddles with the decision, is soon

discounted. There he is, just one more on that side of the question.

For when he begins to care too much, he begins to see what he wishes

to see, and by that fact ceases to see what he is there to see. He is

there to represent the unseen. He represents people who are not

voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out

of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and

people. He has a constituency of intangibles. And intangibles cannot

be used to form a political majority, because voting is in the last

analysis a test of strength, a sublimated battle, and the expert

represents no strength available in the immediate. But he can exercise

force by disturbing the line up of the forces. By making the invisible

visible, he confronts the people who exercise material force with a

new environment, sets ideas and feelings at work in them, throws them

out of position, and so, in the profoundest way, affects the decision.

Men cannot long act in a way that they know is a contradiction of the

environment as they conceive it. If they are bent on acting in a

certain way they have to reconceive the environment, they have to

censor out, to rationalize. But if in their presence, there is an

insistent fact which is so obtrusive that they cannot explain it away,

one of three courses is open. They can perversely ignore it, though

they will cripple themselves in the process, will overact their part

and come to grief. They can take it into account but refuse to act.

They pay in internal discomfort and frustration. Or, and I believe

this to be the most frequent case, they adjust their whole behavior to

the enlarged environment.

The idea that the expert is an ineffectual person because he lets

others make the decisions is quite contrary to experience. The more

subtle the elements that enter into the decision, the more

irresponsible power the expert wields. He is certain, moreover, to

exercise more power in the future than ever he did before, because

increasingly the relevant facts will elude the voter and the

administrator. All governing agencies will tend to organize bodies of

research and information, which will throw out tentacles and expand,

as have the intelligence departments of all the armies in the world.

But the experts will remain human beings. They will enjoy power, and

their temptation will be to appoint themselves censors, and so absorb

the real function of decision. Unless their function is correctly

defined they will tend to pass on the facts they think appropriate,

and to pass down the decisions they approve. They will tend, in short,

to become a bureaucracy.

The only institutional safeguard is to separate as absolutely as it is

possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which

investigates. The two should be parallel but quite distinct bodies of

men, recruited differently, paid if possible from separate funds,

responsible to different heads, intrinsically uninterested in each

other's personal success. In industry, the auditors, accountants, and

inspectors should be independent of the manager, the superintendents,

foremen, and in time, I believe, we shall come to see that in order to

bring industry under social control the machinery of record will have

to be independent of the boards of directors and the shareholders.

3

But in building the intelligence sections of industry and politics, we

do not start on cleared ground. And, apart from insisting on this

basic separation of function, it would be cumbersome to insist too

precisely on the form which in any particular instance the principle

shall take. There are men who believe in intelligence work, and will

adopt it; there are men who do not understand it, but cannot do their

work without it; there are men who will resist. But provided the

principle has a foothold somewhere in every social agency it will make

progress, and the way to begin is to begin. In the federal government,

for example, it is not necessary to straighten out the administrative

tangle and the illogical duplications of a century's growth in order

to find a neat place for the intelligence bureaus which Washington so

badly needs. Before election you can promise to rush bravely into the

breach. But when you arrive there all out of breath, you find that

each absurdity is invested with habits, strong interests, and chummy

Congressmen. Attack all along the line and you engage every force of

reaction. You go forth to battle, as the poet said, and you always

fall. You can lop off an antiquated bureau here, a covey of clerks

there, you can combine two bureaus. And by that time you are busy with

the tariff and the railroads, and the era of reform is over. Besides,

in order to effect a truly logical reorganization of the government,

such as all candidates always promise, you would have to disturb more

passions than you have time to quell. And any new scheme, supposing

you had one ready, would require officials to man it. Say what one

will about officeholders, even Soviet Russia was glad to get many of

the old ones back; and these old officials, if they are too ruthlessly

treated, will sabotage Utopia itself.

No administrative scheme is workable without good will, and good will

about strange practices is impossible without education. The better

way is to introduce into the existing machinery, wherever you can find

an opening, agencies that will hold up a mirror week by week, month by

month. You can hope, then, to make the machine visible to those who

work it, as well as to the chiefs who are responsible, and to the

public outside. When the office-holders begin to see themselves,--or

rather when the outsiders, the chiefs, and the subordinates all begin

to see the same facts, the same damning facts if you like, the

obstruction will diminish. The reformer's opinion that a certain

bureau is inefficient is just his opinion, not so good an opinion in

the eyes of the bureau, as its own. But let the work of that bureau be

analysed and recorded, and then compared with other bureaus and with

private corporations, and the argument moves to another plane.

There are ten departments at Washington represented in the Cabinet.

Suppose, then, there was a permanent intelligence section for each.

What would be some of the conditions of effectiveness? Beyond all

others that the intelligence officials should be independent both of

the Congressional Committees dealing with that department, and of the

Secretary at the head of it; that they should not be entangled either

in decision or in action. Independence, then, would turn mainly on

three points on funds, tenure, and access to the facts. For clearly if

a particular Congress or departmental official can deprive them of

money, dismiss them, or close the files, the staff becomes its

creature.

4

The question of funds is both important and difficult. No agency of

research can be really free if it depends upon annual doles from what

may be a jealous or a parsimonious congress. Yet the ultimate control

of funds cannot be removed from the legislature. The financial

arrangement should insure the staff against left-handed, joker and

rider attack, against sly destruction, and should at the same time

provide for growth. The staff should be so well entrenched that an

attack on its existence would have to be made in the open. It might,

perhaps, work behind a federal charter creating a trust fund, and a

sliding scale over a period of years based on the appropriation for

the department to which the intelligence bureau belonged. No great

sums of money are involved anyway. The trust fund might cover the

overhead and capital charges for a certain minimum staff, the sliding

scale might cover the enlargements. At any rate the appropriation

should be put beyond accident, like the payment of any long term

obligation. This is a much less serious way of "tying the hands of

Congress" than is the passage of a Constitutional amendment or the

issuance of government bonds. Congress could repeal the charter. But

it would have to repeal it, not throw monkey wrenches into it.

Tenure should be for life, with provision for retirement on a liberal

pension, with sabbatical years set aside for advanced study and

training, and with dismissal only after a trial by professional

colleagues. The conditions which apply to any non-profit-making

intellectual career should apply here. If the work is to be salient,

the men who do it must have dignity, security, and, in the upper ranks

at least, that freedom of mind which you find only where men are not

too immediately concerned in practical decision.

Access to the materials should be established in the organic act. The

bureau should have the right to examine all papers, and to question

any official or any outsider. Continuous investigation of this sort

would not at all resemble the sensational legislative inquiry and the

spasmodic fishing expedition which are now a common feature of our

government. The bureau should have the right to propose accounting

methods to the department, and if the proposal is rejected, or

violated after it has been accepted, to appeal under its charter to

Congress.

In the first instance each intelligence bureau would be the connecting

link between Congress and the Department, a better link, in my

judgment, than the appearance of cabinet officers on the floor of both

House and Senate, though the one proposal in no way excludes the

other. The bureau would be the Congressional eye on the execution of

its policy. It would be the departmental answer to Congressional

criticism. And then, since operation of the Department would be

permanently visible, perhaps Congress would cease to feel the need of

that minute legislation born of distrust and a false doctrine of the

separation of powers, which does so much to make efficient

administration difficult.

5

But, of course, each of the ten bureaus could not work in a watertight

compartment. In their relation one to another lies the best chance for

that "coordination" of which so much is heard and so little seen.

Clearly the various staffs would need to adopt, wherever possible,

standards of measurement that were comparable. They would exchange

their records. Then if the War Department and the Post Office both buy

lumber, hire carpenters, or construct brick walls they need not

necessarily do them through the same agency, for that might mean

cumbersome over-centralization; but they would be able to use the same

measure for the same things, be conscious of the comparisons, and be

treated as competitors. And the more competition of this sort the

better.

For the value of competition is determined by the value of the

standards used to measure it. Instead, then, of asking ourselves

whether we believe in competition, we should ask ourselves whether we

believe in that for which the competitors compete. No one in his

senses expects to "abolish competition," for when the last vestige of

emulation had disappeared, social effort would consist in mechanical

obedience to a routine, tempered in a minority by native inspiration.

Yet no one expects to work out competition to its logical conclusion

in a murderous struggle of each against all. The problem is to select

the goals of competition and the rules of the game. Almost always the

most visible and obvious standard of measurement will determine the

rules of the game: such as money, power, popularity, applause, or Mr.

Veblen's "conspicuous waste." What other standards of measurement does

our civilization normally provide? How does it measure efficiency,

productivity, service, for which we are always clamoring?

By and large there are no measures, and there is, therefore, not so

much competition to achieve these ideals. For the difference between

the higher and the lower motives is not, as men often assert, a

difference between altruism and selfishness. [Footnote: _Cf._

Ch. XII] It is a difference between acting for easily understood aims,

and for aims that are obscure and vague. Exhort a man to make more

profit than his neighbor, and he knows at what to aim. Exhort him to

render more social service, and how is he to be certain what service

is social? What is the test, what is the measure? A subjective

feeling, somebody's opinion. Tell a man in time of peace that he ought

to serve his country and you have uttered a pious platitude, Tell him

in time of war, and the word service has a meaning; it is a number of

concrete acts, enlistment, or buying bonds, or saving food, or working

for a dollar a year, and each one of these services he sees definitely

as part of a concrete purpose to put at the front an army larger and

better armed, than the enemy's.

So the more you are able to analyze administration and work out

elements that can be compared, the more you invent quantitative

measures for the qualities you wish to promote, the more you can turn

competition to ideal ends. If you can contrive the right index numbers

[Footnote: I am not using the term index numbers in its purely

technical meaning, but to cover any device for the comparative

measurement of social phenomena.] you can set up a competition between

individual workers in a shop; between shops; between factories;

between schools; [Footnote: See, for example, _An Index Number for

State School Systems_ by Leonard P. Ayres, Russell Sage Foundation,

1920. The principle of the quota was very successfully applied in the

Liberty Loan Campaigns, and under very much more difficult

circumstances by the Allied Maritime Transport Council.] between

government departments; between regiments; between divisions; between

ships; between states; counties; cities; and the better your index

numbers the more useful the competition.

6

The possibilities that lie in the exchange of material are evident.

Each department of government is all the time asking for information

that may already have been obtained by another department, though

perhaps in a somewhat different form. The State Department needs to

know, let us say, the extent of the Mexican oil reserves, their

relation to the rest of the world's supply, the present ownership of

Mexican oil lands, the importance of oil to warships now under

construction or planned, the comparative costs in different fields.

How does it secure such information to-day? The information is

probably scattered through the Departments of Interior, Justice,

Commerce, Labor and Navy. Either a clerk in the State Department looks

up Mexican oil in a book of reference, which may or may not be

accurate, or somebody's private secretary telephones somebody else's

private secretary, asks for a memorandum, and in the course of time a

darkey messenger arrives with an armful of unintelligible reports. The

Department should be able to call on its own intelligence bureau to

assemble the facts in a way suited to the diplomatic problem up for

decision. And these facts the diplomatic intelligence bureau would

obtain from the central clearing house. [Footnote: There has been a

vast development of such services among the trade associations. The

possibilities of a perverted use were revealed by the New York

Building Trades investigation of 1921.]

This establishment would pretty soon become a focus of information of

the most extraordinary kind. And the men in it would be made aware of

what the problems of government really are. They would deal with

problems of definition, of terminology, of statistical technic, of

logic; they would traverse concretely the whole gamut of the social

sciences. It is difficult to see why all this material, except a few

diplomatic and military secrets, should not be open to the scholars of

the country. It is there that the political scientist would find the

real nuts to crack and the real researches for his students to make.

The work need not all be done in Washington, but it could be done in

reference to Washington. The central agency would, thus, have in it

the makings of a national university. The staff could be recruited

there for the bureaus from among college graduates. They would be

working on theses selected after consultation between the curators of

the national university and teachers scattered over the country. If

the association was as flexible as it ought to be, there would be, as

a supplement to the permanent staff, a steady turnover of temporary

and specialist appointments from the universities, and exchange

lecturers called out from Washington. Thus the training and the

recruiting of the staff would go together. A part of the research

itself would be done by students, and political science in the

universities would be associated with politics in America.

7

In its main outlines the principle is equally applicable to state

governments, to cities, and to rural counties. The work of comparison

and interchange could take place by federations of state and city and

county bureaus. And within those federations any desirable regional

combination could be organized. So long as the accounting systems were

comparable, a great deal of duplication would be avoided. Regional

coordination is especially desirable. For legal frontiers often do not

coincide with the effective environments. Yet they have a certain

basis in custom that it would be costly to disturb. By coordinating

their information several administrative areas could reconcile

autonomy of decision with cooperation. New York City, for example, is

already an unwieldy unit for good government from the City Hall. Yet

for many purposes, such as health and transportation, the metropolitan

district is the true unit of administration. In that district,

however, there are large cities, like Yonkers, Jersey City, Paterson,

Elizabeth, Hoboken, Bayonne. They could not all be managed from one

center, and yet they should act together for many functions.

Ultimately perhaps some such flexible scheme of local government as

Sidney and Beatrice Webb have suggested may be the proper

solution. [Footnote: "The Reorganization of Local Government" (Ch. IV),

in _A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great

Britain_.] But the first step would be a coordination, not of

decision and action, but of information and research. Let the

officials of the various municipalities see their common problems in

the light of the same facts.

8

It would be idle to deny that such a net work of intelligence bureaus

in politics and industry might become a dead weight and a perpetual

irritation. One can easily imagine its attraction for men in search of

soft jobs, for pedants, for meddlers. One can see red tape, mountains

of papers, questionnaires ad nauseam, seven copies of every document,

endorsements, delays, lost papers, the use of form 136 instead of form

2gb, the return of the document because pencil was used instead of

ink, or black ink instead of red ink. The work could be done very

badly. There are no fool-proof institutions.

But if one could assume that there was circulation through the whole

system between government departments, factories, offices, and the

universities; a circulation of men, a circulation of data and of

criticism, the risks of dry rot would not be so great. Nor would it be

true to say that these intelligence bureaus will complicate life. They

will tend, on the contrary, to simplify, by revealing a complexity now

so great as to be humanly unmanageable. The present fundamentally

invisible system of government is so intricate that most people have

given up trying to follow it, and because they do not try, they are

tempted to think it comparatively simple. It is, on the contrary,

elusive, concealed, opaque. The employment of an intelligence system

would mean a reduction of personnel per unit of result, because by

making available to all the experience of each, it would reduce the

amount of trial and error; and because by making the social process

visible, it would assist the personnel to self-criticism. It does not

involve a great additional band of officials, if you take into account

the time now spent vainly by special investigating committees, grand

juries, district attorneys, reform organizations, and bewildered

office holders, in trying to find their way through a dark muddle.

If the analysis of public opinion and of the democratic theories in

relation to the modern environment is sound in principle, then I do

not see how one can escape the conclusion that such intelligence work

is the clue to betterment. I am not referring to the few suggestions

contained in this chapter. They are merely illustrations. The task of

working out the technic is in the hands of men trained to do it, and

not even they can to-day completely foresee the form, much less the

details. The number of social phenomena which are now recorded is

small, the instruments of analysis are very crude, the concepts often

vague and uncriticized. But enough has been done to demonstrate, I

think, that unseen environments can be reported effectively, that they

can be reported to divergent groups of people in a way which is

neutral to their prejudice, and capable of overcoming their

subjectivism.

If that is true, then in working out the intelligence principle men

will find the way to overcome the central difficulty of

self-government, the difficulty of dealing with an unseen reality.

Because of that difficulty, it has been impossible for any

self-governing community to reconcile its need for isolation with the

necessity for wide contact, to reconcile the dignity and individuality

of local decision with security and wide coordination, to secure

effective leaders without sacrificing responsibility, to have useful

public opinions without attempting universal public opinions on all

subjects. As long as there was no way of establishing common versions

of unseen events, common measures for separate actions, the only image

of democracy that would work, even in theory, was one based on an

isolated community of people whose political faculties were limited,

according to Aristotle's famous maxim, by the range of their vision.

But now there is a way out, a long one to be sure, but a way. It is

fundamentally the same way as that which has enabled a citizen of

Chicago, with no better eyes or ears than an Athenian, to see and hear

over great distances. It is possible to-day, it will become more

possible when more labor has gone into it, to reduce the discrepancies

between the conceived environment and the effective environment. As

that is done, federalism will work more and more by consent, less and

less by coercion. For while federalism is the only possible method of

union among self-governing groups, [Footnote: _Cf._ H. J. Laski,

_The Foundations of Sovereignty_, and other Essays, particularly

the Essay of this name, as well as the Problems of Administrative

Areas, The Theory of Popular Sovereignty, and The Pluralistic State.]

federalism swings either towards imperial centralization or towards

parochial anarchy wherever the union is not based on correct and

commonly accepted ideas of federal matters. These ideas do not arise

spontaneously. They have to be pieced together by generalization based

on analysis, and the instruments for that analysis have to be invented

and tested by research.

No electoral device, no manipulation of areas, no change in the system

of property, goes to the root of the matter. You cannot take more

political wisdom out of human beings than there is in them. And no

reform, however sensational, is truly radical, which does not

consciously provide a way of overcoming the subjectivism of human

opinion based on the limitation of individual experience. There are

systems of government, of voting, and representation which extract

more than others. But in the end knowledge must come not from the

conscience but from the environment with which that conscience deals.

When men act on the principle of intelligence they go out to find the

facts and to make their wisdom. When they ignore it, they go inside

themselves and find only what is there. They elaborate their

prejudice, instead of increasing their knowledge.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE APPEAL TO THE PUBLIC

1

IN real life no one acts on the theory that he can have a public

opinion on every public question, though this fact is often concealed

where a person thinks there is no public question because he has no

public opinion. But in the theory of our politics we continue to think

more literally than Lord Bryce intended, that "the action of Opinion

is continuous," [Footnote: _Modern Democracies_, Vol. I, p. 159.]

even though "its action... deals with broad principles only."

[Footnote: Id., footnote, p. 158.] And then because we try to think of

ourselves having continuous opinions, without being altogether certain

what a broad principle is, we quite naturally greet with an anguished

yawn an argument that seems to involve the reading of more government

reports, more statistics, more curves and more graphs. For all these

are in the first instance just as confusing as partisan rhetoric, and

much less entertaining.

The amount of attention available is far too small for any scheme in

which it was assumed that all the citizens of the nation would, after

devoting themselves to the publications of all the intelligence

bureaus, become alert, informed, and eager on the multitude of real

questions that never do fit very well into any broad principle. I am

not making that assumption. Primarily, the intelligence bureau is an

instrument of the man of action, of the representative charged with

decision, of the worker at his work, and if it does not help them, it

will help nobody in the end. But in so far as it helps them to

understand the environment in which they are working, it makes what

they do visible. And by that much they become more responsible to the

general public.

The purpose, then, is not to burden every citizen with expert opinions

on all questions, but to push that burden away from him towards the

responsible administrator. An intelligence system has value, of

course, as a source of general information, and as a check on the

daily press. But that is secondary. Its real use is as an aid to

representative government and administration both in politics and

industry. The demand for the assistance of expert reporters in the

shape of accountants, statisticians, secretariats, and the like, comes

not from the public, but from men doing public business, who can no

longer do it by rule of thumb. It is in origin and in ideal an

instrument for doing public business better, rather than an instrument

for knowing better how badly public business is done.

2

As a private citizen, as a sovereign voter, no one could attempt to

digest these documents. But as one party to a dispute, as a

committeeman in a legislature, as an officer in government, business,

or a trade union, as a member of an industrial council, reports on the

specific matter at issue will be increasingly welcome. The private

citizen interested in some cause would belong, as he does now, to

voluntary societies which employed a staff to study the documents, and

make reports that served as a check on officialdom. There would be

some study of this material by newspaper men, and a good deal by

experts and by political scientists. But the outsider, and every one

of us is an outsider to all but a few aspects of modern life, has

neither time, nor attention, nor interest, nor the equipment for

specific judgment. It is on the men inside, working under conditions

that are sound, that the daily administrations of society must rest.

The general public outside can arrive at judgments about whether these

conditions are sound only on the result after the event, and on the

procedure before the event. The broad principles on which the action

of public opinion can be continuous are essentially principles of

procedure. The outsider can ask experts to tell him whether the

relevant facts were duly considered; he cannot in most cases decide

for himself what is relevant or what is due consideration. The

outsider can perhaps judge whether the groups interested in the

decision were properly heard, whether the ballot, if there was one,

was honestly taken, and perhaps whether the result was honestly

accepted. He can watch the procedure when the news indicates that

there is something to watch. He can raise a question as to whether the

procedure itself is right, if its normal results conflict with his

ideal of a good life. [Footnote: _Cf._ Chapter XX. ] But if he

tries in every case to substitute himself for the procedure, to bring

in Public Opinion like a providential uncle in the crisis of a play,

he will confound his own confusion. He will not follow any train of

thought consecutively.

For the practice of appealing to the public on all sorts of intricate

matters means almost always a desire to escape criticism from those

who know by enlisting a large majority which has had no chance to

know. The verdict is made to depend on who has the loudest or the most

entrancing voice, the most skilful or the most brazen publicity man,

the best access to the most space in the newspapers. For even when the

editor is scrupulously fair to "the other side," fairness is not

enough. There may be several other sides, unmentioned by any of the

organized, financed and active partisans.

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his

Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a

compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature

and an insult to his sense of evidence. As his civic education takes

account of the complexity of his environment, he will concern himself

about the equity and the sanity of procedure, and even this he will in

most cases expect his elected representative to watch for him. He will

refuse himself to accept the burden of these decisions, and will turn

down his thumbs in most cases on those who, in their hurry to win,

rush from the conference table with the first dope for the reporters.

Only by insisting that problems shall not come up to him until they

have passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern

state hope to deal with them in a form that is intelligible. For

issues, as they are stated by a partisan, almost always consist of an

intricate series of facts, as he has observed them, surrounded by a

large fatty mass of stereotyped phrases charged with his emotion.

According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from the

conference room insisting that what he wants is some soulfilling idea

like Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism. On such issues the

citizen outside can sometimes be provoked to fear or admiration, but

to judgment never. Before he can do anything with the argument, the

fat has to be boiled out of it for him.

3

That can be done by having the representative inside carry on

discussion in the presence of some one, chairman or mediator, who

forces the discussion to deal with the analyses supplied by experts.

This is the essential organization of any representative body dealing

with distant matters. The partisan voices should be there, but the

partisans should find themselves confronted with men, not personally

involved, who control enough facts and have the dialectical skill to

sort out what is real perception from what is stereotype, pattern and

elaboration. It is the Socratic dialogue, with all of Socrates's

energy for breaking through words to meanings, and something more than

that, because the dialectic in modern life must be done by men who

have explored the environment as well as the human mind.

There is, for example, a grave dispute in the steel industry. Each

side issues a manifesto full of the highest ideals. The only public

opinion that is worth respect at this stage is the opinion which

insists that a conference be organized. For the side which says its

cause is too just to be contaminated by conference there can be little

sympathy, since there is no such cause anywhere among mortal men.

Perhaps those who object to conference do not say quite that. Perhaps

they say that the other side is too wicked; they cannot shake hands

with traitors. All that public opinion can do then is to organize a

hearing by public officials to hear the proof of wickedness. It cannot

take the partisans' word for it. But suppose a conference is agreed

to, and suppose there is a neutral chairman who has at his beck and

call the consulting experts of the corporation, the union, and, let us

say, the Department of Labor.

Judge Gary states with perfect sincerity that his men are well paid

and not overworked, and then proceeds to sketch the history of Russia

from the time of Peter the Great to the murder of the Czar. Mr. Foster

rises, states with equal sincerity that the men are exploited, and

then proceeds to outline the history of human emancipation from Jesus

of Nazareth to Abraham Lincoln. At this point the chairman calls upon

the intelligence men for wage tables in order to substitute for the

words "well paid" and "exploited" a table showing what the different

classes _are_ paid. Does Judge Gary think they are all well paid?

He does. Does Mr. Foster think they are all exploited? No, he thinks

that groups C, M, and X are exploited. What does he mean by exploited?

He means they are not paid a living wage. They are, says Judge Gary.

What can a man buy on that wage, asks the chairman. Nothing, says Mr.

Foster. Everything he needs, says Judge Gary. The chairman consults

the budgets and price statistics of the government. [Footnote: See an

article on "The Cost of Living and Wage Cuts," in the _New

Republic_, July 27, 1921, by Dr. Leo Wolman, for a brilliant

discussion of the naive use of such figures and "pseudo-principles."

The warning is of particular importance because it comes from an

economist and statistician who has himself done so much to improve the

technic of industrial disputes.] He rules that X can meet an average

budget, but that C and M cannot. Judge Gary serves notice that he does

not regard the official statistics as sound. The budgets are too high,

and prices have come down. Mr. Foster also serves notice of exception.

The budget is too low, prices have gone up. The chairman rules that

this point is not within the jurisdiction of the conference, that the

official figures stand, and that Judge Gary's experts and Mr. Foster's

should carry their appeals to the standing committee of the federated

intelligence bureaus.

Nevertheless, says Judge Gary, we shall be ruined if we change these

wage scales. What do you mean by ruined, asks the chairman, produce

your books. I can't, they are private, says Judge Gary. What is

private does not interest us, says the chairman, and, therefore,

issues a statement to the public announcing that the wages of workers

in groups C and M are so-and-so much below the official minimum living

wage, and that Judge Gary declines to increase them for reasons that

he refuses to state. After a procedure of that sort, a public opinion

in the eulogistic sense of the term [Footnote: As used by Mr. Lowell

in his _Public Opinion and Popular Government_.] can exist.

The value of expert mediation is not that it sets up opinion to coerce

the partisans, but that it disintegrates partisanship. Judge Gary and

Mr. Foster may remain as little convinced as when they started, though

even they would have to talk in a different strain. But almost

everyone else who was not personally entangled would save himself from

being entangled. For the entangling stereotypes and slogans to which

his reflexes are so ready to respond are by this kind of dialectic

untangled.

4

On many subjects of great public importance, and in varying degree

among different people for more personal matters, the threads of

memory and emotion are in a snarl. The same word will connote any

number of different ideas: emotions are displaced from the images to

which they belong to names which resemble the names of these images.

In the uncriticized parts of the mind there is a vast amount of

association by mere clang, contact, and succession. There are stray

emotional attachments, there are words that were names and are masks.

In dreams, reveries, and panic, we uncover some of the disorder,

enough to see how the naive mind is composed, and how it behaves when

not disciplined by wakeful effort and external resistance. We see that

there is no more natural order than in a dusty old attic. There is

often the same incongruity between fact, idea, and emotion as there

might be in an opera house, if all the wardrobes were dumped in a heap

and all the scores mixed up, so that Madame Butterfly in a Valkyr's

dress waited lyrically for the return of Faust. "At Christmas-tide"

says an editorial, "old memories soften the heart. Holy teachings are

remembered afresh as thoughts run back to childhood. The world does

not seem so bad when seen through the mist of half-happy, half-sad

recollections of loved ones now with God. No heart is untouched by the

mysterious influence.... The country is honeycombed with red

propaganda--but there is a good supply of ropes, muscles and

lampposts... while this world moves the spirit of liberty will burn in

the breast of man."

The man who found these phrases in his mind needs help. He needs a

Socrates who will separate the words, cross-examine him until he has

defined them, and made words the names of ideas. Made them mean a

particular object and nothing else. For these tense syllables have got

themselves connected in his mind by primitive association, and are

bundled together by his memories of Christmas, his indignation as a

conservative, and his thrills as the heir to a revolutionary

tradition. Sometimes the snarl is too huge and ancient for quick

unravelling. Sometimes, as in modern psychotherapy, there are layers

upon layers of memory reaching back to infancy, which have to be

separated and named.

The effect of naming, the effect, that is, of saying that the labor

groups C and M, but not X, are underpaid, instead of saying that Labor

is Exploited, is incisive. Perceptions recover their identity, and the

emotion they arouse is specific, since it is no longer reinforced by

large and accidental connections with everything from Christmas to

Moscow. The disentangled idea with a name of its own, and an emotion

that has been scrutinized, is ever so much more open to correction by

new data in the problem. It had been imbedded in the whole

personality, had affiliations of some sort with the whole ego: a

challenge would reverberate through the whole soul. After it has been

thoroughly criticized, the idea is no longer _me_ but _that_.

It is objectified, it is at arm's length. Its fate is not bound up with my

fate, but with the fate of the outer world upon which I am acting.

5

Re-education of this kind will help to bring our public opinions into

grip with the environment. That is the way the enormous censoring,

stereotyping, and dramatizing apparatus can be liquidated. Where there

is no difficulty in knowing what the relevant environment is, the

critic, the teacher, the physician, can unravel the mind. But where

the environment is as obscure to the analyst as to his pupil, no

analytic technic is sufficient. Intelligence work is required. In

political and industrial problems the critic as such can do something,

but unless he can count upon receiving from expert reporters a valid

picture of the environment, his dialectic cannot go far.

Therefore, though here, as in most other matters, "education" is the

supreme remedy, the value of this education will depend upon the

evolution of knowledge. And our knowledge of human institutions is

still extraordinarily meager and impressionistic. The gathering of

social knowledge is, on the whole, still haphazard; not, as it will

have to become, the normal accompaniment of action. And yet the

collection of information will not be made, one may be sure, for the

sake of its ultimate use. It will be made because modern decision

requires it to be made. But as it is being made, there will accumulate

a body of data which political science can turn into generalization,

and build up for the schools into a conceptual picture of the world.

When that picture takes form, civic education can become a preparation

for dealing with an unseen environment.

As a working model of the social system becomes available to the

teacher, he can use it to make the pupil acutely aware of how his mind

works on unfamiliar facts. Until he has such a model, the teacher

cannot hope to prepare men fully for the world they will find. What he

can do is to prepare them to deal with that world with a great deal

more sophistication about their own minds. He can, by the use of the

case method, teach the pupil the habit of examining the sources of his

information. He can teach him, for example, to look in his newspaper

for the place where the dispatch was filed, for the name of the

correspondent, the name of the press service, the authority given for

the statement, the circumstances under which the statement was

secured. He can teach the pupil to ask himself whether the reporter

saw what he describes, and to remember how that reporter described

other events in the past. He can teach him the character of

censorship, of the idea of privacy, and furnish him with knowledge of

past propaganda. He can, by the proper use of history, make him aware

of the stereotype, and can educate a habit of introspection about the

imagery evoked by printed words. He can, by courses in comparative

history and anthropology, produce a life-long realization of the way

codes impose a special pattern upon the imagination. He can teach men

to catch themselves making allegories, dramatizing relations, and

personifying abstractions. He can show the pupil how he identifies

himself with these allegories, how he becomes interested, and how he

selects the attitude, heroic, romantic, economic which he adopts while

holding a particular opinion. The study of error is not only in the

highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating

introduction to the study of truth. As our minds become more deeply

aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method

that is not otherwise there. We see vividly, as normally we should

not, the enormous mischief and casual cruelty of our prejudices. And

the destruction of a prejudice, though painful at first, because of

its connection with our self-respect, gives an immense relief and a

fine pride when it is successfully done. There is a radical

enlargement of the range of attention. As the current categories

dissolve, a hard, simple version of the world breaks up. The scene

turns vivid and full. There follows an emotional incentive to hearty

appreciation of scientific method, which otherwise it is not easy to

arouse, and is impossible to sustain. Prejudices are so much easier

and more interesting. For if you teach the principles of science as if

they had always been accepted, their chief virtue as a discipline,

which is objectivity, will make them dull. But teach them at first as

victories over the superstitions of the mind, and the exhilaration of

the chase and of the conquest may carry the pupil over that hard

transition from his own self-bound experience to the phase where his

curiosity has matured, and his reason has acquired passion.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE APPEAL TO REASON

1

I HAVE written, and then thrown away, several endings to this book.

Over all of them there hung that fatality of last chapters, in which

every idea seems to find its place, and all the mysteries, that the

writer has not forgotten, are unravelled. In politics the hero does

not live happily ever after, or end his life perfectly. There is no

concluding chapter, because the hero in politics has more future

before him than there is recorded history behind him. The last chapter

is merely a place where the writer imagines that the polite reader has

begun to look furtively at his watch.

2

When Plato came to the point where it was fitting that he should sum

up, his assurance turned into stage-fright as he thought how absurd it

would sound to say what was in him about the place of reason in

politics. Those sentences in book five of the Republic were hard even

for Plato to speak; they are so sheer and so stark that men can

neither forget them nor live by them. So he makes Socrates say to

Glaucon that he will be broken and drowned in laughter for telling

"what is the least change which will enable a state to pass into the

truer form," [Footnote: _Republic_, Bk. V, 473. Jowett transl.]

because the thought he "would fain have uttered if it had not seemed

too extravagant" was that "until philosophers are kings, or the kings

and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and

political greatness and wisdom meet in one... cities will never cease

from ill,--no, nor the human race..."

Hardly had he said these awful words, when he realized they were a

counsel of perfection, and felt embarrassed at the unapproachable

grandeur of his idea. So he hastens to add that, of course, "the true

pilot" will be called "a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing."

[Footnote: 2 Bk. VI, 488-489.] But this wistful admission, though it

protects him against whatever was the Greek equivalent for the charge

that he lacked a sense of humor, furnished a humiliating tailpiece to

a solemn thought. He becomes defiant and warns Adeimantus that he must

"attribute the uselessness" of philosophers "to the fault of those who

will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly

beg the sailors to be commanded by him--that is not the order of

nature." And with this haughty gesture, he hurriedly picked up the

tools of reason, and disappeared into the Academy, leaving the world

to Machiavelli.

Thus, in the first great encounter between reason and politics, the

strategy of reason was to retire in anger. But meanwhile, as Plato

tells us, the ship is at sea. There have been many ships on the sea,

since Plato wrote, and to-day, whether we are wise or foolish in our

belief, we could no longer call a man a true pilot, simply because he

knows how to "pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars

and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art." [Footnote: Bk. VI,

488-489.] He can dismiss nothing which is necessary to make that ship

sail prosperously. Because there are mutineers aboard, he cannot say:

so much the worse for us all... it is not in the order of nature that

I should handle a mutiny... it is not in the order of philosophy that

I should consider mutiny... I know how to navigate... I do not know

how to navigate a ship full of sailors... and if they do not see that

I am the man to steer, I cannot help it. We shall all go on the rocks,

they to be punished for their sins; I, with the assurance that I knew

better....

3

Whenever we make an appeal to reason in politics, the difficulty in

this parable recurs. For there is an inherent difficulty about using

the method of reason to deal with an unreasoning world. Even if you

assume with Plato that the true pilot knows what is best for the ship,

you have to recall that he is not so easy to recognize, and that this

uncertainty leaves a large part of the crew unconvinced. By definition

the crew does not know what he knows, and the pilot, fascinated by the

stars and winds, does not know how to make the crew realize the

importance of what he knows. There is no time during mutiny at sea to

make each sailor an expert judge of experts. There is no time for the

pilot to consult his crew and find out whether he is really as wise as

he thinks he is. For education is a matter of years, the emergency a

matter of hours. It would be altogether academic, then, to tell the

pilot that the true remedy is, for example, an education that will

endow sailors with a better sense of evidence. You can tell that only

to shipmasters on dry land. In the crisis, the only advice is to use a

gun, or make a speech, utter a stirring slogan, offer a compromise,

employ any quick means available to quell the mutiny, the sense of

evidence being what it is. It is only on shore where men plan for many

voyages, that they can afford to, and must for their own salvation,

deal with those causes that take a long time to remove. They will be

dealing in years and generations, not in emergencies alone. And

nothing will put a greater strain upon their wisdom than the necessity

of distinguishing false crises from real ones. For when there is panic

in the air, with one crisis tripping over the heels of another, actual

dangers mixed with imaginary scares, there is no chance at all for the

constructive use of reason, and any order soon seems preferable to any

disorder.

It is only on the premise of a certain stability over a long run of

time that men can hope to follow the method of reason. This is not

because mankind is inept, or because the appeal to reason is

visionary, but because the evolution of reason on political subjects

is only in its beginnings. Our rational ideas in politics are still

large, thin generalities, much too abstract and unrefined for

practical guidance, except where the aggregates are large enough to

cancel out individual peculiarity and exhibit large uniformities.

Reason in politics is especially immature in predicting the behavior

of individual men, because in human conduct the smallest initial

variation often works out into the most elaborate differences. That,

perhaps, is why when we try to insist solely upon an appeal to reason

in dealing with sudden situations, we are broken and drowned in

laughter.

4

For the rate at which reason, as we possess it, can advance itself is

slower than the rate at which action has to be taken. In the present

state of political science there is, therefore, a tendency for one

situation to change into another, before the first is clearly understood,

and so to make much political criticism hindsight and little else. Both in

the discovery of what is unknown, and in the propagation of that which

has been proved, there is a time-differential, which ought to, in a much

greater degree than it ever has, occupy the political philosopher. We

have begun, chiefly under the inspiration of Mr. Graham Wallas, to

examine the effect of an invisible environment upon our opinions.

We do not, as yet, understand, except a little by rule of thumb, the

element of time in politics, though it bears most directly upon the

practicability of any constructive proposal. [Footnote: _Cf_. H. G.

Wells in the opening chapters of _Mankind in the Making._] We

can see, for example, that somehow the relevancy of any plan depends

upon the length of time the operation requires. Because on the length

of time it will depend whether the data which the plan assumes as

given, will in truth remain the same. [Footnote: The better the

current analysis in the intelligence work of any institution, the less

likely, of course, that men will deal with tomorrow's problems in the

light of yesterday's facts.] There is a factor here which realistic

and experienced men do take into account, and it helps to mark

them off somehow from the opportunist, the visionary, the philistine

and the pedant. [Footnote: Not all, but some of the differences

between reactionaries, conservatives, liberals, and radicals are

due, I think, to a different intuitive estimate of the rate of change

in social affairs.] But just how the calculation of time enters into

politics we do not know at present in any systematic way.

Until we understand these matters more clearly, we can at least

remember that there is a problem of the utmost theoretical difficulty

and practical consequence. It will help us to cherish Plato's ideal,

without sharing his hasty conclusion about the perversity of those who

do not listen to reason. It is hard to obey reason in politics,

because you are trying to make two processes march together, which

have as yet a different gait and a different pace. Until reason is

subtle and particular, the immediate struggle of politics will

continue to require an amount of native wit, force, and unprovable

faith, that reason can neither provide nor control, because the facts

of life are too undifferentiated for its powers of understanding. The

methods of social science are so little perfected that in many of the

serious decisions and most of the casual ones, there is as yet no

choice but to gamble with fate as intuition prompts.

But we can make a belief in reason one of those intuitions. We can use

our wit and our force to make footholds for reason. Behind our

pictures of the world, we can try to see the vista of a longer

duration of events, and wherever it is possible to escape from the

urgent present, allow this longer time to control our decisions. And

yet, even when there is this will to let the future count, we find

again and again that we do not know for certain how to act according

to the dictates of reason. The number of human problems on which

reason is prepared to dictate is small.

5

There is, however, a noble counterfeit in that charity which comes

from self-knowledge and an unarguable belief that no one of our

gregarious species is alone in his longing for a friendlier world. So

many of the grimaces men make at each other go with a flutter of their

pulse, that they are not all of them important. And where so much is

uncertain, where so many actions have to be carried out on guesses,

the demand upon the reserves of mere decency is enormous, and it is

necessary to live as if good will would work. We cannot prove in every

instance that it will, nor why hatred, intolerance, suspicion,

bigotry, secrecy, fear, and lying are the seven deadly sins against

public opinion. We can only insist that they have no place in the

appeal to reason, that in the longer run they are a poison; and taking

our stand upon a view of the world which outlasts our own

predicaments, and our own lives, we can cherish a hearty prejudice

against them.

We can do this all the better if we do not allow frightfulness and

fanaticism to impress us so deeply that we throw up our hands

peevishly, and lose interest in the longer run of time because we have

lost faith in the future of man. There is no ground for this despair,

because all the _ifs_ on which, as James said, our destiny hangs,

are as pregnant as they ever were. What we have seen of brutality, we

have seen, and because it was strange, it was not conclusive. It was

only Berlin, Moscow, Versailles in 1914 to 1919, not Armageddon, as we

rhetorically said. The more realistically men have faced out the

brutality and the hysteria, the more they have earned the right to say

that it is not foolish for men to believe, because another great war

took place, that intelligence, courage and effort cannot ever contrive

a good life for all men.

Great as was the horror, it was not universal. There were corrupt, and

there were incorruptible. There was muddle and there were miracles.

There was huge lying. There were men with the will to uncover it. It

is no judgment, but only a mood, when men deny that what some men have

been, more men, and ultimately enough men, might be. You can despair

of what has never been. You can despair of ever having three heads,

though Mr. Shaw has declined to despair even of that. But you cannot

despair of the possibilities that could exist by virtue of any human

quality which a human being has exhibited. And if amidst all the evils

of this decade, you have not seen men and women, known moments that

you would like to multiply, the Lord himself cannot help you.