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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at |http : //books . google . com/| I ^ ;yii/^ Ill' 0/ Mrs. Jerome B. Thomas DaU Dd* y SIAMORD UNVERSTY LBRARES SWrOKD. CAUFORMA 94505 Br Waltkx Lippmann: Tbb Pdbmi dp Paul Maubtt. Edited with an Inttoductiao A Prbpacb to Pounca DUFT AND MaSTBXY The Stakes of DtPLOUAcr The PoLmcAL Scene: An Emay on the Victohy op 1918 LlBEKTY AND THE NbWS PUBLIC OPINION WALTER LIPPMANN NEW YORK HAROOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY PilBtH) la tba n. S. A. FAYE LIPPMANN Wading River, Long Idand. "Btkeld.' kiunan brings limng in a sort of underground den, akiek htu a meutk open toteardi the light and naeking ail across iki den;.tkty kate bet* km from tkeir tkiidkood, and kase Iktir Ugs and tucks ckainid so ikal ikey cannM mow, and can only see before them; for ike ckaini are arranged f H sntk a nuxAner as to prevent then from turning round tkeir keads. At a distance ahote and bekind tkem tke tight of a fire is blazing, and betteeen At fire and lie prisoners there is a raised way; and you teill see, if you look, a loa teail built along the way, lite tke screen wkitk marionetu players kave before tiem, over wkith tkey skoai the puppets. And do you see, I said, men passing along tke atoll carrying vessels, vkieh appear oner tke audi; also figures of men and animals, made of wood and stone and various materials; and some of the prisoners, as you tfould expect, are talking, and some of them are silent ? This is a strange image, ke said, and tkey are strange prisoners. Like outsehes, I replied; and tkey see only their oam skadotes, or tke thadem of one another, wkitk the fire throws on the opposite wall of tke True, he said: koto could tkey see anything but the skedoai if they were never inlawed to move their heads ? And of the objeets wkiek ere being tarried in like manner tkey would see only tke skadoms T And if they tvere able to talk tviik one anotker, would they not suppose tkat they were Tiaming what was artually before them f" — The Republic of PlalO) Book Seven. Qowett Translation.) CONTENTS a,.pt» ''*«T'- INTRODUCTION p.^ L The Worid Outtide and the Pinures in Our Headi. 3 PART 11. APPROACHES TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE II. Cenionhip and Privacy 35 III. Contact and Opportunity 46 IV. Tune and Attention 58 V. Speed, Wotdi, and Qeamesi 64 PART III. STEREOTYPES VI. Stereotypes 79 VII. Stereotypei ai Defense 9; VIII. Blind Spot» and Thdr Value lOf IX. Codet and Thdr Enemiet 1 1; X. The Detectioa of Stereotype* 130 PART IV. INTERESTS XI. The Enliidng of Interest 159 XIL SdF-Interett KeconndeTed 170 PART V. THE MAKING OF A COMMON WILL XIII. The Trantfer of Interest 193 XIV. Ye» or No aio XV. Lcadett and the Rank and File 134 PART VI. THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY XVI. The SdfOntered Man JSJ XVII. The SdKontained Community 363 XVIII. The Role of Force, Patronage, and Privilege 276 XIX. The Old Image in a New Form: GuUd Sodaliam 193 XX. A New Image jio X CONTENTS Ch.p«f PART VII. NEWSPAPERS p^ XXI. TTie Buying Public 317 XXII. The Conitant Reader jiS XXni. The Nature of New* 338 XXIV. Newt, Truth, and a Conduiion 358 PART Vin. ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE XXV. The Entering Wedge 369 XXVI. IntdUgence Work 379 XXVn. The Appeal to the Puhlie 39S XXVIIL Tlie Appeal to ReMOD 411 PART I INTRODUCTION Chapter I The World Outside and the Pictures IN Our Heads PUBLIC OPINION CHAPTER I. I^r^RODUCTION THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighring in behalf of the sanctity of treaties agunst those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies. But that plight was not so different from that of most of the population of Europe. They had been mistaken for six weeks, on the continent the interval may have been only six days or six hours. There was 4 PUBLIC OPINION an interval. There was a moment when the picture of Europe on which men were conducting their business as usual, did not in any way correspond to the Europe which was about to make a jumble of thur lives. There was a time for each man when he was still adjusted to an environment that no longer existed. All over the world as late as July 25th men were making goods that they would not be able to ship, buying goods they would not be able to import, careers were being planned, enterprises contemplated, hopes and expectations entertained, all in the belief that the world as known was the world as it was. Men were writing books describing that world. They trusted the picture in their heads. And then over four years later, on a Thursday morning, came the news of an armistice, and people gave vent to their unutterable relief that the slaughter was over. Yet in the five days before the real armistice came, though the end of the war had been celebrated, several thou- sand young men died on the battlefields. Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself. It is harder to remember that about the beliefs upon which we are now acting, but in respect to other peoples and other ages we flatter ourselves that it is easy to see when they were in deadly earnest about ludicrous pictures of the world. We in»st, because of our superior hindsight, that the world as they needed to know it, and the world as they did know it, were THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 5 often two quite contradictory things. We can see, too, that while they governed and fought, traded and reformed in the world as they imagined it to be, they produced results, or failed to produce any, in the world as it was. They started for the Indies and found America. They diagnosed evil and hanged old women. They thought they could grow rich by always selling and never buying. A caliph, obeying what he conceived to be the Will of Allah, burned the library at Alexandria. Writing about the year 389, St. Ambrose stated the case for the prisoner in Plato's cave who resolutely declines to turn his head. "To discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states. ' That He hung up the earth upon nothing ' (Job xxvi. 7). Why then argue whether He hung it up in air or upon the water, and raise a controversy as to how the thin air could sustain the earth; or why, if upon the waters, the earth does not go crashing down to the bottom? . . . Not because the earth is in the middle, as if suspended on even balance, but because the majesty of God constrains it by the law of His will, does it endure stable upon the unstable and the void. " ^ It does not help us in our hope of the life to come. It is enough to know what Scripture states. Why then argue? But a century and a half after St. Ambrose, opinion was still troubled, on this 1 by the problem of the antipodes. A monk I Tk* Mtdiavat Mind, by Henry ^IXLJCA it Tnrr, ^3r .IE 3 -te irrnrnt-s a ic -rsc: rant i -ico^sa. : -tiar ie -wmd :a x ir -pa :Tnm ^sat -c w-it a r 3 one r'jur a mr -t 31 j—^^ In -he 3=n .-Tien ^i'''^ 'aebrc ■itt ^ny Voah'i >ir: it -naarsatam. ji dte aorrit is * jnfc cnnicAl moontain srmmi vmcs -crawe "t^ ^q j^i ;Tuy)fi. When 'iie aan is ^emoi -ae "rwimu rtin -c 3 night. Tnc ikj is ^ued tj ttk adees ji' :ie okid- earrh. It ccnsisa ar imr irig h -rails -roici ai^H: 31 » c/-»ncave mcf, » ^har :ae su'-li is aic iwr or r^ nnivenc There is an oaaa an rtt ;oe- sm ot ::fc ^y, a>nAtituting ie "waarrs Taac jre lijoTc cfce firmament. " TTic space berwem rie ceestial ocean and rSe oltimatc root of die univo^e beiccgs co die hit^t. The space between the eardi and skr b inhal>ifed by theangds. FinallT, since Sc Paul said fhar all men are made to live upon the " face of die fHrth" h Pan V. ■ See Siockui Lewii^ Uaiit SirtiU THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 13 Rctures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is impossible for her to imagine three million men. No one, in fact, can imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as, say, two hundred divisions. But Miss Sherwin has no access to the order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she fastens upon JofFre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a personal duel. Perhaps if you could see what she sees with her mind's eye, the image in its composition might be not unlike an Eighteenth Century engraving of a great soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures winding off into the landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men oblivious to these expec- tations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a photc^apher's visit to Jotfre. The General was in his " middle class <^ce, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to write his signature. Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps on the walls. But since according to popular ideas it is not possible to think of a general without maps, a few were placed in portion for the picture, and removed soon after- wards." * The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts. I have seen a young girl, brought up in a Pennsylvania mining town, plunged suddenly from entire cheerfulness into a ' op. cii., p. 99. 14 PUBLIC OPINION paroxysm of grief when a gust of wind cracked the kitchen window-pane. For hours she was in- consolable, and to me incomprehensible. But when she was able to talk, it transpired that if a window- pane broke it meant that a close relative had died. She was, therefore, mourning for her father, who had frightened her into running away from home. The father was, of course, quite thoroughly alive as a telegraphic inquiry soon proved. But until the telegram came, the cracked glass was an authentic message to that girl. Why it was authentic only a prolonged investigation by a skilled psychiatrist could show. But even the most casual observer could see that the girl, enormously upset by her family troubles, had hallucinated a complete fiction out of one ex- ternal fact, a remembered superstition, and a tur- moil of remorse, and fear and love for her father. Abnormality in these instances is only a matter of degree. When an Attorney-General, who has been frightened by a bomb exploded on his doorstep, convinces himself by the reading of revoluHonary literature that a revolution is to happen on the first of May 1920, we recc^nize that much the same mechanism is at work. The war, of course, furnished many examples of this pattern : the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent Instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men re- spond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. Let him cast the THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 15 first stone who did not believe in the Russian army that passed through England in August, 1914, did not accept any tale of atrocities without direct proof, and never saw a plot, a traitor, or a spy where there was none. Let him cast a stone who never passed on as the real in«de truth what he had heard someone say who knew no more than he did. In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response. But because it is behavior, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates. If the be- havior is not a practical act, but what we call roughly thought and emotion, it may be a long time before there is any noticeable break in the texture of the fictitious world. But when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact results in action on things or other people, contradiction soon develops. Then comes the sen- sation of butting one's head agfunst a stone wall, of learning by experience, and witnessing Herbert Spencer's tragedy of the murder of a Beautiful Tlieory by a Gang of Brutal Facts, the discomfort in short of a maladjustment. For certainly, at the level of soda] life, what is called the adjustment of man to lus environment takes place through the me- dium of fictions. By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a represen- tation of the environment which is in lesser or greater deffct made by man himself. The range of fiction i6 PUBLIC OPINION extends all the way from complete hallucination to the scientists' perfectly self-conscious use of a sche- matic model, or his decision that for his pardcular problem accuracy beyond a certain numbu* of ded- mal places is not important. A work of fiction may have almost any degree of fidelity, and so long as the degree of fidelity can be taken into account, fiction is . not misleading. In fact, human culture is very > largely the selection, the rearrangement, the tracing of patterns upon, and the stylizing of, what William James called "the random irradiations and resettle- ments of our ideas. " ' The alternative to the ■■- use of fictions is direct exposure to the ebb and ''^ flow of sensation. That is not a real alternative, for 4/fk however refreshing it is to see at times with a per- ^y^ fectly innocent eye, innocence itself is not wisdom,^ though a source and corrective of wisdom. For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combi- nations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Thdr persistent difiiculty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else's need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia. 4 The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the triangular relationship between the ' Jamet, PHneiflti <^ Pfythology, Vol II, p. 638. N THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 17 scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and - the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action. It is like a play su^ested to the actors by their own experience, in which the plot is transacted in the real lives of the actors, and not merely in their stage parts. The moving picture often emphasizes with great skill this double drama of interior motive and external behavior. Two men are quarreling, ostensibly about some money, but their passion is inexplicable. Then the picture fades out and what one or the other of the two men sees with his mind's eye is reenacted. Across the table 'rfiey were quarreling about money. In memory they are back in their youth when the girl jilted him for the other man. The exterior drama is explained: the hero is not greedy; the hero is in love. A scene not so different was played in the United States Senate. At breakfast on the morning of September 29, 1919, some of the Senators read a news dispatch in the Washington Post about the landing of American marines on the Dalmatian coast. The newspaper sud: FACTS NOW ESTABLISHED "The following important facts appear already estab' lisked. The orders to Rear Admiral Andrews command- ing the American naval forces in the Adriatic, came from the British Admiralty via the War Council and Rear Admiral Knapps in London. Tlie approval or dis- approval of the American Navy Department was not i8 PUBLIC OPINION WITHOUT DANIELS' KNOWLEDGE " Mr. Daniels was admittedly placed in a peculiar posi- tion when cables reached here stating that the forces over which he is presumed to have exclusive control were carry- ing on what amounted to naval warfare ^thout his knowl- edge. It was fully realized that the British Admiralty might desire to issue orders to Rear Admiral Andrews to act on behalf of Great Britain and her Allies, because the situation required sacrifice on the part of some narion if D'Annunzio's followers were to be held in check. " It was further realized that under the new league of nations plan foreigners would be in a position to direct American Naval forces in emergencies with or without the consent of the American Navy Department. . . ." etc. (Italics mine). TKe first Senator to comment is Mr. Knox of Pennsylvania. Indignantly he demands investiga^ tion. In Mr. Brandegee of Connecticut, who spoke next, indignation has already stimulated credulity. Where Mr. Knox indignantly wishes to know if the report is true, Mr. Brandegee, a half a minute later, would like to know what would have happened if marines had been killed. Mr. Knox, interested in the question, forgets that he asked for an inquiry, and re- plies. If Ametican marines had been killed, it would be war. The mood of the debate is still conditional. Debate proceeds. Mr. McCormick of Illinois reminds the Senate that the Wilson administration is prone to the wa^ng of small unauthorized wars. He repeats Theodore Roosevelt's quip about "waging peace." More debate. Mr. Brandegee notes that the marines THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 19 acted "under orders of a Supreme Council sitting somewhere," but he cannot recall who represents the United States on that body. The Supreme Council is unknown to the ConstituOon of the United States. Therefore Mr. New of Indiana submits a resolution calling for the fiacts. So far the Senators still realize vaguely that they are discussng a rumor. Being lawyers they still remember some of the forms of evidence. But as red-blooded men they already experience all the indignation which is appropriate to the fact that American marines have been ordered into war by a fordgn government and without the consent of Con- gress. Emotionally they want to believe it, because they are Republicans fighting the Le^ue of Nations. This arouses the Democratic leader, Mr. Hitchcock of Nebraska. He defends the Supreme Council: it was acring under the war powers. Peace has not yet been concluded because the Republicans are delaying it. Therefore the action was necessary and l^al. Both »des now assume that the report is true, and the conclusions they draw are the conclusions of their partisanship. Yet this extraordinary assump- tion is in a debate over a resolution to investigate the truth of the assumption. It reveals how difficult it is, even for trained lawyers, to suspend response until the returns are in. The response is instantaneous. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed. A few days later an official report showed that the marines were not landed by order of the British Govermnent or of the Supreme Council. They had 20 PUBLIC OPINION not been fighting the Italians. They had been landed at the request of the Italian Government to protect Italians, and the American commander had been officially thanked by the Italian authorities. The marines were not at war with Italy. They had acted according to an established international practice which had nothing to do with the League of Nations. The scene of action was the Adriatic. The picture of that scene in the Senators' heads at Washington was furnished, in this case probably with intent to deceive, by a man who cared nothing about the Adriatic, but much about defeating the League. To this jMcture the Senate responded by a strengthen- ing of its partisan differences over the League. 5 Whether in this particular case the Senate was above or below its normal standard, it is not neces- sary to decide. Nor whether the Senate compares favorably with the House, or with other parlia- ments. At the moment, I should like to think only about the world-wide spectacle of men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli from their pseudo-environments. For when full allowance has been made for deliberate fraud, political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that it is acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately^ they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones. THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS ai It is to these special worlds, it is to these private or group, or class, or provincial, or occupational, or national, or sectarian artifacts, that the political adjustment of mankind in the Great Society takes place. Their variety and complication are impossible to describe. Yet these fictions determine a very great part of men's political behavior. We must think of perhaps fifty sovereign parliaments consis- ting of at least a hundred l^slative bodies. With them belong at least fifty hierarchies of provincial and municipal assemblies, which with their executive, ad- ministrative and l^slative organs, constitute formal authority on earth. But that does not begin to reveal the compleMty of political life. For in each of these innumerable centers of authority there are parties, and these parties are themselves hierarchies with their roots in classes, sections, cliques and clans; and within these are the individual politicians, each the personal center of a web of connection and mem- ory and fear and hope. Somehow or other, for reasons often necessarily obscure, as the result of domination or compromise or a logroll, there emerge from these political bodies commands, which set armies in motion or make peace, conscript life, tax, e^dle, imprison, protect prc^rty or confiscate it, encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another, facilitate immi- gration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor it, establish schools, build navies, proclaim "polides," and "destiny," raise economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring one people under the rule of another, or favor one class as against 22 PUBLIC OPINION another. For each of these decisions some view of the facts is taken to be conclusive, some view of the circumstances is accepted as the basis of inference and as the stimulus of feeling. What view of the facts, and why that one? And yet even this does not b^n to exhaust the real complexity. The formal political structure exists in a social environment, where there are innumerable large and small corporations and institutions, volun- tary and semi-voluntary associations, national, pro- vincial, urban and neighborhood groupings, which often as not make the decision that the political body re^sters. On what are these decisions based? "Modern society" says Mr. Chesterton, "is in- trinsically insecure because it is based on the notion that all men will do the same thing for different reasons .... And as within the head of any convict may be the hell of a quite solitary crime, so in the house or under the hat of any suburban clerk may be the limbo of a quite separate philosophy. The first man may be a complete Materialist and feel his own body as a horrible machine manufacturing his own mind. He may listen to his thoughts as to the dull ticking of a clock. The man next door may be a Christian Scientist and regard his own body as some- how rather less substantial than his own shadow. He may come almost to regard his own arms and legs as delusions like moving serpents in the dream of delirium tremens. The third man in the street may not be a Christian Scientist but, on the contrary, a Christian. He may live in a fairy tale as his ndgh- bors would say; a secret but solid f^ry tale full of the THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 23 faces and presences of unearthly friends. The fourth man may be a theosophist, and only too probably a v^etarian; and I do not see why I should not gratify myself with the fancy that the fifth man is a devil worshiper. . . . Now whether or not this sort of variety is valuable, this sort of unity is shaky. To expect that all men for all time will go on thinking different things, and yet doing the same things, is a doubtful speculation. It is not founding society on a communion, or even on a convention, but rather on a coincidence. Four men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But to expect this to happen night after night is unwise. . . ." * For the four men at the lamp post substitute the governments, the parries, the corporations, the socie- ties, the social sets, the trades and professions, uni- versiries, sects, and narionalities of the world. Think of the legislator voting a statute that will affect distant peoples, a statesman coming to a decision. Think of the Peace Conference reconsrituting the frontiers of Europe, an ambassador in a foreign country trying to discern the intentions of his own government and of the foreign government, a pro- moter working a concession in a backward country, an editor demanding a war, a clergyman calling on ' G. K. GMtterton, "The Mad Hatter and the Sane HouKholdcr," Fa*ily Fair, January, 193I1 p. 54. 34 PUBLIC OPINION the police to r^;uUte amusement, a club lounging- room making up its mind about a strike, a sewing circle preparing to r^ulate the schools, nine judges deciding whether a l^slature in Or^;on may fix the working hours of women, a cabinet meeting to decide on the recc^ition of a government, a party con- vention choo^ng a candidate and writing a platform, twenty-seven million voters casting their ballots, an Irishman in Cork thinking about an Irishman in Belfast, a Third International planning to recon- struct the whole of human society, a board of directors confronted with a set of their employees* demands, a boy choosing a career, a merchant esti- mating supply and demand for the coming season, a speculator predicting the course of the market, a banker deciding whether to put credit behind a new enterprise, the advertiser, the reader of advertis- ments. . . .Thinkof the different sorts of Americans thinking about their notions of "The British Elmpire" or "France" or "Russia" or "Mexico." It is not so different from Mr. Chesterton's four men at the pea green lamp post. 6 And so before we involve ourselves in the jungle of obscurities about the innate differences of men, we shall do well to fix our attention upon the extra- ordinary differences in what men know of the world.' I do not doubt that there are important biologjcal differences. Since man is an animal it would be strange if there were not. But as rational b^ngs it t C}. Wallu, Ow Sotial Btrita^, m-Tl*t '*t- THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 25 is worse than shallow to generalize at all about comparative behavior until there is a measurable similarity between the environments to which be- havior is a response. The pragmaric value of this idea is that it intro- duces a much needed refinement into the ancient con- troversy about nature and nurture, innate quality and environment. For the pseudo-environment is a hybrid compoimded of "human nature" and "conditions." To my mind it shows the uselessness of pontificating about what man is and always will be from what we observe man to be doing, or about what are the necessary conditions of society. For we do not know how men would behave in response to the facts of the Great Society. All that we really know is how they behave in response to what can feirly be called a most inadequate picture of the Great Society. No conclusion about man or the Great Society can honestly be made on evidence like that. TTiis, then, will be the clue to our inquiry. We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon m\\ go in quest of it. If someone di^ up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he had found gold. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not a6 PUBLIC OPINION what they will achie determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort, their feehngs, their hopes, not their accompHshjnents and results. The very men who most loudly proclaim their "materialism" and their contempt for "ideologues," the Marxian commun- ists, place their entire hope on what ? On the forma- tion by propaganda of a class-conscious group. But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another? What is class conscious- ness but a way of realizing the world? National consciousness but another way? And Professor Gid- dings' consciousness of kind, but a process of believ- ing that we recognize among the multitude certain ones marked as our kind? Try to explain social life as the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. You will soon be saying that the hedonist begs the question, for even suppos- ing that man does pursue these ends, the crucial problem of why he thinks one course rather than another likely to produce pleasure, is untouched. Does the guidance of man's conscience explain ? How then does he happen to have the particular con- science which he has? The theory of economic self- interest? But how do men come to conceive their interest in one way rather than another? The desire for security, or prestige, or domination, or what is vaguely called self-realization? How do men con- ceive their security, what do they consider prestige, how do they figure out the means of domination, or what is the notion of self which they wish to realize? I PI leasure, pam, conscience, acqui THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 27 enhancement, mastery, are undoubtedly names for some of the ways people act. There may be instinc- tive dispositions which work toward such ends. But no statement of the end, or any description of the tendencies to seek it, can explain the behavior which results. The very fact that men theorize at all is proof that their pseudo-environments, their interior representations of the world, are a determining element in thought, feeling, and action. For if the connection between reality and human response were direct and immediate, rather than indirect and in- ferred, indecision and failure would be unknown, and Of each of us fitted as snugly into the world as the child in the womb), Mr. Bernard Shaw would not hare been able to say that except for the first nine months of its existence no human being manages its affairs as well as a plant. The chief difficulty in adapting the psychoanalytic scheme to political thought arises in this connection. The Freudians are concerned with the maladjust- ment of distinct individuals to other individuals and to concrete circumstances. They have assumed that if internal derangements could be straightened out, there would be little or no confusion about what is the obviously normal relationship. But public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public opinions refer are known only as opinions. The psychoanalyst, on the other hand, almost always assumes that the environ- ment is knowable, and if not knowable then at least bearable, to any unclouded intelligence. This assump- 28 PUBLIC OPINION tion of his is the problem of public opinion. Instead of taking for granted an environment that is readily known, the social analyst is most concerned in study- ing how the latter political environment is conceived, and how it can be conceived more successfully. The psychoanalyst examines the adjustment to an X, called by him the environment; the social analyst examines the X, called by him the pseudo-environ- ment. He is, of course, permanently and constantly in debt to the new psychology, not only because when rightly applied it so gready helps people to stand on their own feet, come what may, but because the study of dreams, fantasy and rationalization has thrown light on how the pseudo-environment is put Wither. But he cannot assume as his criterion either what is called a "normal biological career" ' within the existing social order, or a career "freed from religous suppression and dogmatic conven- rions" outside.* What for a sociologist is a normal social career? Or one freed from suppressions and conventions? Conservative critics do, to be sure, assume the first, and romantic ones the second. But in assuming them they are taking the whole world for granted. They are saying in effect either that society is the sort of thing which corresponds to their idea of what is normal, or the sort of thing which corresponds to their idea of what is free. Both ideas are merely public opinions, and while the psycho- analyst as physician may perhaps assume them, the sociologist may not take the products of existing ■ Edmnl J. Konpf, Piyckopatkolofyt P- "^ * ^d., p. 151. THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 29 public opinion as criteria by which to study public ofnnion. The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristo- telian god contemplating all existence at one glance. He is the creature of an evolurion who can just about span a suiEcient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness. Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense masses and in- finitesmal ones, of counting and separating more items than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach. Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesring to us, we call roughly public affairs. The pictures inside the heads of these human bangs, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. And so in the chapters which follow we shall inquire JO PUBLIC OPINION first into some of the reasons why the picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside. Under this heading we shall consider first the chief factors which limit their access to the facts. They are the artificial censorships, the limita- tions of social contact, the comparatively meager time avfulable in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a smajl vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives. The analysis then turns from these more or less external limitations to the question of how this trickle of messages from the outside is affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them out, and in th«r turn powerfully direct the play of our attention, and our vision itself. From this it proceeds to examine how in the individual person the limited messages from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified with his own interests as he feels and con- ceives them. In the succeeding sections it examines how opinions are crystallized into what is called Public Opinion, how a National Will, a Group Mind, a Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to callit, is formed. The first five parts constitute the descriprive sec- tion of the book. There follows an analysis of the traditional democratic theory of public opinion. The substance of the argument is that democracy in its THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS 31 original form never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside people's heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside. And then, because the democratic theory is under criticism by socialist thinkers, there' follows an examination of the most advanced and coherent of these cridcisms, as made by the English Guild Social- ists. My purpose here is to find out whether these re- formers take into account the main difficulties of pub- lic opinion. My conclusion is that they ignore the difficulties, as completely as did the original demo- crats, because they, too, assume, and in a much more complicated civilization, that somehow mysteriously there exists in the hearts of men a knowledge of the world beyond their reach. I argue that representative government, ather in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfiilly, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert oi^nizarion for maldng the unseen facts in- telligible to those who have to make the decisions. I attempt, therefore, to argue that the serious ac- ceptance of the principle that personal representa- tion must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory de- centralization, and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs. It is argued that the problem of the press is confused because the critics and the apologists expect the press to realize this fiction, expect it to make up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democ- 32 PUBLIC OPINION racy, and that the readers expect this miracle to be performed at no cost or trouble to themselves. The newspapers are regarded by democrats as a panacea for their own defects, whereas analyws of the nature of news and of the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, i;i greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opin- ion. My conclusion is that public opinions must be organizai for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case today. This ot^anization I conceive to be in the first instance the task of a political science that has won its proper place as formulator, in advance of real decision, instead of apologist, critic, or reporter after the decision has been made. I try to indicate that the perplexities of government and industry are conspiring to give political science this enormous opportunity to enrich itself and to serve the public. And, of course, I hope that these pages will help a few people to realize that opportxmity more vividly, and therefore to pursue it more consciously. PART n APPROACHES TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE Chaptek 2. Censorship and Privacy " 3. Contact and Opportunity " 4. Time and Attention " 5. Speed, Words, and Clearness CHAPTER II CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY The picture of a general presiding over an editorial conference at the most terrible hour of one of the great batdes of history seems more like a scene from The Chocolate Soldier than a page from life. Yet we know at first hand from the officer who edited the French communique that these conferences were a regular part of the business of war; that in the worst moment of Verdun, General Jofire and his cabinet met and argued over the nouns, adjectives, and verbs that were to be prints in the newspapers the next moming. "The evening communique of the twenty-third (February 1916)" says M. de Pierrefeu,^ "was edited in a dramatic atmosphere. M. Berthelot, of the Prime Minister's office, had just telephonol by order of the minister asking General Pell£ to strength- en the report and to emphasize the proportions of the enemy's attack. It was necessary to prepare the public for the worst outcome in case the affair turned into a catastrophe. This anxiety showed clearly that neither at G. H. Q. nor at the Ministry of War had the Government found reason for con- fidence. As M. Berthelot spoke, General PelU made ' G. Q. C, pp. 11&-119. 36 PUBLIC OPINION notes. He handed me the paper on which he had written the Government's wishes, t<^ther with the order of the day issued by General von Deimling and found on some prisoners, in which it was stated that this attack was the supreme offensive to secure peace. Skilfully used, all this was to demonstrate that Germany was letting loose a gigantic effort, an effort without precedent, and that from its success she hoped for die end of the war. The logic of this was that nobody need be surprised at our with- drawal. When, a half hour later, I went down with my manuscript, I found gathered together in Colonel Claudel's office, he being away, the major-general. General Janin, Colonel Dupont, and Lieutenant- Colonel Renouard. Fearing that I would not succeed io giving the desired impression. General Pell£ had himself prepared a proposed communique. I read what I had just done. It was found to be too moderate. General PelU's, on the other hand, seemed too alarming. I had purposely omitted von Deimling's order of the day. To put it into the communique would he to break with the formula to which the public was accustomed, would be to trans- form it into a kind of pleading. It would seem to say: 'How do you suppose we can resist?* There was reason to fear that the public would be distracted by this change of tone and would believe that everything was lost. I explained my reasons and su^ested giving Deimling's text to the newspapers in the form of a separate note. "Opinion being divided, General Pell£ went to ask General de Castlenau to come and decide finally. CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY 37 The General arrived smiling, quiet and good humored, sud a few pleasant words about this new kind of literary council of war, and looked at the texts. He chose the simpler one, gave more weight to the first phrase, inserted the words 'as had been antici- pated,' which supply a reassuring quality, and was flatly against inserting von Deimling's order, but was for transmitting it to the press in a special note ..." General JofFre that evening read the communique carefully and approved it. Within a few hours those two or three hundred words would be read all over the world. They would paint a picture in men's minds of what was happening on the slopes of Verdun, and in front of that picture people would take heart or despair. The shopkeeper in Brest, the peasant in Lorraine, the deputy in the Palais Bourbon, the editor in Amsterdam or Minnea- polis had to be kept in hope, and yet prepared to accept possible defeat without yielding to panic. They are told, therefore, that the loss of ground is no surprise to the French Command. They are taught to regard the affair as serious, but not strange. Now, as a matter of fact, the French General Staff was not fully prepared for the German offensive. Supporting trenches had not been dug, alternarive roads had not been built, barbed wire was lacking. But to confess that would have aroused im- ages in the heads of civilians that might well have turned a reverse into a disaster. The High Command could be disappointed, and yet pull itself together; the people at home and abroad, full of uncertainties, and with none of the professional man's singleness of 38 PUBLIC OPINION purpose, might on the basis of a complete story have lost sight of the war in a mel^ of faction and counter- faction about the competence of the officers. In- stead> therefore, of letting the public act on all the facts which the generals knew, the authorities pre- sented only certain facts, and these only in such a way' as would be most likely to steady the people. In this case the men who arranged the pseudo- environment knew what the real one was. But a few days later an incident occurred about which the French Staff did not know the truth. The Germans announced ' that on the previous afternoon they had taken Fort Douaumont by assault. At French headquarters in Chantilly no one could understand this news. For on the morning of the twenty-fifth, after the engagement of the XXth corps, the battle had taken a turn for the better. Reports from the front said nothing about Douaumont. But inquiry showed that the German report was true, though no one as yet knew how the fort had been taken. In the meantime, the German communique was being flashed around the world, and the French had to say something. So headquarters explained. "In the midst of total ignorance at Chantilly about the way the attack had taken place, we imagined, in the evening communique of the 26th, a plan of the attack which certainly had a thousand to one chance of being true." The communique of this imaginary battle read: "A bitter struggle is taking place around Fort de Douau- mont which is an advanced post of the old defensive 01^ 1 On February 261 1916. Pierrefeu, C. Q. C, pp. 133 li ttj. CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY 39 ganization of Verdun. The position taken this morning by the enemy, after several unsuccessful assaults that cost him very heavy losses, has been reached again and passed by our tioops whom the enemy has not been able to drive back." » What had actually happened differed from both the French and German accounts. While changing troops in the line, the position had somehow been forgotten in a confusion of orders. Only a battery commander and a few men remained in the fort. Some German soldiers, seeing the door open, had crawled into the fort, and taken everyone inside prisoner. A litde later the French who were on the slopes of the hill were horrified at being shot at from the fort. There had been no batde at Douaumont and no losses. Nor had the French troops advanced beyond it as the communiqufe seemed to say. They were beyond it on either side, to be sure, but the fort was in enemy hands. Yet from the communique everyone believed that the fort was half surrounded. The words did not expltcidy say so, but "the press, as usual, forced the pace." Military writers concluded that the Germans would soon have to surrender. In a few days they began to ask themselves why the garrison, ' Thii ii my own tranalation: the EoEliih translation from London publiihed in the New York Timei of Sunday, Feb. 27, is as followt: London, Feb. i£ (1916). A funoui ictuggle hu b Rou, SeeitU Piyeholety, Ch. IX, X, XL CONTACT AND OPPORTUNITY 55 set are public matters, and public matters are its pri- vate, often its family affairs. The conSnements of Margot Asquith like the confinements of royalty are, as the philosophers say, in much the same universe of discourse as a tariff bill or a parliamentary debate. There are large areas of governments in which this social set is not interested, and in America, at least, it has exercised OTily a fluctuating control over the national government. But its power in foreign af- fairs is always very great, and in war time its prestige is enormously enhanced. That is natural enough because these cosmopolitans have a contact with the outer world that most people do not possess. They have dined with each other in the capitals, and their sense of national honoris no mere abstraction; it is a concrete experience of being snubbed or approved by their friends. To Dr. Kenntcott of Gopher Prairie it matters mighty litde what Winston thinks and a great deal what Ezra Stowbody thinks, but to Mrs. Mingott with a daughter married to the Earl of Swithin it matters a lot when she visits her daughter, or entertains Winston himself. Dr. Kennicott and Mrs. Mingott are both socially sensitive, but Mrs. Mingott is sensitive to a social set that governs the world, while Dr. Kennicott's social set governs only in Gopher Prune. But in matters that effect the larger relarionships of the Great Society, Dr. Kenni- cott will often be found holding what he thinks is purely his own opinion, though, as a matter of fact, it has trickled down to Gopher Prairie from High Society, transmuted on its passage through the pro- vincial social sets. PUBLIC OPINION It is no part of our inquiry to attempt an account of the social tissue. We need only fix in mind how big is the part played by the sodal set in our spirit- ual contact with the worlds how it tends to fix what is admissible, and to determine how it shall be judged. Affairs within its immediate competence each set more or less determines for itself. Above all it determines the detailed administration of the judg- ment. But the judgment itself is formed on pat- terns ' that may be inherited from the past, trans- mitted or imitated from other social sets. The high- est social set consists of those who embody the leader- ship of the Great Sodety. As against almost every other social set where the bulk of the opinions are first hand only about local affairs, in this Highest Society the big decisions of war and peace, of social strategy and the ultimate distribution of political power, are intimate experiences within a circle of what, potentially at least, are personal acquaintances. Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can be seen, heard, read, and expe- rienced, as well as what it is permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought. Yet in truly effective thinking the prime neces^ty is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted. Man's history being what it is, political opinion on the scale of the Great Society requires an amoimt of selfless equanimity rarely attainable by any one for >Q.?mUL CONTACT AND OPPORTUNITY S7 any length of time. We are concerned in public af- lajrs, but immersed in our private ones. The time and attention are limited that we can spare for the labor of not taking opinions for granted, and we are subject to constant interruption. CHAPTER IV TIME AND ATTENTION Naturally it is possible to make a rough estimate only of the amount of attention people give each day to informing themselves about public affairs. Yet it is interesting that three estimates that I have ex- amined agree tolerably well, though they were made at different times, in different places, and by differ- ent methods.' A questionaire was sent by Hotchldss and Franken to 1761 men and women college students in New York City, and answers came from all but a few. Scott used a questionaire on four thousand promi- nent business and professional men In Chicago and received replies from twenty-three hundred. Be- tween seventy and seventy-five percent of all those who replied to ather inquiry thought they spent a quarter of an hour a day reading newspapers. Only four percent of the Chicago group guessed at less than this and twenty-five percent guessed at more. Among the New Yorkers a little over eight percent 'July, 1900. D. F. Wilccw, TU AmMcan Nrvispaptr: A Study in Soaal Ptyehotogy, Annala of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. xvi, p. 56. (The ilatiirical cables are reproduced in James Edward Rogers', The jimerUan Niaspaprr.) 1916 (?) W. D. Scon. The Piyckohty of Adernitint, pp. 116-148. See alio Henry Foster Adams, AdBirliiing aid its Alenlal IJms, Ch. Vi. ■ " ■ f Collrge Studtnti, by Prof. George 'ranken, published by the Associa- iS East j6tb Street, New York TIME AND ATTENTION S9 ^ured thdr newspaper reading at less than fifteen minutes, and seventeen and a half at more. Very few people have an accurate idea of fifteen minutes, so the figures are not to be taken literally. Moreover, business men, professional people, and collie students are most of them liable to a curious little bias against appealing to spend too much time over the newspapers, and perhaps also to a faint suspicion of a desire to be known as rapid readers. All that the figures can justly be taken to mean is that over three quarters of those in the selected groups rate rather low the attention they give to printed news of the outer world. These time estimates are fairly well confirmed by a test which is less subjective. Scott asked his Chi- cagoans how many papers they read each day, and was told that 14 percent read but one paper two papers three papers four papers five papers six papers all the papers (eight at the time of this inquiry). The two- and three-paper readers are sixty-seven percent, which comes fairly close to the seventy-one percent in Scott's group who rate themselves at fifteen minutes a day. The omnivorous readers of from four to eight papers coincide roughly mth the twenty-five percent who rated themselves at more than fifteen minutes. PUBLIC OPINION It is still more difficult to guess how the time is distributed. The coU^ students were asked to name "the five features which interest you most." Just under twenty percent voted for "general news," just under fifteen for editorials, just under twelve for "poliucs," a little over eight for finance, not two years after the armistice a little over six for foreign news, three and a half for local, nearly three for business, and a quarter of one percent for news about "labor." A scattering said they were most interested in sports, special articles, the theatre, advertisements, cartoons, book reviews, "accuracy," music, "ethical tone," society, brevity, art, stories, shipping, school news, "current news," print. Dis- r^arding these, about sixty-seven and a half per- cent picked as the most interesting features news and opinion that dealt with public affairs. This was a mixed college group. The girls pro- fessed greater interest than the boys in general news, foreign news, local news, politics, editorials, the theatre, music, art, stories, cartoons, advertisements, and " ethical tone." The boys on the other hand were more absorbed in finance, sports, business page, "accuracy" and "brevity." These discriminations correspond a little too closely with the ideals of what is cultured and moral, manly and decisive, not to make one suspect the utter objectivity of the replies. Yet they agree fairly well with the replies of Scott's Chicago business and profes^onal men. They were asked, not what features interested them most, but why they preferred one newspaper to another. TIME AND ATTENTION 6i Nearly seventy-one percent based their conscious preference on local news (17.8%), or political (15.8%) or financial (11.3%), or foreign (^.5%), or general (7-2%), or editorials (9%). The other thirty per- cent decided on grounds not connected with public affairs. They ranged from not quite seven who dcdded for ethical tone, down to one twentieth of one percent who cared most about humor. How do these preferences correspond with the space ^ven by newspapers to various subjects? Unfortunately there are no data collected on this point for the newspapers read by the Chicago and New York groups at the rime the quesdonaires were made. But there is an interesting analysis made over twenty years ago by Wilcox. He studied one hundred and ten newspapers in fourteen large cities, and classified the subject matter of over nine thou- sand columns. Averaged for the whole country the various news- paper matter was found to fill: (a) W»Newi 17.9 Cb) General ' P^^ II. ntiutratmu III. litentim IV. Opiuon V. AdratiMaieiitt 31.1 In order to bring this table into a fair comparison, it is necessary to exclude the space ^ven to advertise- 62 PUBLIC OPINION ments, and recompute the percentages. For the ad- vertisements occupied only an infinitesmal part of the conscious preference of the Chicago group or the college group. I think this is justifiable for our purposes because the press prints what advertise- ments it can get,' whereas the rest of the paper is designed to the taste of its readers. The table would then read : I. New* 81.4+ WarNew* General New* 36.4- Foreign 1.8- „ „j. Political 9- 4+ J'°+ Crime 4.6- Mia'c 16.3+ II. niuitration 4.6- Special " |Bu«ne*.u.i- m. Litenture [V. Opinion 3-5 + 10. s- Editorial* Letter. IM In this revised table if you add up the items which may be supposed to deal with public affairs, that is to say war, foreign, political, miscellaneous, business news, and opinion, you find a total of 76.5% of the edited space devoted in 1900 to the 70.6% of reasons given by Chicago business men in 1916 for preferring a particular newspaper, and to the five features which most interested 67.5% of the New York College students in 1920. This would seem to show that the tastes of busi- ness men and college students in big cities to-day still correspond more or less to the averaged judg- ments of newspaper editors in big cities twenty II objectionable, and thoae which, in TIME AND ATTENTION 63 years ago. Since that time the proportion of fea- tures to news has undoubtedly increased, and so has the circulation and the size of newspapers. There- fore, if to-day you could secure accurate replies from more typical groups than college students or business and professional men, you would expect to find a smaller percentage of time devoted to public afF^rs, as well as a smaller percentage of space. On the other hand you would expect to find that the average man spends more than ^e quarter of an hour on his newspaper^ and that while the percentage of space given to public affairs is less than twenty years ago the net amount is greater. No elaborate deductions are to be drawn from these figures. They help merely to make somewhat more concrete our notions of the effort that goes day by day into acquiring the data of our opinions. The newspapers are, of course, not the only means, but they are certainly the principal ones. Maga^nes, the public forum, the chautauqua, the church, political gatherings, trade union meerings, women's clubs, and news serials in the moving picture houses su|>> plement the press. But taking it all at the most favorable estimate, the time each day is small when any of us is directly exposed to information from our unseen environment. CHAPTER V SPEED. WORDS, AND CLEARNESS The unseen environment is reported to us chiefly by words. These words are transmitted by wire or radio from the reporters to the editors who fit them into print. Telegraphy is expensive, and the facil- ities are often limited. Press service news is, there, fore, usually coded. Thus a dispatch which reads, — "Washington, D. C. June i. — ^The United States regards the question of German shipping seized in this country at the outbreak of hostilities as a closed incident," may pass over the wires in the following form: "Washn I. The Uni Stas rgds tq of Ger spg seized in ts cou at t outbic o box as a clod incident." > A news item saying; "Berfin, June i. Chancellor Wirth told the Reichstag to-day in outlining the Government's program that 'res- toration and recondliation would be the keynote of the new Government's policy.' He added that the Cabinet was dctennined disarmament should be carried out loy- ally and that disarmament would not be the occasion of the imposition of further penalties by the Allies." may be cabled in this form: 1 Phillip's Code. 64 SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS 65 "Berlin l. Chancellor Winh told t Reichstag tdy in outlining the gvts pgn tt qn restoration & reconciliadon wd b the keynote f new gvts policy, qj He added ttt cabinet ws dtmd disarmament sd b carried out loyally & tt disarmament wd n b. the ocan f imposition of further penalties hi t alis." In this second item the substance has been culled from a long speech in a foreign tongue, translated, coded, and then decoded. The operators who re- ceive the messages transcribe them as they go along, and I am told that a good operator can write fifteen thousand or even more words per eight hour day, with a half an hour out for lunch and two ten min- ute periods for rest. a A few words must often stand for a whole succes- sion of acts, thoughts, feelings and consequences. We read: "Washington, Dec. 23 — ^A statement charging Japanese militaiy authorities with deeds more 'frightful and bar- barous' than anything ever alleged to have occurred in Belgium during the war was issued here to-day by the Korean Commission, based, the Commission said, on authentic reporu received by it from Manchuria." Here eyewitnesses, their accuracy unknown, report to the makers of 'authentic reports;' they in turn transmit these to a commission five thousand miles away. It prepares a statement, probably much too long for publication, from which a correspondent culls an item of print three and a half inches long. The meaning has to be telescoped in such a way as to 66 PUBLIC OPINION permit the reader to judge how much weight to give to the news. It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the elements of truth that com- plete justice would demand into a hundred word account of what had happened in Korea during the course of several months. For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's. Theoretically, if each fact and each relation had a name that was unique, and if everyone had agreed on the names, it would be possible to communicate without misunderstanding. In the exact sciences there is an approach to this ideal, and that is part of the reason why of all forms of world-wide cooperation, scientific inquiry is the most effective. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.' The journalist ad- dressing half a million readers of whom he has only a dim picture, the speaker whose words are flashed to remote villages and overseas, cannot hope that a few phrases will carry the whole burden of their mean- ing. "The words of Lloyd George, badly under- stood and badly transmitted," said M. Briand to the Chamber of Deputies,* "seemed to give the Pan- ' Cited by White, Afiehanims of Ckaracur Formatiim. ■ Spedal Cable to Tkt Nta York Tinuj, May 15, 1911, by Edwin L Jama. SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS 67 Germanists the idea that the time had come to start something. " A British Prime Minister, speaking in English to the whole attentive world, speaks his own meaning in his own words to all kinds of people who will SM thar meaning in those words. No matter how rich or subde — or rather the more rich and the more subde that which he has to say, the more his meaning will suiFer as it is sluiced into standard speech and then distributed again among alien minds.' Millions of those who are watching him can read hardly at all. Millions more can read the words but the following it "The Franco-Euriith Exchange in Words. "Id quarten wdfacquainted with French wayi and character I find » tendency to tbutk that undue sensibility hat been shown by our preti and puUic opinion in the lively and at timei intemperate language of the French pre** through the preieat crisis. The point was put to me by a wdl-infonned neutral observer in the following manner. "Words, like money, are tokens of value. They represent meaning, therefore, and juit as money, their representative vaJue ^oes up ana down. The French word 'etonnant' was used by Bossuet with a terrible weigjit of meaning which it has lost to-day. A similar thing can be obtcrved with the Endish word 'awful.' Some nations constitutionally tend to understate, others to overstate. What the British Tommy called to unltealthy place could onlv be described by an Italian soldier by meant of a nch vocabulary aiaed with an exuberant mimicry. Nariona that understate keep their word-currency sound. Nationt that overstate tuffet from inflation in their language. "Expretdont tuch at 'a distinguished scholar,' 'a clever writer,' must be translated into French as 'a ^rea( savant,' 'an exquisite master' It is a mere matter of exchange, just as in France one pound pays 46 francs, and yet one knows that that does not increase its value at home. Englishmen reading the French press should endeavour to work out a mental operation similar to that of the banket who puu back francs into pounds, and not fbtget in so doing that while in normal rimes the change was IJ it is now 46 on account of (he war. For there is a war fluctuation on word exchanges at well as on money exchanges. "The ugameat, one ho|>es, works both ways, and Frenchmen do not fail to rea&c that there u as much value behind English reucence at b^ind thdi own (xubcnoce of apiestion." 68 PUBLIC OPINION cannot understand them. Of those who can both read and understand, a good three-quarters we may assume have some part of half an hour a day to spare for the subject. To them the words so acquired are the cue for a whole train of ideas on which ultimately a vote of untold consequences may be based. Necessarily the ideas which we allow the words we read to evoke form the biggest part of the original data of our o[»nions. The world is vast, the situations that concern us are intricate^ the messages are few, the biggest part of opinion must be constructed in the imagination. When we use the word "Mexico" what picture does it evoke in a resident of New York? Likely as not, it is some composite of sand, cactus, oil wells, greasers, rum-drinking Indians, testy old cavaliers flourishing whiskers and sovereignty, or perhaps an idyllic peasantry a la Jean Jacques, assailed by the prospect of smoky industrialism, and fighting for the Rights of Man. What does the word "Japan" evoke? Is it a vague horde of slant-eyed yellow men, surrounded by Yellow Perils, picture brides, fans, Samurai, banz^s, art, and cherry blossoms? Or the word "alien?" According to a group of New Eng- land college students, writing in the year 1920, an alien was the following: ' "A person hostile to this country." "A person against the government." "A person who is on the opposite side." "A native of an unfriendly country." "A foreigner at war." ■ Tkt Ntm RepubtU: Oecember 29, 1910, p. 14*. SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS 69 "A foreigner who tries to do harm to the country he is in. "An enemy from a foreign land." "A person against a country." etc . . . Yet the word alien is an unusually exact legal term, far more exact than words like sovereignty, inde- pendence, national honor, rights, defense, aggression, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, about which we so readily take sides "for" or "against". 3 The power to dissociate superficial analogies, at- tend to differences and appreciate variety is lucidity of mind. It is a relative faculty. Yet the differences in lucidity are extensive, say as between a newly bom infant and a botanist examining a flower. To the infant there is precious little difference between his own toes, his father's watch, the lamp on the table, the moon in the sky, and a nice bright yellow edition of Guy de Maupassant. To many a member of the Union League Club there is no remarkable difference between a Democrat, a Socialist, an an- archist, and a burglar, while to a highly sophisticated anarchist there is a whole universe of difference between Bakunin, Tolstoi, and Kropotkin. These examples show how difficult it might be to secure a sound public opinion about de Maupassant among babies, or about Democrats in the Union League aub. A man who merely rides in other people's auto- mobiles may not rise to finer discrimination than between a Ford, a taxicab, and an automobile. But let that same man own a car and drive it, let him, as TO PUBLIC OPINION the psychoanalysts would say, project his libido upon automobiles^ and he will describe a difference in carburetors by looking at the rear end of a car a city block away. That is why it is often such a relief when the talk turns from "general topics" to a man's own hobby. It is like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the ploughed field outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a sojourn in the painter's portrayal of his own emotional response Co his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen. We easily identify, says Ferenczi, two only parti- ally simitar things:* the child more easily than the adult, the primitive or arrested mind more readily than the mature. As it first appears in the child, consciousness seems to be an unmanageable mixture of sensations. The child has no sense of time, and almost none of space, it reaches for the chandelier with the same confidence that it reaches for its mother's breast, and at first with almost the same expectation. Only very gradually does function define itself. To complete inexperience this is a coherent and undifferentiated world, in which, as someone has s^d of a school of philosophers, all facts are born free and equal. Those facts which belong together in the world have not yet been separated from those which happen to lie side by side in the stream of consciousness. At first, says Ferenczi, the baby gets some of the things it wants by crying for them. This is "the * Intemat. Zeitichr, f. Arztl. Psychoanalyie, 191}. Translated and republiihed by Dr. Eraeit Jones in S. Fetenczi, CoMribuiioni to Fiycho- aMlyiis, Ch. VIII, SUpt *'» tkt Dathtprntnt of tkt Senst oj Sealiiy. SPEED, WORDS. AND CLEARNESS 71 period of magical hallucinatory omnipotence. " In its second phase the child points to the things it wants, and they are given to it. "Omnipotence by the help of magic gestures." Later, the child learns to talk, asks for what it wishes, and is partially successful. "The period of magic thoughts and ma^c words. " Each phase may persist for certain situations, though overlaid and only visible at times, as for example, in the litde harmless superstitions from which few of us are wholly free. In each phase, partial success tends to confirm that way of acting, while failure tends to stimulate the development of another. Many individuals, parties, and even nations, rarely appear to transcend the magical organization of ex- perience. But in the more advanced sections of the most advanced peoples, trial and error after repeated failure has led to the invention of a new principle. The moon, they learn, is not moved by baying at it. Crops are not raised from the soil by spring festivals or Republican majorities, but by sunlight, moisture, seeds, fertilizer, and cultivation.' Allowing for the purely schematic value of Fer- enczi's categories of response, the quality which we note as critical is the power to discriminate among crude perceptions and vague analogies. This power has been studied under laboratory conditions.^ The ' Fncncxi, being a pathologist, does not describe this maturer period where experience u orKanized as equations, the phase of realism on the basis of science; * See, (or example, Diagnostische Assoziation Studien, conducted at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Zurich under the direction of Dr. C. G. Jung. These tests were carried on principally under the so-called Krapdin-Aschaffenburg classification. They shon reaction time, dassify tetponse to the sumulant word as inner, outer, and clang, show ■eparate retults for the first and second hundred words, for reaction time 7« PUBLIC OPINION Zurich Association Studies indicate clearly that slight mental fatigue, an inner disturbance of atten- tion or an external distraction, tend to "flatten" the quality of the response. An example of the very "flat" type is the clang association (cat-hat), a reaction to the sound and not to the sense of the stimulant word. One test, for example, shows a 9% increase of clang in the second series of a hundred reactions. Now the clang is almost a repetition, a very primitive form of analogy. 4 If the comparatively simple conditions of a labora- tory can so readily flatten out discrimination, what must be the effect of city life? In the laboratory the fatigue is slight enough, the distraction rather trivial. Both are balanced tn measure by the subject's in- terest and self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress intelligence, what do aght or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the politi- cal judgments formed on the basis of newspapers read in street-cars and subways? Can anything be heard in the hubbub that does not shriek, or be seen in the general glare that does not flash like an electric «gn? The life of the city dweller lacks solitude, ^lence, ease. The nights are noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant sound, ind reacdon quality when the subject ii diitracted by holding an idea in mind, or when ht replin while beating time with a metronome. Some of the rctults ate aummariied in Jung, Analytic^ Piytkology, Ch. II, iraiul. by Dr. Conitance E. Long. SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS 73 now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rythms, but endless and remorseless. Under modern industrialism thought goes on tn a bath of noise. If its discriminations are often flat and foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult. "The intolerable burden of thought" ts a burden when the conditions make it burdensome. It ts no burden when the conditions are favorable. It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural. Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of ciidlization, the citizen per- forms the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sun- light and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest banning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an umless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of mus- cles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the 74 PUBLIC OPINION vicrim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad ^r, and suffocating ornament. Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and spacious; we go to a theatre where modem stagecraft has cut away distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clam- orous is the ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent differences. 5 But this external disorder is complicated further by internal. Experiment shows that the speed, the accuracy, and the intellectual quality of association is deranged by what we are taught to call emotional conflicts. Measured in fifths of a second, a series of a hundred stimuli containing both neutral and hot words may show a variation as between 5 and 32 or even a total failure to respond at all.* Obviously our public opinion is in intermittent contact with complexes of all sorts; with ambition and economic interest, personal animosity, racial prejudice, class feeling and what not. They distort our reading, our thinking, our talking and our behavior in a great variety of ways. * Jung, CUri Licitmt. SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS 75 And finally since opinions do not stop at the nor- mal members of society, since for the purposes of an eI«:tton, a propaganda, a following, numbers con- stitute power, tiie quality of attention is still further depressed. The mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated individuals, is very considerable, much more considerable there is reason to think than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal is circulated among persons who are mentally chil- dren or barbarians, people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion. The scream of public opinion is stopped by them in little eddies of misunderstand- ing, where it is discolored with prejudice and far fetched analogy. A "broad appeal" takes account of the quality of association, and is made to those susceptibilities which are widely distributed. A "narrow" or a "special" appeal is one made to those susceptibilities which are uncommon. But the same individual may respond with very different quality to different stimuli, or to the same stimuli at different times. Human suscepti- bilities are like an alpine country. T^ere are isolated peaks, there are extensive but separated plateaus, and there are deeper strata which are quite continu- ous for nearly all mankind. Thus the individuals whose susceptibilities reach the rarefied atmosphere of those peaks where there exists an exquisitive dif- ference between Frege and Peano, or between Sas- 76 PUBLIC OPINION setta's earlier and later periods, may be good stanch Republicans at another level of appeal, and when they are starving and afraid, indistinguishable from any other starving and frightened person. No won- der that the magazines with the large circulations prefer the face of a pretty girl to any other trade mark, a face, pretty enough to be alluring, but innocent enough to be acceptable. For the "psychic level " on which the stimulus acts determines whether the public is to be potentially a la^ or a small one. 6 Thus the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted in many ways, by censor- ship and privacy at the source, by physical and social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clear- ness and justice of perception, to substitute mislead- ing fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead. PART III STEREOTYPES Chapter 6. Stereotypes " 7. Stereotypes as Defense " 8. Bund Spots and Their Value " 9. Codes and Their Enemies " 10. The Detection of Stereotypes CHAPTER VI STEREOTYPES Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth's surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquiuntances knows only a few intimately. Of any public event that has wide effects we see at best only a phase and an aspect. This is as true of the eminent insiders who draift treaties, make laws, and issue orders, as it is of those who have treaties framed for them, taws promulgated to them, orders given at them. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine. Yet even the eyewitness does not bring back a naive picture of the scene.' For experience seems to 'Eg. (f. Edmond Locard, VEnqutU CriminelU tt lei hitthoiis Seientifi^i. A Breat deal of intetoting material ha* been gathered in late yean oa the credibility of the nitneti, which ihowi, ai an able reviewer of Di. Locard's book says in The Times (London) Literary Supplement (Auguit ift, 1911), that credibility vaiiet at to cUtset of witneues and ctaBiei of events, and also 19 to type of perception. Thui, perceptioni of touch, odor, and taste have low evidential value. Our nearing ii defectiveand arbitrary when it judeet the louice and direc- tion of tound. and in Litenin^ to the calk of octaer people "words which are not heard will be supplied by the nicnest in all good faith. He will have a theory of the purport of the conversation, and will arrange the sound) he heard to fit it." Even visual perceptions are liable to great enor, as in identification, recogmtion, judgmcDt of distance, ettimaiea 79 8o PUBLIC OPINION show that he himself brings something to the scene which later he takes away from it, that oftener than not what he imagines to be the account of an event is really a transfiguration of it. Few facts in conscious- ness seem to be merely given. Most facts in con- sciousness seem to be partly made. A report is the joint product of the knower and known, in which the rdte of the observer is always selective and usually creative. The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes. An unfamiliar scene is like the baby's world, "one great, blooming, buzzing confusion. '* ■ This is the way, says Mr. John Dewey,* that any new thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really new and strange. "Foreign languages that we do not under- stand always seem jibberings, babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut, individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded street, the landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts in a complicated game, are futher instances. Put an inexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a meaning- less medley. All strangers of another race proverb- ially look alike to the visiting stranger. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an out- sider in a flock of sheep, each of which is perfectly oTnumben, for example, the size of a crowd. In the untrained observer, the lense of time ii highly variable. All these original weaknetset are complicated by tricki of memory, and the incessant creative quality of the imapnation. Cf. alto Sherrington, Tkt Integrant Action 0/ the Nenons SyxUm, pp. 318-317. The late Ptofeiior Hugo Munsterberg wrote a popular book on this lubject called On tkt Witntst Stand. ' Wm. Tame*, PrineipUt^ Piycholoty, Vol. I, p. 488. * John Dewey, Him Wt Tkink, p. lai. STEREOTYPES 81 individualized to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an indiscriminately shifting suction characterize what we do not understand. The problem of the acquisi- tion of meaning by things, or (stated in another way) of forming habits of simple apprehension, is thus the problem of introducing (i) definiimess and distinction and (2) consistency or stability of meaning into what is otherwise vague and wavering. " But the kind of definiteness and consistency in- troduced depends upon who introduces them. In a later passage * Dewey ^ves an example of how dif- ferently an experienced layman and a chemist might define the word metal. "Smoothness, hardness, glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy weight for its size . . . the serviceable properties of capacity for being hammered and pulled without breaking, of being softened by heat and hardened by cold, of retaining the shape and form given, of resistance to pressure and decay, would probably be included" in the lay- man's definition. But the chemist would likely as not ignore these esthetic and utilitarian qualities, and define a metal as "any chemical element that enters into combination witii oxygen so as to form a base." For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buz^ng confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture. Of the great men who assembled at Paris to setde the ' Of. tit., p. ijj. 8i PUBLIC OPINION affairs of mankind, how many were there who were able to see much of the Europe about them, rather than thdr commitments about Europe? Could any- one have penetrated the mind of M. Clemenceau, would he have found there images of the Europe of I9I9, or a great sediment of stereotyped ideas ac- cumulated and hardened in a long and pugnacious existence? Did he sec the Germans of 1919, or the German type as he had learned to see it since 1871 ? He saw the type, and among the reports that came to him from Germany, he Cook to heart those reports, and, it seems, chose only, which fitted the type chat was in his mind. If a junker blustered, chat was an authentic German; if a labor leader confessed the guilt of the empire, he was not an authentic German. At a Congress of Psycholt^ in Gottingen an inter- esting experiment was made with a crowd of presum- ably trained observers.' "Not far from the hall in which the Congress was sit- ting there was a public fete with a masked ball. Suddenly the door of the hall was thrown open and a clown rushed in madly pursued by a n^ro, revolver in hand. They stopped in the middle of the room fighting; the clown fell, the negro leapt upon him, fired, and then both rushed out of the hall. The whole incident hardly lasted twenty seconds. "The President aslced those present to write immedi- ately a report since there was sure to be a judicial inquiiy. Forty reports were sent in. Only one had less than 20% of mistakes in regard to the principal facts; fourteen had 20% to 40% of mistakes; twelve from 40% to 50%; ' A. von Gennep. La formation dei Ittndt], p van Laneenhove, Th* &outk 0} a Ltitnd, pp. IK STEREOTYPES 83 thirteen more than 50%. Moreover in twenty-four ac- counts 10% of the details were pure inventions and this proportion was exceeded in ten ac(X)unts and diminished in six. Briefly a quarter of the accounts were false. "It goes without saying that the whole' scene had been arranged and even photographed in advance. The ten false reports may then be relegated to the category of tales and legends; twenty-four accounts are half l^en- dary, and six have a value approximating to exact evi- dence." Thus out of forty trained observers writing a responsible account of a scene that had just happened before their eyes, more than a majority saw a scene that had not taken place. What then did they see? One would suppose it was easier to tell what had occurred, than to invent something which had not occurred. They saw their stereotype of such a brawl. All of them had in the course of their lives acquired a series of images of brawls, and these images flickered before their eyes. In one man these images displaced less than 20% of the actual scene, in thirteen men more than half. In thirty-four out of the forty observers the stereotypes preempted at least one- tenth of the scene. A distinguished art critic has said • that "what with the almost numberless shapes assumed by an object. . . . What with our insensitiveness and in- attention, things scarcely would have for us features and outlines so determined and clear that we could recall them at will, but for the stereotyped shapes art has lent them." The truth is even broader than that. 84 PUBLIC OPINION for the stereotyped shapes lent to the world come not merely from art, in the sense of painting and sculp- ture and literature, but irom our moral codes and our sodal philosophies and our political agitations as well. Substitute in the following passage of Mr. Berenson's the words 'politics,' 'business,' and 'soci- ety,* for the word 'art' and the sentences will be no less true: "... unless years devoted to the study of all schools of art have taught us also to see with our own eyes, we soon fall into the habit of moulding whatever we look at into the forms borrowed from the one art with which we are acquainted. There is our standard of artistic reality. Let anyone give us shapes and colors which we cannot instantly match in our paltry stock of hackneyed forms and tints, and we shake our heads at his failure to re- produce things as we know they certainly are, or we accuse him of insincerity." Mr. Berenson speaks of our displeasure when a painter "does not visualize objects exactly as we do," and of the difficulty of appreciating the art of the Middle Ages because since then "our manner of visualizing forms has changed in a thousand ways. " • He goes on to show how in r^ard to the human figure we have been taught to see what we do see. "Created by Donatcllo and Masaccio, and sanc- ' Cf. alio hii commenc on Dantt'i Fiiual Images, and hii Early Ilhatrators in The Study and Criikiim of Italian Art (Fint Series), p. 13. " }Fi cannot help dressing Vir^l as a Roman, and giving him a classical profile' and 'statuesque carnage,' but Dante's visual image of Virgil was probably no less mediaeval, no more based on a critical recon- strunion of antiquity, than his entire conceplion of the Roman po«. Fourteenth Century illustrators make Virgil look like a medizval scholar, dressed in cap and gown, and there is no reason why Dante's visual image of him should nave been other than this." STEREOTYPES 85 tioned by the Humanists, the new canon of the human figure, the new cast of features . . . presented to the ruling classes of that time the type of human being most likely to win the day in the combat of human forces. . . Who had the power to break through this new standard of vision and, out of the chaos of things, to select shapes more definitely expresuve of reality than those fixed by men of gen- ius? No one had such power. People had perforce to see things in that way and in no other, and to see only the shapes depicted, to love only the ideals presented. . . . " ' 2 If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds through which they have filtered it. For the accepted types, the current patterns, the standard versions, intercept information on its way to consciousness. Americanization, for example, is superficially at least the substitution of American for European stereotypes. Thus the peasant who might see his landlord as if he were the lord of the manor, his employer as he saw the local magnate, is taught by Americanization to see the landlord and employer ac- cording to American standards. This constitutes a change of mind, which is, in effect, when the innocu- lation succeeds, a change of vision. His eye sees differently. One kindly gentlewoman has confessed ■ Tkf Cenlral Italian Painters, pp. 66-67. 86 PUBLIC OPINION that the stereotypes are of such overweening import- ance, that when hers are not indulged, she at least is unable to accept the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God: "we are strangely affected by the clothes we wear. Garments create a mental and social atmosphere. What can be hoped for the Americanism of a man who insists on employing a London tailor ? One's very food affects his American- ism. What kind of American consciousness can grow in the atmosphere of sauerkraut and Limburger cheese? Or what can you expect of the Americanism of the man whose breath always reeks of garlic?" * This lady might well have been the patron of a pageant which a friend of mine once attended. It was called the Melting Pot, and it was given on the Fourth of July in an automobile town where many foreign-born workers are employed. In the center of the baseball park at second base stood a huge wooden and canvas pot. There were flights of steps up to the rim on two sides. After the audience had settled itself, and the band had played, a procession came through an opening at one side of the field. It was made up of men of all the foreign nationalities employed in the factories. They wore their native costumes, they were singing their national songs; they danced their folk dances, and carried the ban- ners of all Europe. The master of ceremonies was the principal of the grade school dressed as Uncle Sam. He led them to the pot. He directed them up the steps to the rim, and inside. He called them out < Cited by Mr. Edwird Hale Biermdt, Ntw Repuhlit. June i 1911, STEREOTYPES 87 again on the other side. They came> dressed in derby hats, coats, pants, vest, stiff collar and polka- dot de, undoubtedly, s^d my friend, each with an Eversharp pencil in his pocket, and all singing the Star-Spangled Banner. To the promoters of this pageant, and probably to most of the actors, it seemed as if they had managed to express the most intimate difficulty to friendly as- sociation between the older peoples of America and the newer. The contradiction of their stereotypes in- terfered with the full recognition of their common humanity. The people who change their names know this. They mean to change themselves, and the attitude of strangers toward them. There is, of course, some connection between the scene outside and the mind through which we watch it, just as there are some long-haired men and short- haired women in radical gatherings. But to the hurried observer a slight connection is enough. If there are two bobbed heads and four beards in the audience, it will be a bobbed and bearded audience to the reporter who knows beforehand that such gather- ings are composed of people with these tastes in the management of their hair. There is a connection between our vision and the facts, but it is often a strange connection. A man has rarely looked at a landscape, let us say, except to examine its possi- bilities for division into building lots, but he has seen a number of landscapes hanging in the parlor. And from them he has learned to think of a landscape as a rosy sunset, or as a country road with a church steeple and a silver moon. One day he goes to the 88 PUBLIC OPINION country, and for hours he does not see a single land- scape. Then the sun goes down looking rosy. At once he recognizes a landscape and exclaims that it is beautiful. But two days later, when he tries to recall what he saw, the odds are that he will remem- ber chiefly some landscape in a parlor. Unless he has been drunk or dreaming or insane he did see a sunset, but he saw in it, and above all remembers from it, more of what the oil painting taught him to observe, than what an impressionist painter, for example, or a cultivated Japanese would have seen and taken away with him. And the Jap- anese and the painter in turn will have seen and remembered more of the form they had learned, unless they happen to be the very rare people who find fresh sight for mankind. In untrained observa- tion we pick recognizable signs out of the environ- ment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice that the thing is man or sunset, and then see chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subjects. 3 There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question. In a circle of friends, and in relation to close associates or competi- tors, there is no shortcut through, and no substitute for, an individualized understanding. Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women STEREOTYPES 89 whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit. For even with- out phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not n^essarily our own; that between two human beings no association has final dignity in which each does not take the other as an end in himself. There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not aflirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both. But modem life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other, such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. In- stead we notice a (rait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. He is an ^tator. That much we notice, or are told. Well, an agitator is this sort of person, and so ^ is this sort of person. He is an intellectual. He is a pluto- crat. He is a foreigner. He is a "South European." He is from Back Bay, He is a Harvard Man. How different from the statement: he is a Yale Man. He is a regular fellow. He is a West Pointer. He is an old army sergeant. He is a Greenwich Villager: what don't we know about him then, and about her? He is an international banker. He is from Main Street. The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory 90 PUBLIC OPINION of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experi- ence them. And those preconceptions, unless edu- cation has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the dif- ference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien. They are aroused by small signs, which may vary from a true index to a vague analc^. Aroused^ they flood fresh vision with older images, and pro- ject into the world what has been resurrected in memory. Were there no practical uniformities in the environment, there would be no economy and only error in the human habit of accepting foresight for sight. But there are uniformities sufficiently accurate, and the need of economizing attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereo- types for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human life. What matters is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon those inclusive pat- terns which constitute our philosophy of life. If in that philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereo- types, we tend to know that they are only stereo- STEREOTYPES 91 typeSj to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend, also, to realize more and more dearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one pre- conception in this mind, another in that mind. Those who wish to censor art do not at least under- estimate this influence. They generally misunder- stand it, and almost always they are absurdly bent on preventing other people from discovering any- thing not sanctioned by them. But at any rate, like Plato in his ailment about the poets, they feel vaguely that the types acquired through fiction tend to be imposed on reality. Thus there can be little doubt that the mo^ang picture is steadily building up imagery which is then evoked by the words people read in their newspapers. In the whole ex- perience of the race there has been no aid to visual- ization comparable to the cinema. If a Florentine wished to visualize the saints, he could go to the frescoes in his church, where he might see a vision of siunts standardized for his time by Giotto. If an Athenian wished to visualize the gods he went to the temples. But the number of objects which were pic- tured was not great. And in the East, where the spiiit of the second commandment was widely accepted, the portraiture of concrete things was even more meager, and for that reason perhaps the faculty of practical 92 PUBLIC OPINION decision was by so much reduced. In the western world, however, during the last few centuries there has been an enormous increase in the volume and scope of secular description, the word picture, the narrative, the illustrated narrative, and finally the moving picture and, perhaps, the talking picture. Photographs have the kind of authority over imag- ination to-day, which the printed word had yester- day, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any dc* scription in words, or even any inert picture, requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observ- ing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you. Without more trouble than is needed to stay awake the result which your imagination is always aiming at is reeled off on the screen. The shadowy idea becomes vivid; your hazy notion, let us say, of the Klu Klux Klan, thanks to Mr. Griffiths, takes vivid shape when you see the Birth of a Nation. Historically it may be the wrong shape, morally it may be a pernicious shape, but it is a shape, and I doubt whether anyone who has seen the film and does not know more about the Klu Klux Klan than Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those white horsemen. 5 And so when we speak of the mind of a group of people, of the French mind, the militarist mind, the STEREOTYPES 93 bolshevik mind, wc are liable to serious confusion unless we agree to separate the instinctive equip- ment from the stereotypes, the patterns, and the formulae which play so decisive a part in building up the mental world to which the native character is adapted and responds. Failure to make this dis- tinction accounts for oceans of loose talk about col- lective minds, national souls, and race psychology. To be sure a stereotype may be so consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact. In some respects, we may indeed have be- come, as Mr. Wallas says,' biologically parasitic upon our social heritage. But certainly there is not the least scientific evidence which would enable any- one to argue that men are born with the political habits of the country in which they are born. In so far as poHtical habits are alike tn a nation, the first places to look for an explanation are the nursery, the school, the church, not in that limbo inhabited by Group Minds and National Souls. Until you have thoroughly failed to see tradition being handed on from parents, teachers, priests, and uncles, it is a solecism of the worst order to ascribe political differ- ences to the germ plasm. It is possible to generalize tentatively and with a decent humihty about comparative differences within the same category of education and experience. Yet even this is a tricky enterprise. For almost no two experiences are exactly alike, not even of two children in the same household. The older son never ' Graham Wallat, Our Social Hefilaff, p. 17. 94 PUBLIC OPINION does have the experience of being the younger. And therefore, until we are able to discount the differ- ence in nurture, we must withhold judgment about differences of nature. As well judge the productivity of two soils by comparing their yield before you know which is in Labrador and which in Iowa, whether they have been cultivated and enriched^ exhausted, or allowed to run wild. CHAPTER VII STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE There is another reason, besides economy of effort, why we so often hold to our stereotypes when we might pursue a more disinterested vision. The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our per- sonal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered, more or less consistent pic- ture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have ad- justed themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a pos- sible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members. We know the way around. There we find the charm of the familiar, the normal, the dependable; its grooves and shapes arc where we are accustomed to find them. And though we have abandoned much that might have tempted us before we creased ourselves into that mould, once we are firmly in, it fits as snugly as an old shoe. No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the founda- tions of the universe. It is an attack upon the founda- 96 PUBLIC OPINION tions of our universe, and, where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any dis- tinction between our universe and the universe. A world which turns out to be one in which those we honor are unworthy, and those we despise are noble, is nerve-wracking. There is anarchy if our order of precedence is not the only possible one. For if the meek should indeed inherit the earth, if the first should be last, if those who are without sin alone may cast a stone, if to Caesar you render only the things that are Caesar's, then the foundations of self-respect would be shaken for those who have arranged their lives as if these maxims were not true. A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and some- thing more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights. The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy. When, for example, in the fourth centiuy B. C, Aristotle wrote his defense of slavery in the face of increasing skepticism,' the Athenian slaves were in great part indistinguishable from free citizens. ' Zimmero: Crttk ComntoimeaU/i, See hit fbotnotCt P- 383. STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE 97 Mr. Zmmem quotes an amu^ng passage from the Old Oligarch eacplaining the good treatment of the slaves. "Suppose it were legal for a slave to be beaten by a citizen, it would frequently happen that an Athenian might be mistaken for a dave or an alien and receive a beating; — since the Athenian people is not better clothed than the slave or alien, nor in personal appearance is there any superiority." Hiis absence of distinction would natiirally tend to dissolve the institution. If free men and slaves looked alike, what basis was there for treating them so differendy? It was this confusion which Anstotle set himself to clear away in the first book of his Politics. With unerring insrinct he understood that to jusrify slavery he must teach the Greeks a way of seeing thar slaves that comported with the continuance of slavery. So, said Aristotle, there are beings who are slaves by nature.' "He then is by nature formed a slave, who is fitted to become the chattel of another person, and on that account is so." All this really says is that whoever happens to be a slave is by nature intended to be one. Logically the statement is worthless, but in fact it is not a proposition at all, and Ic^c has nothing to do with it. It is a stereotype, or rather it is part of a stereotype. The rest follows almost immediately. After asserting that slaves perceive reason, but are not endowed with the use of it, Aristotle insists that "it is the intention of nature to make the bodies of slaves and free men different from each other, that the one should be ' Puiitiei, Bk. I, Ch. 5. 98 PUBLIC OPINION robust for their necessary purposes, but the other erect; useless indeed for such servile labours, but iit for civil life. ... It is clear then that some men are free by nature, and others are slaves. . . ." If we ask ourselves what is the matter with Aris- totle's argument, we find that he has b^un by erect- ing a great barrier between himself and the facts. When he had said that those who are slaves are by nature intended to be slaves, he at one stroke ex- cluded the fatal question whether those particular men who happened to be slaves were the particular men intended by nature to be slaves. For that ques- tion would have tainted each case of slavery with doubt. And since the fact of being a slave was not evidence that a man was destined to be one, no cer- tain test would have remained. Aristode, therefore, excluded entirely that destructive doubt. Those who are slaves are intended to be slaves. Each slave holder was to look upon his chattels as natural slaves. When his eye had been trained to see them that way, he was to note as confirmation of their servile character the fact that they performed servile work, that they were competent to do servile work, and that they had the muscles to do servile work. This is the perfect stereotype. Its hallmark is that it precedes the use of reason; is a form of perception, imposes a certain character on the data of our senses before the data reach the intelligence. The stereo- type is like the lavender window-panes on Beacon Street, like the door-keeper at a costume ball who judges whether the guest has an appropriate mas- querade. There is nothing so obdurate to education STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE 99 or to criticism as the stereotype. It stamps itself upon the evidence in the very act of securing the evidence. That is why the accounts of returning travellers are often an interesting tale of what the traveller carried abroad with him on his trip. If he carried chiefly his appetite, a zeal for tiled bath- rooms, a conviction that the Pullman car is the acme of human comfort, and a belief that it is proper to tip waiters, taxicab drivers, and barbers, but under no circumstances station agents and ushers, then his Odyssey will be replete with good meals and bad meals, bathing adventures, compartment-train escap- ades, and voracious demands for money. Or if he is a more serious soul he may while on tour have found himself at celebrated spots. Having touched base, and cast one furtive glance at the monument, he buried his head in Baedeker, read every word through, and moved on to the next celebrated spot; and thus returned with a compact and orderly im- pression of Europe, rated one star, or two. In some measure, stimuli from the outside, especi- ally when they are printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy con- sciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through blue glasses and saw green. If what we are looking at corresponds successfully with what we anticipated, the stereo- type is reinforced for the future, as it is in a man who knows in advance that the Japanese are cun- ning and has the bad luck to run across two dishonest Japanese. loo PUBLIC OPINION If the experience contradicts the stereotype, one of two things happens. If the man is no longer plastic, or if some powerful interest makes it highly inconvenient to rearrange his stereotypes, he pooh- poohs the contradiction as an exception that proves the rule, discredits the witness, finds a flaw some- where, and manages to forget it. But if he is still curious and open-minded, the novelty is taken into the picture, and allowed to modify it. Sometimes, if the incident is striking enough, and if he has felt a general discomfort with his established scheme, he may be shaken to such an extent as to distrust all accepted ways of looking at life, and to expect that normally a thing will not be what it is generally supposed to be. In the extreme case, especially if he is literary, he may develop a passion for inverting the moral canon by making Judas, Benedict Arnolt^ or Caesar Borgia the hero of his tale. 3 The role played by the stereotype can be seen in the German tales about Belgian snipers. Those tales curiously enough were first refuted by an oi^an- ization of German Catholic priests known as Pax.' The existence of atrocity stories is itself not remark- able, nor that the German people gladly believed them. But it is remarkable that a great conservative body of patriotic Germans should have set out as early as August 16, 19I4, to contradict a collection of slanders on the enemy, even though such slanders :, The Groalk of a Legrnd. The author it a STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE loi were of the utmost value in soothing the troubled conscience of their fellow countrymen. Why should the Jesuit order in particular have set out to destroy a fiction so important to the fighdng morale of Ger- many? I quote from M. van Langenhove's account: "Hardly had the German armies entered Belgium when strange rumors b^an to circulate. They spread from place to place, they were reproduced by the press, and they soon permeated the whole of Germany. It was said that the Bel^an people, instigated by the clergy, had intervened perfidiously in the hostilities; had attacked by surprise isolated detachments; had indicated to the enemy the posi- tions occupied by the troops; that old men, and even children, had been guilty of horrible atrocities upon wounded and defenseless German soldiers, tearing out their eyes and cutting off fingers, nose or ears; that the priests from their pulpits had exhorted the people to commit these crimes, promising them as a reward the kingdom of heaven, and had even taken the lead in this barhority. "Public credulity accepted these stories. The highest powers in the state welcomed them without hesitation and endorsed them with their authority. . "In this way public opinion in Germany was disturbed and a lively indignation manifested itself, directed especially against the priests who were held responsible for the barbarities attributed to the Belgians. . . By a natural diversion the anger to which they were a prey was directed by the Germans against the Catholic clergy generally. Protestants loi PUBLIC OPINION allowed the old religious hatred to be relighted in their minds and delivered themselves to attacks against Catholics. A new Kuhurkampf was let loose. "The Catholics did not delay in taking action against this hostile attitude." (Italics mine)' There may have been some sniping. It would be extraordinary if every angry Belgian had rushed to the library, opened a manual of international law^ and had informed himself whether he had a right to take potshot at the infernal nuisance tramping through his streets. It would be no less extraordi- nary if an army that had never been under fire, did not regard every bullet that came its way as un- authorized, because it was inconvenient, and indeed as somehow a violation of the rules of the Kriegspiel, which then constituted its only experience of war. One can imagine the more sensitive bent on convinc- ing themselves that the people to whom they were doing such terrible things must be terrible people. And so the legend may have been spun until it reached the censors and propagandists, who, whether they believed it or not, saw its value, and let it loose on the German civilians. They too were not alto- gether sorry to find that the people they were out- raging were sub-human. And, above all, since the l^end came from their heroes, they were not only entitled to believe it, they were unpatriotic if they did not. But where so much is left to the imagination be- cause the scene of action is lost in the fog of war. STEREOTYPES AS DEFENSE 103 there is no check and no control. The l^nd of the ferocious Belgian priests soon tapped an old hatred. For in the minds of most patriotic protestant Ger- mans, especially of the upper classes, the picture of Bismarck's victories included a long quarrel with the Roman Catholics. By a process of association, Bel- gian priests became priests, and hatred of Belgians a vent for all their hatreds. These German protes- tants did what some Americans did when under the stress of war they created a compound object of hatred out of the enemy abroad and all their oppon- ents at home. Against this synthetic enemy, the Hun in Germany and the Hun within the Gate, they launched all the animosity that was in them. The Catholic resistance to the atrocity tales was, of course, defensive. It was aimed at those particu- lar iicuons which aroused animosity against all Catholics, rather than against Belgian Catholics alone. The Injormaitons Pax, says M. van Langen- hove, had only an ecclesiastical bearing and "con- fined their attention almost exclusively to the repre- hensible acts attributed to the priests. " And yet one cannot help wondering a litde about what was set in motion in the minds of German Catholics by this revelation of what Bismarck's empire meant in rela- rion to them; and also whether there was any obscure connection between that knowledge and the fact that the prominent German politician who was willing in the armistice to sign the death warrant of the empire was Erzbet^er,* the leader of the Catholic Centre Party. ' Since thi* vu vritten, Eraberger has be«a aMatsiaaied. CHAPTER VIII BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE I I HAVE been speaking of stereotypes rather than ideals, because the word Ideal is usually reserved for what we consider the good, the true and the beauti- ful. Thus it carries the hint that here is something to be copied or attained. But our repertory of fixed impressions is wider than that. It contains ideal swindlers, ideal Tammany politicians, ideal jingoes, ideal agitators, ideal enemies. Our stereotyped world is not necessarily the world we should like it to be. It is simply the kind of world we expect it to be. If events correspond there is a sense of familiarity, and we feel that we are moving with the movement of events. Our slave must be a slave by nature, if we are Athenians who wish to have no qualms. If we have told our friends that we do eighteen holes of golf in 95, we tell them after doing the course in no, that we are not ourselves to-day. That is to say, we are not acquainted with the duffer who foozled fifteen strokes. Most of us would deal with affairs through a rather haphazard and shifting assortment of stereotypes, if a comparatively few men in each generation were not constantly engaged in arranging, standardizing, and improving them into logical systems, known as the Laws of Political Economy, the Principles of Politics, BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE loj and the like. Generally when we write about culture, tradition, and the group mind, we are thinking of these systems perfected by men of genius. Now there is no disputing the necessity of constant study and criticism of these idealized versions, but the historian of people, the politician, and the publicity man cannot stop there. For what opterates in history is not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting imitations, replicas, counterfeits, ana- logjes, and distortions in individual minds. Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the pohtical history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as under- stood, the Constitution as interpreted and adminis- tered, to which you have to go. For while there is a reciprocating influence between the standard version and the current versions, it is these current versions as distributed among men which affect their behavior.' ' But unfortunately it is ever 50 much harder to know this actual cullurelhanit ti totummarizeand to comment upon the works of genius. The actual culture eiiata in people far too husy to indulge in the stiangc ttade ot fotmulating their bcliefa. They record them only incidentally, and the wudent tardy knows how typical are hia data. Perhaps the ben he can do is to follow Lord Bryce's suggestion [Modrm Dtmocracii), Vol. I, p. i;6| that he move freely "amon^ all sorts and conditions of men," to seek out the unbiassed persons in every neighhorhood who have skill in sizing up. "There is i flair which long practise and 'sym- pathetic touch' bestow. The trained observer learns how to profit by small indications, as an old seaman discerns, sooner than the landsman, the li^i of coming itotm." There is, in short, a vast amount of puess work involved, and it is no wonder that scholars, who enjoy precision, to dften cdofiDe chdr attentions to the neater fonnuUtions of other io6 PUBLIC OPINION "The theory of Relativity," says a critic whose eyelids, like the Lady Lisa's, are a little weary, "promises to develop into a principle as adequate to universal application as was the theory of Evolution. This latter theory, from being a technical biological hypothesis, became an inspiring guide to workers in practically every branch of knowledge: manners and customs, morals, religions, philosophies, arts, steam engines, electric tramways — everything had 'evolved.' 'Evolution' became a very general term; it also be- came imprecise until, in many cases, the original, definite meaning of the word was lost, and the theory it had been evoked to describe was misunderstood. We are hardy enough to prophesy a similar career and fate for the theory of Relativity. The technical physical theory, at present imperfecdy understood, will become still more vague and dim. History repeats itself, and Relativity, like Evolution, after receiving a number of Intelligible but somewhat inaccurate popular expositions in Its scientific aspect, will be launched on a world-conquering career. We suggest that, by that time. It will probably be called Relathismus. Many of these larger applications will doubtless be justified; some will be absurd and a considerable number will, we imagine, reduce to truisms. And the physical theory, the mere seed of this mighty growth, will become once more the purely technical concern of scientific men." • But for such a world-conquering career an Idea ' TAf Timti (London), Literary SttfpUintm, June i, 1921, p. 351. Professor Einstein said when he was in America in 1911 thai people tended to overeitiinate the influence of hii theory, and to under-escimue its certainty. BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE 107 must correspond, however imprecisely, to something. Professor Bury shows for how long a time the idea of progress remained a speculative toy. "It Is not easy," he writes,' "for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and inform the general conscious- ness of a community until it has assumed some external and concrete embodiment, or is recom- mended by some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were fulfilled (in Ejigland) in the period 1820-1850." The most striking evidence was furnished by the mechanical revolution. "Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam naviga- tion, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway." In the consciousness of the average householder miracles like these formed the pattern of his belief in the perfectibility of the human race. Tennyson, who was in philosophical matters a fairly normal person, tells us that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wh«ds ran in grooves. Then he wrote this line: " Let the great world spin forever down the rinpng grooves of change." ' And so a norion more or less applicable to a journey between Liverpool and Manchester was generaliznl into a pattern of the universe "for ever." This io8 PUBLIC OPINION pattern, taken up by others, reinforced by dazzling inventions, imposed an optimistic turn upon the theory of evolution. That theory, of course, is, as Professor Bury says, neutral between pessimism and optimism. But it promised continual change, and the changes visible in the world marked such extras ordinary conquests of nature, that the popular mind made a blend of the two. Evolution first in Darwin himself, and then more elaborately in Herbert Spencer, was a "progress towards perfection." The stereotype represented by such words as "progress" and "perfection" was composed funda- mentally of mechanical inventions. And mechanical it has remained, on the whole, to this day. In Amer- ica more than anywhere else, the spectacle of mechan- ical prc^ess has made so deep an impression, that it has suffused the whole moral code. An American will endure almost any insult except the charge that he is not progressive. Be he of long native ancestry, or a recent immigrant, the aspect that has always struck his eye is the immense physical growth of American civilization. That constitutes a funda- mental stereotype through which he views the world: the country village will become the great metro- polis, the modest building a skyscraper, what is small shall be big; what is slow shall be fast; what is poor shall be rich; what is few shall be many; what- ever is shall be more so. Not every American, of course, sees the world this way. Henry Adams didn't, and William Allen BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE 109 White doesn't. But those men do, who in the magazines devoted to the religion of success appear as Makers of America. They mean just about that when they preach evolution, progress, prosperity, being constructive, the American way of doing things. It is easy to laugh, but, in fact, they are using a very great pattern of human endeavor. For one thing it adopts an impersonal criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion; for a third it is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the ideal confuses excellence with size, hap- piness with speed, and human nature with contrap- tion. Yet the same motives are at work which have ever actuated any moral code, or ever will. The desire for the biggest, the fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wristwatches or microscopes the smallest; the love in short of the superlative and the "peerless," is in essence and possibility a noble Certunly the American ver^on of progress has fitted an extraordinary range of facts in the economic situation and in human nature. It turned an unusual amount of pugnacity, acquisitiveness, and lust of power into productive work. Nor has it, until more recendy perhaps, seriously frustrated the active nature of the active members of the community. They have made a civilization wtuch provides them who made it with what they feel to be ample satisfaction in work, mating and play, and the rush of their victory over mountfuns, wildernesses, dis- tance, and human competition has even done duty for that part of religous feeling which is a sense of no PUBLIC OPINION communion with the purpose of the universe. The pattern has been a success so nearly perfect in the sequence of ideals, practice, and results, that any challenge to it h called un-American. And yet, this pattern is a very partial and inade- quate way of representing the world. The habit of thinking about progress as "development" has meant that many aspects of the environment were simply neglected. With the stereotype of "progress" before their eyes, Americans have in the mass seen little that did not accord with that progress. They saw the expansion of cities, but not the accretion of slumsj they cheered the census statistics, but refused to consider overcrowding; they pointed with pride to their growth, but would not see the drift from the land, or the unassimilated immigration. They expanded industry furiously at reckless cost to thdr natural resources; they built up gigantic corpora^ tions without arranging for industrial relations. They grew to be one of the most powerful nations on earth without preparing their institutions or thar minds for the ending of their isolation. They stum- bled into the World War morally and physically unready, and they stumbled out again, much dis- illusioned, but hardly more experienced. In the World War the good and the evil influence of the American stereotype was plainly viable. The idea that the war could be won by recruiting unlim- ited armies, rai^ng unlimited credits, building an unlimited number of ships, producing unlimited munitions, and concentrating without limit on these alone, fitted the traditional stereotype, and resulted BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE iii in something like a physical miracle.' But among those most affected by the stereotype^ there was no place for the consideration of what the fruits of victory were, or how they were to be attained. Therefore, aims were ignored, or r^arded as auto- matic, and victory was conceived, because the stereo- type demanded it, as nothing but an annihilating victory in the field. In peace time you did not ask what the fastest motor car was for, and in war you did not ask what the completest victory was for. Yet in Pans the pattern did not fit the facts. In peace you can go on endlessly supplanting small things with big ones, and big ones with bigger ones; in war when you have won absolute victory, you cannot go on to a more absolute victory. You have to do something on an entirely different pattern. And if you lack such a pattern, the end of the war is to you what it was to so many good people, an anti- climax in a dreary and savorless world. This marks the point where the stereotype and the facts, that cannot be ignored, definitely part com- pany. There is always such a point, because our images of how things behave are simpler and more fixed than the ebb and flow of affairs. There comes a time, therefore, when the blind spots come from the edge of vision into the center. TTien unless there are critics who have the courage to sound an alarm, and leaders capable of understanding the change, * 1 have in mind the traniportatioa and lupply of two million troopi Prof. Wedey Mitcndl pointi out that the total produi"' ' 112 PUBLIC OPINION and a people tolerant by habit, the stereotype, instead of economizing effort, and focussing energy as it did in 1917 and 1918, may frustrate effort and waste men's energy by blinding them, as it did for those people who cried for a Carthaginian peace in 1919 and deplored the Treaty of Versailles in 1921. 3 Uncritically held, the stereotype not only censors out much that needs to be taken into account, but when the day of reckoning comes, and the stereo- type is shattered, likely as not that which it did wisely take into account is ship-wrecked with - it. That is the punishment assessed by Mr. Bernard Shaw against Free Trade, Free Contract, Free Com- petition, Natural Liberty, Laissez-faire, and Dar- winism. A hundred years ago, when he would surely have been one of the tartest advocates of these doctrines, he would not have seen them as he sees them to-day, in the Infidel Half Century,' to be excuses for '"doing the other fellow down' with impunity, all interference by a guiding govern-, ment, all organization except police organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all at- tempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the industrial welter being 'con- trary to the laws of political economy.'" He would have seen, then, as one of the pioneers of the march to the plains of heaven ' that, of the kind of human purpose and design and forethought to be found in a government like that of Queen Victoria's uncles, ' Bark to Methiueloh. PTcfacc * Tht Qutnuiientt 0/ Ibienism. BLIND SPOTS AND THEIR VALUE 113 the less the better. He would have seen, not the strong doing the weak down, but the foolish doing the strong down. He would have seen purposes, designs and forethoughts at work, obstructing in- vention, obstructing enterprise, obstructing what he would infallibly have rect^ized as the next move of Creative Evolution. Even now Mr. Shaw is none too eager for the guid- ance of any guiding government he knows, but in theory he has turned a full loop against laissez- faire. Most advanced thinking before the war had made the same turn against the established notion that if you unloosed everything, wisdom would bubble up, and establish harmony. Since the war, with its definite demonstration of guiding governments, assisted by censors, propagandists, and spies. Roebuck Ramsden and Natural Liberty have been readmitted to the company of serious thinkers. One thing is common to these cycles. There Is in each set of stereotypes a point where effort ceases and things happen of their own accord, as you would like them to. The prt^essive stereotype, powerful to incite work, almost completely obliterates the attempt to decide what work and why that work. Laissez-fjure, a blessed release from stupid official- dom, assumes that men will move by spontaneous combustion towards a pre-established harmony. Collectivism, an antidote to ruthless selfishness, seems, in the Marxian mind, to suppose an economic determinism towards efficiency and wisdom on the part of socialist officials. Strong government. 114 PUBLIC OPINION imperialism at home and abroad, at its best deeply conscious of the price of disorder, relies at last on the notion that all that matters to the governed will be known by the governors. In each theory there is a spot of blind automatism. That spot covers up some fact, which if it were taken into account, would check the vital movement that the stereotype provokes. If the progressive had to ask himself, like the Chinaman in the joke, what he wanted to do with the time he saved by breaking the record, if the advocate of laissez-faire had to contemplate not only free and exuberant enerpes of men, but what some people call their human nature, If the collecti^ast let the center of his attention be occupied with the problem of how he is to secure his officials, if the imperialist dared to doubt his own inspiration, you would find more Hamlet and less Henry the Fifth. For these blind spots keep away distracting images, which with their attendant emotions, might cause hesitation and infirmity of purpose. Consequently the stereotype not only saves time in a busy life and ts a defense of our position in society, but tends to preserve us from all the bewildering effect of trying to see the world steadily and see it whole. CHAPTER IX CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES I Anyone who has stood at the end of a railroad platform waiting for a friend, will recall what queer people he mistook for him. The shape of a hat, a slightly characteristic gait, evoked the vivid picture in his mind's eye. In sleep a tinkle may sound like the pealing of a great bell; the distant stroke of a hammer like a thunderclap. For our constellations of imagery will vibrate to a stimulus that is perhaps but vaguely similar to some aspect of them. They may, in hallucination, flood the whole consciousness. They may enter very little into perception, though I am inclined to think that such an experience is extremely rare and highly sophisticated, as when we gaze blankly at a familiar word or object, and it gradually ceases to be familiar. Certainly for the most part, the way we see things is a combinarion of what is there and of what we expected to find. The heavens are not the same to an astronomer as to a pair of lovers; a page of Kant will start a differ- ent train of thought in a Kantian and in a radical empiricist; the Tahitian belle is a better looking person to her Tahitian suitor than to the readers of the National Geographic Magazine. E:q>ertness in any subject is, in fact, a multiplica- n6 PUBLIC OPINION tion of the number of aspects we are prepared to discover, plus the habit of discounting our expecta- tions. Where to the ignoramus all things look alike, and life is just one thing after another, to the special- ist things are highly individual. For a chauffeur, an epicure, a connoisseur, a member of the Fresi- , dent's cabinet, or a professor's wife, there are evi- dent distinctions and qualities, not at all evident to the casual person who discusses automobiles, wines, old masters. Republicans, and college faculties. But in our public opinions few can be expert, while life is, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has made plain, so short. Those who are expert are so on only a few topics. Even among the expert soldiers, as we learned during the war, expert cavalrymen were not necessarily brilliant with trench-warfare and tanks. Indeed, sometimes a little expertness on a small topic may simply exaggerate our normal human habit of trying to squeeze into our stereotypes all that can be squeezed, and of casting into outer darkness that which does not tit. Whatever we recognize as familiar we tend, if we are not very careful, to visualize with the aid of images already in our mind. Thus in the American view of Progress and Success there is a definite picture of human nature and of society. It is the kind of human nature and the kind of society which logically produce the kind of progress that is regarded as ideal. And then, when we seek to describe or explain actually successful men, and events that have really happened, we read back into them the qualities that arc presupposed in the stereotypes. CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES 117 These qualities were standardized rather inno- cently by the older economists. They set out to describe the social system under which they I?ved, and found it too complicated for words. So they constructed what they sincerely hoped was a sim- plified diagram, not so different in principle and in veracity from the parallelogram with 1^ and head in a child's drawing of a complicated cow. The scheme con^sted of a capitalist who had diligently saved capital from his labor, an entrepreneur who conceived a socially useful demand and organized a factory, a collection of workmen who freely con- tracted, take it or leave it, for their labor, a landlord, and a group of consumers who bought in the cheap- est market those goods which by the ready use of the pleasure-pain calculus they knew would g^ve them the most pleasure. The model worked. The kind of people, which the model assumed, living in the sort of world the model assumed, invariably cooper- ated harmoniously in the books where the model was described. With modiBcation and embroidery, this pure fic- tion, used by economists to simplify their thinking, was retailed and popularized until for large sections of the population it prevailed as the economic mytho- logy of die day. It supplied a standard version of capitalist, promoter, worker and consumer in a soci- ety that was naturally more bent on achieving suc- cess than on explaining it. The buildings which rose, and the bank accounts which accumulated, were evidence that the stereotype of how the thing had been done was accurate. And those who benefited ii8 PUBLIC OPINION most by success came to believe they were the kind of men they were supposed to be. No wonder that the candid friends of successful men, when they read the official bic^aphy and the obituary, have to restrain themselves from asking whether this is indeed their friend. 2 To the vanquished and the victims, the official portraiture was, of course, unrecognizable. For while those who exemplified progress did not often pause to inquire whether they had arrived according to the route laid down by the economists, or by some other just as creditable, the unsuccessfiJ people did inquire. "No one" says William James' "sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends. " The captains of industry saw in the great trusts monuments of (their) success; their defeated competitors saw the monuments of (their) failure. So the captains exf>ounded the economies and virtues of big business, asked to be let alone, said they were the agents of prosperity, and the developers of trade. The vanquished insisted upon the wastes and brutalities of the trusts, and called loudly upon the Department of Justice to free busi- ness from conspiracies. In the same situation one side saw progress, economy, and a splendid develop- ment; the other, reaction, extravagance, and a re- straint of trade. Volumes of statistics, anecdotes about the real truth and the inside truth, the deeper and the larger truth, were published to prove both sides of the argument. ' Tht LttUTi 0} Wittiam Janu), Vol. i, p. 65. CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES 119 For when a system of stereotypes is well fixed, our attention is called to those facts which support it, and diverted from those which contradict. So per- haps it is because they are attuned to find it, that kindly people discover so much reason for kindness, malicious people so much malice. We speak quite accurately of seeing through rose-colored spectacles, or with a jaundiced eye. If, as Philip Littell once wrote of a distinguished professor, we see life as through a class darkly, our stereotypes of what the best people and the lower classes are like will not be contaminated by understanding. What is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes. We do not see what our eyes are not accustomed to take into account. Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy. 3 This philosophy is a more or less organized series of images for describing the unseen world. But not only for describing it. For judging it as well. And, therefore, the stereotypes are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope. Whatever invokes the stereotype is judged with the appropriate senti- ment. Except where we deliberately keep prejudice in suspense, we do not study a man and judge him to be bad. We see a bad man. We see a dewy morn, a blushing maiden, a sainted priest, a humorless Eng- lishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree bohemian, a lazy Hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a I20 PUBLIC OPINION volatile Irishman, a greedy Jew, a ioo% American. In the workaday world that is often the real judg- ment, long in advance of the evidence, and it con- tiuns within itself the concluaon which the evidence is pretty certain to confirm. Ndther justice, nor mercy, nor truth, enter into such a judgment, for the judgment has preceded the evidence. Yet a people without prejucUces, a people with altc^ther neutral vision, is so unthinkable in any civilization of which it is useful to think, that no scheme of education could be based upon that ideal. Prejudice can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them, and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of what is felt to be positively good, rather than hatred of what is not contained in their version of the good. Morality, good taste and good form first standard- ize and then emphasize certmn of these underlying prejudices. As we adjust ourselves to our codes, we adjust the facts we see to that code. Rationally, the facts are neutral to all our views of right and wrong. Actually, our canons determine greatly what we shall perceive and how. For a moral code is a scheme of conduct applied to a number of typical instances. To behave as the code directs is to serve whatever purpose the code pursues. It may be God's will, or the king's. CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES 121 individual salvation in a good, solid, three dimen- sional paradise, success on earth, or the service of mankind. In any event the makers of the code fix upon certun typical ^tuations, and then by some form of reasoning or intuition, deduce the kind of behavior which would produce the am they acknow- ledge. The rules apply where they apply. But in daily living how does a man know whether his predicament is the one the law-giver had in mind? He is told not to Idlt. But if his children are attacked, may he kill to stop a killing? The Ten Commandments are silent on the point. Therefore, around every code there is a cloud of interpreters who deduce more specific cases. Suppose, then, that the doctors of the law decide that he may kill in self- defense. For the next man the doubt is almost as great; how does he know that he is defining self- defense correctly, or that he has not misjudged the facts, imagined the attack, and is really the aggres- sor? Perhaps he has provoked the attack. But what is a provocation? Exactly these confii^ons infected the minds of most Germans in August, 1914. Far more serious in the modern world than any difference of moral code is the difference in the as- sumptions about facts to which the code is applied. Reli^ous,moral and political formulae are nothinghke so far apart as the facts assumed by thdr votaries. Useful discussion, then, instead of comparing ideals, reexamines the visions of the facts. Thus the rule that you should do imto others as you would have them do unto you rests on the belief that human nature is uniform. Mr. Bernard Shaw's statement that you 122 PUBLIC OPINION should not do unto others what you would have them do unto you, because their tastes may be different, rests on the belief that human nature is not uniform. The maxim that competition is the life of trade consists of a whole tome of assumptions about econ- omic motives, industrial relations, and the work- ing of a particular commercial system. The claim that America will never have a merchant marine, unless it is privately owned and managed, assumes a certiun proved connection between a certain kind of profit-making and incentive. The justification by the bolshevik propagandist of the dictatorship, espionage, and the terror, because "every state is an apparatus of violence" ^ is an historical judgment, the truth of which is by no means self-evident to a non-communist. At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a ver- sion of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply. So far as the facts of personality, of the environment and of memory are different, by so far the rules of the code are difficult to apply with suc- cess. Now every moral code has to conceive human psychology, the material world, and tradition some way or other. But in the codes that are under the influence of science, the conception is known to be an hypothesis, whereas in the codes that come unex- amined from the past or bubble up from the caverns of 'See Two Yfarj of Confiiel on ike InJernal Front, published by the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, Moscow, 192a Ttans- lated by Malcolm W. Davis for the Nop York Evening Post, January ij. CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES 1Z3 the mind> the conception is not taken as an hypothe- sis demanding proof or contradiction, but as a fiction accepted without question. In the one case, man is humble about his beliefs, because he knows they are tentative and incomplete; in the other he is dermatic, because his belief is a completed myth. The moralist who submits to the sctendiic discipline knows that though he does not loiow everything, he is in the way of knowing something; the dt^madst, using a myth, believes himself to share part of the insight of omniscience, though he lacks the criteria by which to tell truth from error. For the distinguishing mark of a myth is that truth and error, fact and fable, report and fantasy, are all on the same plane of credibility. The myth is, then, not necessarily false. It might happen to be wholly true. It may happen to be pardy true. If it has affected human conduct a long dme, it is almost certain to contain much that ts profoundly and importantly true. What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truths from its errors. For that power comes only by realizing that no human opinion, whatever its supposed origin, is too exalted for the test of evidence, that every opinion is only somebody's opinion. And if you ask why the test of evidence is preferable to any other, there is no answer unless you are willing to use the test in order to test it. 4 The statement is, I think, susceptible of over- whelming proof, that moral codes assume a particular view of the facts. Under the term moral codes I 124 PUBLIC OPINION include all kinds: personal, family, economic, pro- fessional, legal, patriotic, international. At the center of each there is a pattern of stereotypes about psychology, sociology, and history. The same view of human nature, institutions or tradition rarely per- sists through all our codes. Compare, for example, the economic and the patriotic codes. There is a war supposed to affect Jill alike. Two men are part- ners in business. One enlists, the other takes a war contract. The soldier sacrifices everything, perhaps even his life. He is p^d a dollar a day, and no one says, no one believes, that you could make a better soldier out of him by any form of economic incentive. That motive disappears out of his human nature. The contractor sacrifices very little, is paid a hand- some profit over costs, and few say or believe that he would produce the munitions if there were no economic incentive. That may be unfair to him. The point is that the accepted patriotic code assumes one kind of human nature, the commercial code another. And the codes are probably founded on true expectations to this extent, that when a man adopts a certain code he tends to exhibit the kind of human nature which the code demands. That is one reason why it is so dangerous to gener- alize about human nature. A loving father can be a sour boss, an earnest municipal reformer, and a rapacious jingo abroad. His family life, his business career, his politics, and his foreign policy rest on totally different versions of what others are like and of how he should act. These versions differ by codes in the same person, the codes differ somewhat among CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES 125 persons in the same social set, differ widely as between social sets, and between two nations, or two colors, may differ to the point where there is no common assumption whatever. That is why people profess- ing the same stock of religious beliefs can go to war. The element of their belief which determines conduct is that view of the facts which they assume. That is where codes enter so subdy and so per> vasively into the making of public opinion. The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion con- stitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting Is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moral- ized and codified version of the facts. I am ai^;uing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them. That is why, ^th the best will in the world, the news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy; why a capitalist sees one set of facts, and certain aspects of human nature, literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist pattern of stereotypes. "There are no classes in America," writes an American editor. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," says the Communist Manifesto. If you have the editor's pattern in your mind, you will see vividly the facts that confirm it, vaguely and inef- 126 PUBLIC OPINION fectively those that contradict. If you have the communist pattern, you will not only look for difFer- ent things, but you will see with a totally different emphams what you and the editor happen to see in And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me per- verse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be exptuned, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explan- ation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole. It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experi- ence seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition. For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a "question," they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a "fact." And they never do believe it until after long critical education, they are fully conscious of how second-hand and subjective ts their appre- hension of their social data. So where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES 127 each other with honesty. If the pattern fits their experience at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an interpretation. They look upon it as "reality." It may not resemble the reality, except that it culminates in a conclu^on which fits a real experience. I may represent my trip from New York to Boston by a straight line on a map, just as a man may regard his triumph as the end of a straight and narrow path. The road by which I actually went to Boston may have involved many detours, much turning and twisring, just as his road may have involved much besides pure enterprise, labor and thrift. But provided I reach Boston and he succeeds, the airline and the straight path will serve as ready made charts. Only when somebody tries to follow them, and does not arrive, do we have to answer objections. If we insist on our charts, and he in^sts on rejecting them, we soon tend to regard him as a dangerous fool, and he to regard us as liars and hypocrites. Thus we gradually paint portraits of each other. For the opponent presents himself as the man who says, evil be thou my good. He is an annoyance who does not fit into the scheme of things. Nevertheless he interferes. And since that scheme Is based in our minds on incontrovertible fact fortified by irresistible logic, some place has to be found for him in the scheme. Rarely in politics or industrial disputes is a place made for him by the simple admission that he has looked upon the same reality and seen another aspect of it. That would shake the whole scheme. Thus to the Italians b Paris Flume was Italian. 128 PUBLIC OPINION It was not merely a city that it would be desirable to include within the Italian kingdom. It was Italian. They fixed their whole mind upon the Italian majority within the legal boundaries of the dty itself. The American delegates, having seen more Italians in New York than there are in Flume, without regarding New York as Italian, fixed their eyes on Fiume as a central European port of entry. They saw vividly the Jugoslavs in the suburbs and the non-Italian hinterland. Some of the Italians in Paris were therefore in need of a convincing explana- tion of the American perversity. They found it in a rumor which started, no one knows where, that an influential American diplomat was in the snares of a Jugoslav mistress. She had been seen. ... He had been seen. . . . AtVersailles just off the boule- vard. . . . The villa with the large trees. This is a rather common way of explaining away opposition. In their more libelous form such charges rarely reach the printed page, and a Roosevelt may have to wait years, or a Harding months, before he can force an issue, and end a whispering campaign that has reached into every circle of talk. Public men have to endure a fearful amount of poisonous clubroom, dinner table, boudoir slander, repeated, elaborated, chuckled over, and r^arded as delicious. While this sort of thing is, I believe, less prevalent in America than in Europe, yet rare is the American official about whom somebody is not repeating a scandal. Out of the opposition we make vill^ns and con- spracies. If prices go up unmercifully the pro- CODES AND THEIR ENEMIES 129 fiteers have conspired; if the newspapers misrepre- sent the news, there is a capitalist plot; if the rich are too rich, they have been stealing; if a closely fought election is lost, the electorate was corrupted; if a statesman does something of which you dis- approve, he has been bought or influenced by some discreditable person. If workingmen are restless, they are the victims of agitators; if they are restless over wide areas, there is a conspiracy on foot. If you do not produce enough aeroplanes, it is the work of spies; if there is trouble in Ireland, it is German or Bolshevik "gold." And if you go stark, staring mad looking for plots, you see all strikes, the Plumb plan, Irish rebellion, Mohammedan unrest, the restor- ation of King Constantine, the League of Nations, Mexican disorder, the movement to reduce arma^ ments, Sunday movies, short skirts, evasion of the liquor laws, Negro self-assertion, as sub-plots under some grandiose plot engineered either by Moscow, Rome, the Free Masons, the Japanese, or the Elders of 2on. CHAPTER X THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES Skilled diplomatists, compelled to talk out loud to the warring peoples, learned how to use a large reper- tory of stereotypes. They were dealing with a pre- carious alliance of powers, each of which was mun- tmning its war unity only by the most careful leadership. The ordinary soldier and his wife> heroic and selfless beyond anything in the chronicles of courage, were still not heroic enough to face death gladly for all the ideas which were said by the foreign offices of foreign powers to be essential to the future of civilization. There were ports, and mines, rocky mountain passes, and villages that few soldiers would willingly have crossed No Man's Land to obtwn for their allies. Now it happened in one nation that the war party which was in control of the foreign office, the high command, and most of the press, had claims on the territory of several of its neighbors. These cl^ms were called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent Ruritan- ian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So holding this flnest flower of the Ruritan- ian genius, as their poet laureate said, to their hearts. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 131 Ruritania's statesmen went forth to divide and con- quer. They divided the claim into sectors. For each piece they invoked that stereotype which some one or more of their allies found it difficult to resist, because that ally had claims for which it hoped to find approval by the use of this same stereotype. The first sector happened to be a mountainous region inhabited by alien peasants. Ruritania demanded it to complete her natural geographical frontier. If you fixed your attention long enough on the ineffable value of what is natural, those alien peas- ants just dissolved into fog, and only the slope of the mountmns was visible. The next sector was inhab- ited by Ruritanians, and on the principle that no people ought to live under alien rule, they were re- annexed. Then came a city of considerable com- mercial importance, not inhabited by Ruritanians. But until the Eighteenth Century it had been part of Ruritania, and on the principle of Historic Right it was annexed. Farther on there was a splendid mineral deposit owned by aliens and worked by aliens. On the principle of reparation for damage it was annexed. Beyond this there was a territory inhabited 97% by aliens, constituting the natural geographical fronrier of another nation, never his- torically a part of Ruritania. But one of the prov- inces which had been federated into Ruritania had formerly traded in those markets, and the upper class culture was Ruritanian. On the principle of cultural superiority and the neces^ty of defending civilization, the lands were claimed. Finally, there was a port wholly disconnected from Ruritania 132 PUBLIC OPINION gec^aphically, ethnically, economically, historically, traditionally. It was demanded on the ground that it was needed for national defense. In the treaties that concluded the Great War you can multiply examples of this kind. Now I do not wish to imply that I think it was possible to resettle Europe consistently on any one of these principles. I am certain that it was not. The very use of these principles, so pretentious and so absolute, meant that the spirit of acconunodarion did not prevul and that, therefore, the substance of peace was not there. For the moment you start to discuss factories, mines, mountwns, or even political authority, as perfect examples of some eternal principle or other, you are not arguing, you are fighting. That eternal principle censors out all the objections, isolates the issue from its background and its context, and sets going in you some strong emotion, appropriate enough to the principle, highly inappropriate to the docks, ware- houses, and real estate. And having started in that mood you cannot stop, A real danger exists. To meet it you have to invoke more absolute principles in order to defend what is open to attack. Then you have to defend the defenses, erect buffers, and buffers for the buffers, until the whole affair is so scrambled that it seems less dangerous to fight than to keep on talking. There are certmn clues which often help in detect- ing the false absolutism of a stereotype. In the case of the Ruritanian propaganda the principles blanketed each other so rapidly that one could readily see how the argument had been constructed. The series THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 133 of contradicdoTis showed that for each sector that stereotype was employed which would obliterate all the facts that interfered with the claim. Contradic- tioii of this sort is often a good clue. Inability to take account of space is another. In the spring of 1918, for example, lat^ numbers of people, appalled by the withdrawal of Russia, de- manded the " reestablishment of an Eastern Front." The war, as they had conceived it, was on two fronts, and when one of them disappeared there was an instant demand that it be recreated. The unem- ployed Japanese army was to man the front, sub- stituting for the Russian. But there was one insup- erable obstacle. Between Vladivostok and the eastern battleline there were five thousand miles of country, spanned by one broken down r^Iway. Yet those five thousand miles would not stay in the minds of the enthusiasts. So overwhelming was their conviction that an eastern front was needed, and so great their confidence in the valor of the Japanese army, that, mentally, they had projected that army from Vladivostok to Poland on a magic carpet. In vain our military authorities argued that to land troops on the rim of Siberia had as little to do with reaching the Germans, as climbing from the cellar to the roof of the Woolworth building had to do with reaching the moon. The stereotype in this instance was the war on two fronts. Ever since men had begun to imagjne the Great War they had conceived Germany held be- 134 PUBLIC OPINION tween France and Russia. One generation of strat- egists, and perhaps two, had lived with that visual image as the starting point of all their calculations. For nearly four years every battle-map they saw had deepened the impression that this was the war. When affairs took a new turn, it was not easy to see them as they were then. They were seen through the stereotype, and facts wluch conflicted with it, such as the distance from Japan to Poland, were incapable of coming vividly into consciousness. It is interesting to note that the American authori- ties dealt with the new facts more realistically than the French. In part, this was because (previous to 1914) they had no preconception of a war upon the continent; in part because the Americans, en- grossed in the mobilization of their forces, had a vision of the western front which was itself a stereo- type that excluded from their consciousness any very vivid sense of the other theatres of war. In the spring of 1918 this American view could not com- pete with the tradirional French view, because while the Americans believed enormously in their own powers, the French at that time (before Cantigny and the Second Marne) had the gravest doubts. The American confidence suffused the American stereotype, gave it that power to possess conscious- ness, that liveliness and sensible pungency, that stimulating effect upon the will, that emotional interest as an object of desire, that congruity with the activity in hand, which James notes as char- acteristic of what we regard as "real." ' The French ' Principlet oj Piyckology, Vol. II, p. 300. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 135 in despair remained fixed on their accepted image. And when facts, gross geographical facts, would not fit with the preconception, they were either cen- sored out of mind, or the facts were themselves ' stretched out of shape. Thus the difficulty of the Japanese reaching the Germans five thousand miles away was, in measure, overcome by bringing the Germans more than half way to meet them. Be- tween March and June 1918, there was supposwl to be a German army operating tn Eastern Siberia. This phantom army consisted of some German prisoners actually seen, more German prisoners thought about, and chiefly of the delusion that those five thousand intervening miles did not really exist.' 3 A true conception of space is not a simple matter. If I draw a straight line on a map between Bombay and Hong Kong and measure the distance, I have learned nothing whatever about the distance I should have to cover on a voyage. And even if I measure the actual distance that I must traverse, I still know very little until I know what ships are in the service, when they run, how fast they go, whether I can secure accommodation and afford to pay for it. In practical life space is a matter of available transporta^ > See in thit connection Mr. Chatlei Grany** interriew with Manhal Foch, Nne York Timfi, February 16, 1918. "Getmany i> walking through Russia. America and Japan, who ate in a pontion to do 10, should go to meet her in Siberia." See also the resolution by Senator King of Utah, June to, 1918, and Mr. Taft's itatement in the Nna York Tiwui, June ti, tgiS, and the appeal to America on May 5, igiS, by Mt. A. J. Sack, Directot of the Kusiian Information Bureau: "IfGermany werein the A"' ' ' the would have 3,000,000 fighting aa the Eatt front with 136 PUBLIC OPINION tion, not of geometrical planes, as the old railroad magnate knew when he threatened to make grass grow in the streets of a city that had offended him. If I am motoring and ask how far it is to my destina- tion, I curse as an unmitigated booby the man who tetls me it is three miles, and does not mention a ^x mile detour. It does me no good to be told that it is three miles if you walk. I might as well be told it is one mile as the crow flies. I do not fly like a crow, and I am not walking either. I must know that it is nine miles for a motor car, and also, if that is the case, that six of them are ruts and puddles. ] call the pedestrian a nuisance who tells me it is three miles and think evil of the aviator who told me it was one mile. Both of them are talking about the space they have to cover, not the space I must cover. In the drawing of boundary lines absurd com- plications have arisen through f^lure to concave the practical geography of a region. Under some general formula like self-determination statesmen have at various times drawn lines on maps, which, when surveyed on the spot, ran through the middle of a factory, down the center of a village street, diagonally across the nave of a church, or between the kitchen and bedroom of a peasant's cottage. There have been frontiers in a grazing country which separated pasture from water, pasture from market, and in an industrial country, railheads from railroad. On the colored ethnic map the line was ethnically just, that is to say, just in the world of that ethnic map. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 137 4 But time, no less than space, fares badly. A conunon example is that of the man who tries by making an elaborate will to control his money long after his death. "It had been the purpose of the first William James," writes his great-grandson Henry James,' "to provide that his children (sev- eral of whom were under age when he died) should qualify themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the lat^ patrimony which he expected to be- queath to them, and with that in view he left a will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and instructions. He showed thereby how great were both his confidence in his own judgment and his solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants." The courts upset the will. For the law tn its objection to perpetuities rec<^izes that there are distinct limits to the usefulness of allowing anyone to impose his mora! stencil upon an unknown future. But the desire to impose it is a very human tr^t, so human that the law permits it to operate for a limited time after death. The amending clause of any constitution is a good index of the confidence the authors entertained about the reach of their opinions in the succeeding genera- tions. There are, I believe, American state con- stitutions which are almost incapable of amendment. The men who made them could have had but little sense of the flux of rime: to them the Here and Now was so brilliantly certain, the Hereafter so vague or so terrifying, that they had the courage to say how > THt Ltttm <4 Wmiam Jamti, Vol. I, p. & 138 PUBLIC OPINION life should run after they were gone. And then be- cause constitutions are difficult to amend, zealous people with a taste for mortmain have loved to write on this imperishable brass all kinds of rules and re- strictions that, given any decent humility about the future, ought to be no more permanent than an ordinary statute. A presumption about rime enters widely into our opinions. To one person an institution which has existed for the whole of his conscious life is part of the permanent furniture of the universe: to another it is ephemeral. Geolc^cal time is very different from biological time. Social time is most complex. The statesman has to decide whether to calculate for the emergency or few the long run. Some deci- sions have to be made on the basis of what will happen in the next two hours; others on what will happen in a week, a month, a season, a decade, when the children have grown up, or their children's children. An important part of wisdom is the ability to distinguish the time-conception that properly belongs to the thing in hand. The person who uses the wrong time-conception ranges from the dreamer who ignores the present to the philistine who can see nothing else. A true scale of values has a very acute sense of relative time. Distant time, past and future, has somehow to be conceived. But as James says, "of the longer dura- tion we have no direct 'realizing' sense."' The longest duration which we immediately feel is what is called the "specious present." It endures, ac- ' principles oj Psychology, Vol. i, p. 638, THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 139 cording to Titchcner, for about six seconds.' "All impressions within this period of time are present to us at once. This makes it possible for us to per- ceive changes and events as well as stationary ob- jects. The perceptual present is supplemented by the ideational present. Through the combination of per- ceptions with memory images, entire days, months, and even years of the past are brought together into the present." In this ideational present, vividness, as James s^d, is proportionate to the number of discrimina- tions we perceive within it. Thus a vacation in which we were bored with nothing to do passes slowly while we are in it, but seems very short in memory. Great activity kills time rapidly, but in memory its duration is long. On the relation between the amount we discriminate and our time perspective James has an interesting passage: * "We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enonnously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Baer has indulged in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10 as now; ^ if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be looo times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of •Gted by Warren, Human Psychology, p. i;;. *Op.nl.,ytA. I, p. 639. ■ In the moving picture thii effect u admirably produced by the iiltn-rapid ciinen. I40 PUBLIC OPINION seasons. If bom in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one loooth part of the sensations we get in 3 given time, and consequently to live looo times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restless boiling water springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc" 5 In his Outline of History Mr. Wells has made a gallant effort to visualize "the true proportions of historical to geological time." ^ On a scale which represents the time from Columbus to ourselves by three inches of space, the reader would have to walk 55 feet to see the date of the painters of the Altamara caves, 550 feet to see the earlier Neanderthalers, a mile or so to the last of the dinosaurs. More or less precise chronology does not begin until after 1000 B. c, and at that time "Sat^on I of the Akkadian- Sumerian Empire was a remote memory, . . . more remote than is Constantine the Great from the world of the present day. . . . Hammurabi had been 9 Hirvey Robinson, ThiNea Hutory, THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 141 dead a thousand years. . . . Stonehenge in England was already a thousand years old." Mr. Wells was writing with a purpose. "In the brief period of ten thousand years these units (into which men have combined) have grown from the small family tribe of the early neolithic culture to the vast united realms — vast yet still too small and partial — of the present time." Mr. Wells hoped by changing the time perspective on our present problems to change the mora! perspective. Yet the astronomical measure of time, the geolo^cal, the biological, any telescopic measure which minimizes the present is not "more true" than a microscopic. Mr. Simeon Strunsky is right when he insists that "if Mr. Wells is thinking of his subtitle, The Prob- able Future of Mankind, he is entitled to ask for any number of centuries to work out his solution. If he is thinking of the salvaging of this western civilization, reeling under the effects of the Great War, he must think in decades and scores of years." ' It all depends upon the practical purpose, for which you adopt the measure. There are situations when the time perspective needs to be lengthened, and others when it needs to be shortened. The man who says that it does not matter if 15,000,000 Chinese die of famine, because in two generations the birthrate will make up the loss, has used a time perspective to excuse his inertia. A person who pauperizes a healthy young man be- cause he is sentimentally overimpressed with an im- 142 PUBLIC OPINION mediate difficulty has lost sight of the duration of the beggar's life. The people who for the sake of an immediate peace are willing to buy otf an ag- gressive empire by indulging its appetite have al- lowed a specious present to interfere with the peace of their children. The people who will not be pa- tient with a troublesome neighbor, who want to bring everything to a "showdown," are no less the victims of a specious present. Into almost every social problem the proper cal- culation of time enters. Suppose, for example, it is a question of timber. Some trees grow faster than others. Then a sound forest policy is one in which the amount of each species and of each age cut in each season is made good by replanting. In so far as that calculation is correct the truest economy has been reached. To cut less is waste, and to cut more is exploitation. But there may come an emei^ency, say the need for aeroplane spruce in a war, when the year's allowance must be exceeded. An alert government will recoghize that and r^ard the restoration of the balance as a charge upon the future. Coal involves a different theory of time, because coal, unlike a tree, is produced on the scale of geo- Ic^ca! time. The supply is limited. Therefore a correct social policy involves intricate computation of the available reserves of the world, the indicated possibilities, the present rate of use, the present economy of use, and the alternative fuels. But THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 143 when that computation has been reached it must finally be squared with an ideal standard involving time. Suppose, for example, that engineers con- clude that the present fuels are bang exhausted at a certain rate; diat barring new discoveries industry will have to enter a phase of contracrion at some definite time in the future. We have then to de- termine how much thrift and self-denial we will use, after all feasible economies have been exercised, in order not to rob posterity. But what shall we con- sider posterity? Our grandchildren? Oiu* great- grandchildren? Perhaps we shall decide to calculate on a hundred years , believing that to be ample rime for the discovery of alternarive fuels if the necessity is made clear at once. The figures are, of course, hypothetical. But in calculadng that way we shall be employing what reason we have. We shall be giving social time its place in public opinion. Let us now imagine a somewhat different case: a contract between a city and a trolley-car company. The company says that it will not invest its capital unless it is granted a monopoly of the main highway for ninety-nine years. In the minds of the men who make that demand ninety-nine years is so long as to mean " forever." But suppose there is reason to think that surface cars, run from a central power plant on tracks, are going out of fashion in twenty years. Then it is a most unwise contract to make, for you are virtually condemning a future genera- tion to inferior transportation. In making such a contract the city officials lack a realizing sense of ninety-nine years. Far better to give the company 144 PUBLIC OPINION a subsidy now in order to attract capital than to stimulate investment by indulging a fallacious sense of eternity. No city official and no company official has a sense of real time when he talks about ninety-nine years. Papular history is a happy hunting ground of time confusions. To the average Englishman, for example, the behavior of Cromwell, the corruption of the Act of Union, the Famine of 1847 are wrongs suffered by people long dead and done by actors long dead with whom no living person, Irish or English, has any real connection. But in the mind of a patriotic Irishman these same events are almost contemporary. His memory is like one of those historical p^ntings, where Virgil and Dante sit side by side conversing. These perspectives and foreshortentngs are a great barrier between peoples. It is ever so difficult for a person of one tradition to remember what is contemporary in the tradition of another. Almost nothing that goes by the name of Historic Rights or Historic Wrongs can be called a truly objective view of the past. Take, for example, the Franco-German debate about Alsace-Lorraine. It all depends on the original date you select. If you start with the Rauraci and Sequani, the lands are historically part of Ancient Gaul. If you prefer Henry I, they are historically a German territory; if you take 1273 they belong to the House of Austria; if you take 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia, most of them are French; if you take Louis XIV and the year 1688 they are almost all French. If you are THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 145 using the argument from history you are fairly cer- tain to select those dates in the past which support your view of what should be done now. Aliments atx>ut "races" and nationalities often betray the same arbitrary view of time. During the war, under the influence of powerful feeling, the differences between "Teutons" on the one hand, and "Anglo-Saxons" and French on the other, was popularly believed to be an eternal difference. They had always been opposing races. Yet a generation ago, historians, like Freeman, were emphasi^ng the common Teutonic oripn of the West European peoples, and ethnologists would certunly insist that the Germans, English, and the greater part of the French are branches of what was once a common stock. The general rule is: if you like a people to^ay you come down the branches to the trunk; if you dislike them you insist that the separate branches are separate trunks. In one case you fix your atten- tion on the period before they were distinguishable; in the other on the period after which they became disrinct. And the view which fits the mood is taken as the "truth." An amiable variation is the family tree. Usually one couple are appointed the original ancestors, if possible, a couple associated with an honorific event like the Norman Conquest. That couple have no ancestors. They are not descendants. Yet they were the descendants of ancestors, and the expression that So-and-So was the founder of his house means not that he is the Adam of his family, but that he is ' the particular ancestor from whom it is desirable 146 PUBLIC OPINION to start, or perhaps the earliest ancestor of which there is a record. But genealc^cal tables exhibit a deeper prejudice. Unless the female line happens to be especially remarkable descent is traced down throi^h the males. - The tree is male. At various moments females accrue to it as itinerant bees light upon an ancient apple tree. 7 But the future is the most illusive time of all. Our temptation here is to jump over necessary steps in the sequence; and as we are governed by hope or doubt, to exaggerate or to minimize the time required to complete various parts of a process. The dis< cussion of the role to be exercised by wage-earners in the management of industry is riddled with this difficulty. For management is a word that covers many functions.' Some of these require no training; some require a little training; others can be learned only in a lifetime. And the truly discriminating pro- gram of industrial democratization would beone based on the proper time sequence, so that the assumption of responsibility would run parallel to a complementary program of industrial training. The proposal for a sudden dictatorship of the proletariat is an attempt to do away with the intervening time of preparation; the resistance to all sharing of responsibility an attempt to deny the alteration of human capacity in the course of time. Primitive notions of democ- racy, such as rotation in office, and contempt for the expert, are really nothing but the old myth that ' Cj. Carter L. Goodiicb, The Frontier of ConiroL THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 147 the Goddess of Wisdom sprang mature and fully armed from the brow of Jove. They assume that what it takes years to learn need not be learned at all. Whenever the phrase "backward people" is used as the basis of a policy, the conception of time is a decisive element. The Covenant of the League of Nations says/ for example, that "the character of the mandate must differ according to the st^e of the development of the people," as well as on other grounds. Certain communities, it asserts, "have reached a stage of development" where their inde- pendence can be provisionally recognized, subject to advice and assistance "until such time as they are able to stand alone." The way in which the man- datories and the mandated conceive that time will influence deeply thdr relations. Thus in the case of Cuba the judgment of the American government virtually coincided with that of the Cuban patriots, and though there has been trouble, there is no finer page in the history of how strong powers have dealt with the weak. Oftener in that history the estimates have not coincided. Where the imperial people, whatever its public expressions, has been deeply convinced that the backwardness of the backward was so hopeless as not to be worth remedying, or so profitable that it was not desirable to remedy it, the rie has festered and poisoned the peace of the world. There have been a few cases, very few, where backwardness has meant to the ruling power the need for a prc^am of forwardness, a program with definite standards and definite estimates of time. Far more 148 PUBLIC OPINION frequently, so frequently in fact as to seem the rule, backwardness has been conceived as an intrinsic and eternal mark of inferiority. And then every attempt to be less backward has been frowned upon as the sedition, which, under these conditions, it undoubtedly is. In our own race wars we can see some of the results of the failure to realize that time would gradually obliterate the slave morality of the Negro, and that social adjustment based on this mor- ality would begin to break down. It is hard not to picture the future as if it obeyed our present purposes, to annihilate whatever delays our desire, or immortalize whatever stands between us and our fears. In putting tc^ther our public opinions, not only do we have to picture more space than we can see with our eyes, and more time than we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine. We have to summarize and general- ize. We have to pick out samples, and treat them as typical. To pick fairly a good sample of a large class is not easy. The problem belongs to the science of statistics, and it is a most difficult affair for anyone whose mathematics is primitive, and mine remain azoic in spite of the half dozen manuals which I once devoudy imagined that I understood. All they have done for me is to make me a litde more conscious of how hard it is to classify and to sample. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 149 how readily we spread a little butter over the whole universe. Some time ago a group of social workers in Sheffield, England, started out to substitute an accurate pic- ture of the mental equipment of the workers of that city for the impressionistic one they had.' They wished to say, with some decent grounds for saying i t, how the workers of Sheffield were equipped. They found, as we all find the moment we refuse to let our first notion prevail, that they were beset with complications. Of the test they employed nothing need be said here except that it was a large ques- tionnmre. For the sake of the illustration, assume that the questions were a fair test of mental equip- ment for English city life. Theoretically, then, those questions should have been put to every member of the working class. But it is not so easy to know who are the working class. However, assume again that the census knows how to classify them. Then there were roughly i04,ocx> men and 107,000 women who ought to have been questioned. They possessed the answers which would justify or refute the casual phrase about the "ignorant workers" or the "intelligent workers." But nobody could think of questioning the whole two hundred thou- sand. So the social workers consulted an eminent statis- tician, Professor Bowley. He advised them that not less than 408 men and 408 women would prove to be a fair sample. According to mathematical calcula- tion this number would not show a greater deviation ■ Tlu Equipmint of liu Worktr. ISO PUBLIC OPINION from the average than i in 22.' They had, therefore^ to question at least 8i6 people before they could pretend to talk about the average workingman. But which 8i6 people should they approach? "We might have gathered particulars concerning workers to whom one or another of us had a prc-inquiry access; we might have worked through philanthropic gentlemen and ladies who were in contact with cer- tain sections of workers at a club, a mission, an infirmary, a place of worship, a setdement. But such a method of selection would produce entirely worthless results. The workers thus selected would not be in any sense representative of what is popu- larly called ' the average run of workers; ' they would represent nothing but the little coteries to which they belonged. "The right way of securing 'victims,' to which at immense cost of time and labour we rigidly adhered, is to get hold of your workers by some 'neutral' or 'accidental' or 'random' method of approach." This they did. And after all these precautions they came to no more definite conclusion than that on their classification and according to their question- naire, among 200,000 Sheffield workers "about one quarter" were "well equipped," "approaching three- quarters" were "inadequately equipped" and that "about one-fifteenth" were "mal-equipped." Compare this conscientious and almost pedantic method of arriving at an opinion, with our usual judgments about masses of people, about the volatile Irish, and the logical French, and the disciplined ' Op. eit., footnote, p. 65. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 151 Germans, and the ignorant Slavs, and the honest Chinese, and the untrustworthy Japanese, and so on and so on. All these are generalizations drawn from samples, but the samples are selected by a method that statisttcally is wholly unsound, llius the employer will judge labor by the most trouble- some employee or the most docile that he knows, and many a radical group has imagined that it was a fair sample of the working class. How many women's views on the "servant question" are litde more than the reflection of their own treatment of their servants? The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which sup- ports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class. A great deal of confusion arises when people de- cline to classify themselves as we have classified them. Prophecy would be so much ea^er if only they would stay where we put them. But, as a matter of fact, a phrase like the working class will cover only some of the truth for a part of the time. When you take all the people, below a certain level of income, and call them the working class, you cannot help assuming that the people so classified will behave in accordance with your stereotype. Just who those people are you are not quite certain. Fac- tory hands and mine workers fit in more or less, but farm hands, small farmers, peddlers, little shop keepers, clerks, servants, soldiers, policemen, firemen slip out of the net. The tendency, when you are appealing to the "working class," is to fix your at- tention on two or three million more or less confirmed 152 PUBLIC OPINION trade unionists, and treat them as Labor; the other seventeen or eighteen million, who might qualify statistically, are tacitly endowed with the point of view ascribed to the organized nucleus. How very misleading it was to impute to the British working class in 1918-1921 the point of ^ew expressed in the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress or in the pamphlets written by intellectuals. The stereotype of Labor as Emancipator selects the evidence which supports itself and rejects, the other. And so parallel with the real movements of working men there exists a fiction of the Labor Movement, in which an idealized mass moves to- wards an ideal goal. The fiction deals with the future. In the future possibilities are almost indis- tinguishable from probabilities and probabilities from certainties. If the future is long enough, the human will might turn what is just conceivable into what is very likely, and what is likely into what is sure to happen. James called this the faith ladder, and said that "it is a slope of goodwill on which in the larger questions of life men habitually live." ' 'i. There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being tnie, nothing contradictory; 2. It might have been true under certain conditions; 3. It may be true even now; 4. It is fit to be true; 5. It ougkl to be true; 6. It must be true; 7. It shall be true, at any rate true for me." > William Jamet, Somi Protleni of Pkiloiopky, p. 2x4. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 153 And, as he added in another place,' "your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making it securely true in the end." Yet no one. would have inmsted more than he, that, so far as we know how, we must avoid substituting the goal for the starting point, must avoid reading back into the present what courage, effort and skill might create in the future. Yet this truism is inordinately difficult to live by, because every one of us is so little trained in the selection of our samples. If we believe that a certun thing ought to be true, we can almost always find either an instance where it is true, or someone who believes it ought to be true. It is ever so hard when a concrete fact il- lustrates a hope to weigh that fact properly. When the first six people we meet agree with us, it is not easy to remember that they may all have read the same newspaper at breakfast. And yet we cannot send out a questionnaire to 816 random samples every time we wish to estimate a probability. In dealing with any large mass of facts, the presumption is against our having picked true samples, if we are acting on a casual impression. 9 And when we try to go one step further in order to seek the causes and effects of unseen and com- plicated afFiurs, haphazard opinion is very tricky. There are few big issues in public life where cause and effect are obvious at once. They are not obvious ' A PluTeliitic Utthmt, p. 319. 1 54 PUBLIC OPINION to scholars who have devoted years, let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage move- ments, or the migration and the assimilation of peoples, or the diplomatic purposes of foreign powers. Yet somehow we are all supposed to have opinions on these matters, and it is not surprising that the commonest form of reasoning is the intuitive, post hoc ergo propter hoc. The more untrained a mind, the more readily it works out a theory that two things which catch its attention at the same time are causally connected. We have already dwelt at some length on the way things reach our attention. We have seen that our access to information is obstructed and imcertain, and that our apprehension is deeply controlled by our stereotypes; that the evidence available to our reason is subject to illusions of defense, prestige, morality, space, time, and sampling. We must note now that with this initial taint, public opinions are still further beset, because in a series of events seen mostly through stereotypes, we readily accept se- quence or parallelism as equivalent to cause and eifect. This is most likely to happen when two ideas that come together arouse the same feeling. If they come tt^ether they are likely to arouse the same feeling; and even when they do not arrive together a power- ful feeling attached to one is likely to suck out of all the corners of memory any idea that feels about the same. Thus everything painful tends to collect into one system of cause and effect, and likewise everything pleasant. THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES 155 "lld iim (1675) This day I hear that GtodJ has shot an arrow into the midst of this Town. The small pox is in an ordinary y' sign of the Swan, the ordinaiy Kecpeis name is Windsor. His daughter is sick of the disease. It is observable that this disease b^ns at an alehouse, to testify God's displeasure ag' the sin of drunkenness & y* of multiplying alehouses! " * Thus Increase Mather, and thus in the year 1919 a distinguished Professor of Celestial Mechanics dis- cussing the Einstein theory: "It may well be that. . . . Bolshevist uprisings are in reality the visible objects of some underiying, deep, mental disturbance, world-wide in character. . . . This same spirit of unrest has invaded science." * In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violendy. They may have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Rela< dvity and Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion. In a superstitious mind, like that of the Professor of CelestiaJ Mechanics, emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and im- beds whatever it touches. When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, aU sorts of objects ludicrously entangled in each other. Anything can be related to anything else, provided it feels like it. Nor has a mind in such a state any way of knowing how preposterous it is. Ancient fears, reinforced by more recent fears, coagulate into a snarl of fears > Tkt Htart of At Pntiun, p. 177, edited br Eliiibcth Decriog HamcMn, ■Otcdin Til* Nm lUpMicOve. 24, 1919, p. 110. iS6 PUBLIC OPINION where anything that is dreaded is the cause of any- thing else that is dreaded. Generally it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of the absolute shows itself. For we do not like qualifying adverbs.' They clutter up sentences, and interfere with irre- sistible feeling. We prefer most to more, least to less, we dislike the words rather, perhaps, if, or, but, toward, not quite, almost, temporarily, partly. Yet nearly every opinion about public affairs needs to be deflated by some word of this sort. But in our free moments everything tends to behave abso- lutely, — one hundred percent, everywhere, forever. It is not enough to say that our side is more right than the enemy's, that our victory will help democ- racy more than his. One must insist that our victory will end war forever, and make the world safe for democracy. And when the war is over, though we have thwarted a greater evil than those which still afflict us, the relativity of the result fades out, the absoluteness of the present evil overcomes our spirit, and we feel that we are helpless because we have not been irresistible. Between omnipotence and im- potence the pendulum swings. Real space, real time, real numbers, real connec- tions, real weights are lost. The perspective and the background and the dimensions of action are clipped and frozen in the stereotype. ' Cf. Freud's discussion of absolutism in dreams, Inttrprtution of Dttamj, Chapttr VI, especially pp. a88, et itq. PART IV INTERESTS Chapter ii. The Eklistihg of Interest " 10. Selt-Interest Reconsidered CHAPTER XI THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST But the human mind is not a film which registers once and for all each impression that comes through its shutters and lenses. The human mind is end- lessly and persistently creative. The pictures fade or combine, are sharpened here, condensed there, as we make them more completely our own. They do not lie inert upon the surface of the mind, but are reworked by the poetic faculty into a personal expression of ourselves. We distribute the emphasis and participate in the action. In order to do this we tend to personalize quanti- ties, and to dramatize relations. As some sort of all^ory, except in acutely sophisticated minds, the affairs of the world are represented. Social Move- ments, Economic Forces, National Interests, Public Opinion are treated as persons, or persons like the Pope, the President, Leniuj Morgan or the King be- come ideas and institutions. The deepest of all the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to inanimate or collective things. The bewildering variety of our impressions, even after they have been censored in all kinds of ways, tends to force us to adopt the greater economy of the allegory. So great is the multitude of things ■ .: -c is .aba mie» rhat lo is a nn l ir has csTvctopsi - -rraiicy. Cnnl ic rdeases ^,:2J» some craving ui' our irc dbiects wtuck tfci noc THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST 163 some aspect of the picture. The identification, or what Vernon Lee has called empathy,' may be almost infinitely subtle and symbolic. The mimicry may be performed without our being aware of it, and some- times in a way that would horrify those sections of our personality which support our self-respect. In sophisticated people the participation may not be in the fate of the hero, but in the fate of the whole idea to which both hero and villain are essentia]. But these are refinements. In popular representation the handles for identifi- cation are almost always marked. You know who the hero is at once. And no work promises to be easily popular where the marking is not definite and the choice clear.' But that is not enough. The audience must have something to do, and the con- templation of the true, the good and the beautiful is not something to do. In order not to sit inertly in the presence of the picture, and this applies as much to newspaper stories as to fiction and the cinema, the audience must be exercised by the image. Now there are two forms of exercise which far transcend all others, both as to ease with which they are aroused, and eagerness with which stimuli for them are sought. They are sexual passion and fighting, and the two have so many associations with each other, blend into each other so intimately, that a fight about sex outranks every other theme in the breadth ofits appeal. There is none so engrossing or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers. . C/.PartVn. i62 PUBLIC OPINION gesture, or in a rythm of speech. Visualization may catch the stimulus and the result. But the inter- mediate and internal is often as badly caricatured by a vtsualizer, as is the intention of the composer by an enormous soprano in the sweet maiden's part. Nevertheless, though they have often a peculiar justice, intuitions remain highly private and largely incommunicable. But social intercourse depends on communication, and while a person can often steer his own life with the utmost grace by virtue of his intuitions, he usually has great difEculty in making them real to others. When he talks about them they sound like a sheaf of mist. For while intuition does pve a fairer perception of human feeling, the reason with its spatial and tactile prejudice can do little with that perception. Therefore, where acrion de- pends on whether a number of people are of one mind, it is probably true that in the first instance no idea is lucid for practical decision until it has visual or tactile value. But it is also true, that no visual idea is significant to us until it has enveloped some stress of our own personality. Until it releases or resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains one of the objects which do not matter. Pictures have always been the surest way of con- veying an idea, and next in order, words that call up pictures in memory. But the idea conveyed is not fully our own until we have identified ourselves with THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST 163 some aspect of the picture. The identification, or what Vernon Lee has called empathy,' may be almost infinitely subtle and symbolic. The mimicry may be performed without our being aware of it, and some- times in a way that would horrify those sections of our personality which support our self-respect. In sophisticated people the participation may not be in the fate of the hero, but in the fate of the whole idea to which both hero and villain are essential. But these are refinements. In popular representation the handles for identifi- cation are almost always marked. You know who the hero is at once. And no work promises to be easily popular where the marking is not definite and the choice clear.* But that is not enough. The audience must have something to do, and the con- templation of the true, the good and the beautiful is not something to do. In order not to sit inertly in the presence of the picture, and this applies as much to newspaper stories as to fiction and the cinema, the audience must be exercised by the image. Now there are two forms of exercise which far transcend all others, both as to ease with which they are aroused, and eagerness with which stimuli for them are sought. They are sexual pas^on and fighting, and the two have so many associations with each other, blend into each other so intimately, that a fight about sex outranks every other theme in the breadth of its appeal. There is none so engrossing or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers. i64 PUBLIC OPINION The sexual motif figures hardly at all in American political imagery. Except in certain minor ecstasies of war, in an occasional scandal, or in phases of the racial conflict with N^roes or Asiatics, to speak of it at all would seem far-fetched. Only in moving pic- tures, novels, and some magazine fiction are indus- trial relations, business competition, politics, and diplomacy tangled up with the girl and the other woman. But the fighting motif appears at every turn. Politics is interesting when there is a fight, or as we say, an issue. And in order to make politics popular, issues have to be found, even when in truth and justice, there are none, — none, in the sense that the differences of judgment, or principle, or fact, do not call for the etdistment of pugnacity.' But where pugnacity is not enlisted, those of us who are not directly involved find it hard to keep up our interest. For those who are involved the absorption may be real enough to hold them even when no issue is involved. They may be exercised by sheer joy in activity, or by subtle rivalry or inven- tion. But for those to whom the whole problem is external and distant, these other faculties do not easily come into play. In order that the faint image of the affair shall mean something to them, they must be allowed to exercise the love of struggle, suspense, and victory. Miss Patterson' insists that "suspense. . . con- 'C/. Tiaacta Taylor Patterson, Cinma Craftsmanihif, pp. 31-31. "III. If the plot licks suspcDse: i. Add an antagonist, 1. Add an ob- atacle, 3. Add a problem, f. EinphaiiEe one of the questions in the THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST 165 stitutes the difFerence between the masterpieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the pictures at the Rivoli or the Rialto Theatres." Had she made it dear that the masterpieces lack either an easy mode of identification or a theme popular -for this generation, she would be wholly right in saying that this "explains why the people straggle into the Metropolitan by twos and threes and struggle into the Rialto and Rivoli by hundreds. The twos and threes look at a picture in the Art Museum for less than ten minutes — unless they chance to be art students, critics, or connoisseurs. The hundreds in the Rivoli or the Rialto look at the picture for more than an hour. As far as beauty is concerned there can be no comparison of the merits of the two pic- tures. Yet the morion picture draws more people and holds them at attention longer than do the masterpieces, not through any intrinsic merit of its own, but because it depicts unfolding events, the outcome of which the audience- is breathlessly wait- ing. It possesses the element of struggle, which never fails to arouse suspense." In order then that the distant situation shall not be a gray flicker on the edge of attenrion, it should be capable of transladon into pictures in which the opportunity for identification is recognizable. Unless that happens it will interest only a few for a little while. It will belong to the sights seen but not felt, to the sensations that beat on our sense organs, and are not acknowledged. We have to take sides. We have to be able to take sides. In the recesses of our being we must step out of the aucUence on to the i66 PUBLIC OPINION stage, and wrestle as the hero for the victory of good over evil. We must breathe into the allegory the breath of our life. And so, in spite of the cridcs, a verdict is rendered in the old controversy about realism and romanticism. Our popular taste is to have the drama originate in a setting realistic enough to make identification plaus- ible and to have it terminate in a setting romantic enough to be desirable, but not so romantic as to be inconceivable. In between the beginning and the end the canons are liberal, but the true banning and the happy ending are landmarks. The moving picture audience rejects fantasy logically developed, because in pure fantasy there is no familiar foothold in the age of machines. It rejects realism relentlessly pursued because it does not enjoy defeat in a struggle that has become its own. What will be accepted as true, as realistic, as good, as evil, as desirable, is not eternally fixed. These are fixed by stereotypes, acquired from earlier experi- ences and carried over into judgment of later ones. And, therefore, if the financial investment in each film and in popular magazines were not so exorbitant as to require instant and widespread popularity, men of spirit and imagination would be able to use the screen and the periodical, as one might dream of their being used, to enlarge and to refine, to verify and criticize the repertory of images with which our imaginations work. But, given the present costs, the men who make moving pictures, like the church THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST 167 and the court punters of other ^es, must adhere to the stereotypes that they find, or pay the price of frustrating expectation. The stereotypes can be altered} but not in time to guarantee success when the fihn is released six months from now. The men who do alter the stereotypes, the pioneer- ing artists and critics, are naturally depressed and angered at managers and editors who protect their investments. They are risking everything, then why not the others? That is not quite fair, for in thdr righteous fury they have forgotten their own rewards, which are beyond any that their employers can hope to feel. They could not, and would not if they could, change places. And they have for- gotten another thing in the unceasing war with PhilisUa. They have forgotten that they are measur- ing thdr own success by standards that artists and wise men of the past would never have dreamed of invoking. They are asking for circulations and audiences that were never considered by any artist until the last few generations. And when they do not get them, they are disappointed. Those who catch on, like Sinclur Lewis in " M^n Street," are men who have succeeded in project- ing definitely what great numbers of other people were obscurely trying to say inside their heads. "You have said it for me." They establish a new form which is then endlessly copied until it, too, becomes a stereotype of perception. The next pioneer finds it difficult to make the public see Main Street any other way. And he, like the forerunners of Sincl^r Lewis, has a quarrel mth the public. i68 PUBLIC OPINION This quarrel is due not only to the conflict of stereotypes, but to the pioneering ardst's reverence for his material. Whatever the plane he chooses, on that plane he remains. If he is dealing with the inwardness of an event he follows it to its conclusion r^ardiess of the piun it causes. He will not tag his fantasy to help anyone, or cry peace where there is no peace. There is his America. But big audiences have no stomach for such severity. They are more interested in themselves than in anything else in the world. The selves in which they are interested are the selves that have been revealed by schools and by tradition. They insist that a work of art shall be a vehicle with a step where they can climb aboard, and that they shall ride, not according to the contours of the country, but to a land where for an hour there are no clocks to punch and no dishes to wash. To satisfy these demands there exists an intermediate class of artists who are able and willing to confuse the planes, to piece tc^ether a realistic- romantic compound out of the inventions of greater men, and, as Miss Patterson advises, give "what real life so rarely does — the triumphant resolution of a set of difficulties; the anguish of virtue and the triumph of sin. . . changed to the glorifications of virtue and the eternal punishment of its enemy." ' 4 The ideologies of politics obey these rules. The foothold of realism is always there. The picture of some real evil, such as the German threat or THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST 169 class conflict, is recognizable in the argument. There is a description of some aspect of the world which is convincing because it agrees with famihar ideas. But as the ideology deals with an unseen future, as well as with a tangible present, it soon crosses im- perceptibly the frontier of verification. In describ- ing the present you are more or less tied down to common experience. In describing what nobody has experienced you are bound to let go. You stand at Arm^eddon, more or less, but you battle for the Lord, perhaps. ... A true beginning, true according to the standards prevailing, and a happy ending. Every Marxist is hard as nails about the brutalities of the present, and mostly sunshine about the day after the dictatorship. So were the war propagandists: there was not a bestial quality in human nature they did not find everywhere east of the Rhine, or west of it if they were Germans. The bestiality was there all right. Butafter the victory, eternal peace. Plenty of this is quite cynically delitwrate. For the skilful pro- pagandist knows that while you must start with a plausible analysis, you must not keep on analyzing, because the tedium of real political accomplishment will soon destroy interest. So the prop^andist ex- hausts the interest in reality by a tolerably plausible banning, and then stokes up energy for a long voyage by brandishing a passport to heaven. The formula works when the public fiction en- meshes itself with a private urgency. But once en- meshed, in the heat of battle, the original self and the ori^al stereotype which effected the junction may be wholly lost to sight. CHAPTER XII SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED I Therefore^ the identical story is not the same story to all who hear it. Each will enter it at a slightly different point, since no two experiences are exactly alike; he will reenact it in his own way, and transfuse it with his own feelings. Sometimes an artist of compelling skill will force us to enter into lives altogether unlike our own, lives that seem at first glance dull, repulsive, or eccentric. But that is rare. In almost every story that catches our attention we become a character and act out the role with a pantomime of our own. The pantomime may be subtle or gross, may be sympathetic to the story, or only crudely analogous; but it will consist of those feelings which are aroused by our concep- tion of the role. And so, the original theme as it circulates, is stressed, twisted, and embroidered by all the minds through which it goes. It is as if a play of Shakespeare's were rewritten each time it is performed with all the changes of emphasis and mean- ing that the actors and audience inspired. Something very like that seems to have happened to the stories in the sagas before they were definitively written down. In our time the printed record, such as it is, checks the exuberance of each individual's SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 171 fancy. But against rumor there is little or no check, and the origjnal story, true or invented, grows wings and horns, hoo^ and beaks, as the artist in each gossip works upon it. The first narrator's account does not keep its shape and proportions. It is edited and revised by all who played with it as they heard it, used it for day dreams, and passed it on.' Consequently the more mixed the audience, the greater will be the variation in the response. For as the audience grows larger, the number of common words diminishes. Thus the common factors in the story become more abstract. This story, lacking precise character of its own, is heard by people of highly varied character. They give it their own character. The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications, according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the in- dividual, his faculties, his career, the progress of his career, an emphasized aspect of his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on the board in any of the games of life that he is playing. What reaches him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs, anecdotes, and some casual ex- perience of his own, he conceives through his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take his personal problems as partial 172 PUBLIC OPINION samples o( the greater environment. He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic en- largement of his private life. But not necessarily of that private life as he would describe it to himself. For in his private life the choices are narrow, and much of himself is squeezed down and out of sight where it cannot directly govern his outward behavior. And thus, beside the more averse people who project the happiness of their own lives into a general good will, or their unhappi- ness into suspicion and hate, there are the outwardly happy people who are brutal everywhere but in thur own circle, as well as the people who, the more they detest thdr families, their friends, th^r jobs, the more they overflow with love for mankind. As you descend from generalities to detiul, it be- comes more apparent that the character in which men deal with their afFurs is not fixed. Possibly their different selves have a common stem and com- mon qualities, but the branches and the twigs have many forms. Nobody confronts every situation with the same character. His character varies in some degree through the sheer influence of time and ac- cumulating memory, since he is not an automaton. His character varies, not pnly in time, but according to circumstance. The legend of the solitary English- man in the South Seas, who invariably shaves and puts on a black tie for dinner, bears witness to his own intuitive and civilized fear of losing the character which he has acquired. So do diaries, and albums, and souvenirs, old letters, and old clothes, and the love of unchan^ng routine testify to our sense of SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 173 how hard it is to step twice in the Heraclitan river. There is no one self always at work. And there- fore it is of great importance in the formation of any public opinion, what self is engaged. The Japanese ask die right to settle in California. Clearly it makes a whole lot of difference whether you con- ceive the demand as a desire to grow fruit or to marry the white man's daughter. If two nations are disputing a piece of territory, it matters greatly whether the people regard the negotiarions as a real estate deal, an attempt to humiliate them, or, in the excited and provocative language which usually enclouds these arguments, as a rape. For the self which takes charge of the instincts when we are thinking about lemons or distant acres is very dif- ferent from the self which appears when we are thinking even potentially as the outraged head o( a family. In one case the private feeling which enters into the opinion is tepid, in the other, red hot. And so while it is so true as to be mere tautology that "self-interest" determines opinion, the statement is not illuminating, until we know which self out of many selects and directs the interest so conceived. Religious teaching and popular wisdom have al- ways distinguished several personalities in each human bang. They have been called the Higher and Lower, the Spiritual and the Material, the Divine and the Carnal; and although we may not wholly accept this classificarion, we cannot fail to observe that distinctions exist. Instead of two anti- thetic selves, a modern man would probably note 174 PUBLIC OPINION a good many not so sharply separated. He would say that the distinction drawn by theologians was arbitrary and external, because many different selves were grouped together as higher provided they fitted into the theologian's cat^orics, but he would recog- nize nevertheless that here was an authentic clue to the variety of human nature. We have learned to note many selves, and to be a little less ready to issue judgment upon them. We understand that we see the same body, but often a different man, depending on whether he is dealing with a social equal, a social inferior, or a social su- perior; on whether he is making love to a woman he is eligible to marry, or to one whom he is not; on whether he is courting a woman, or whether he considers himself her proprietor; on whether he is dealing with his children, his partners, his most trusted subordinates, the boss who can make him or break him; on whether he is struggling for the neces- sities of life, or successful; on whether he is dealing with a friendly alien, or a despised one; on whether he is in great danger, or in perfect security; on whether he is alone in Paris or among his family in Peoria. People differ widely, of course, in the consistency of thdr characters, so widely that they may cover the whole gamut of differences between a split sou! like Dr. Jekyll's to an utterly singleminded Brand, Parsifal, or Don Quixote. If the selves are too un- related, we distrust the man; if they are too inflex- ibly on one track we find him arid, stubborn, or eccentric. In the repertory of characters, meager SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 175 for the isolated and the self-sufficient, highly varied for the adaptable, there is a whole range of selves, from that one at the top which we should wish God to see, to those at the bottom that we ourselves do not dare to see. There may be octaves for the family, — father, Jehovah, tyrant, — husband, pro- prietor, male, — lover, lecher, — for the occupation, — employer, master, exploiter, — competitor, intriguer, enemy, — subordinate, courtier, snob. Some never come out into public view. Others are called out only by exceptional circumstances. But the char- acters take thdr form from a man's conceprion of the situation in which he finds himself. If the environment to which he is sensitive happens to be the smart set, he will imitate the character he con- ceives to be appropriate. That character will tend to act as modulator of his bearing, his speech, his choice of subjects, his preferences. Much of the comedy of life lies here, in the way people imagine thar characters for situations that are strange to them: the professor among promoters, the deacon at a poker game, the cockney in the country, the paste diamond among real diamonds. 3 Into the making of a man's characters there en- ters a variety of influences not easily separated.' The analysis in its fiandamentals is perhaps still as doubtful as it was in the fifth century b. c. when ' Foi an interaUDB tketch ef the mote noteworthy early atiempu to explain character, lee the chapter called "The Antecedents of the Study of Character aoA Tenpcnment," in Joieph Jaitrotr's, The Psytholoty of 176 PUBLIC OPINION Hippocrates formulated the doctrine of the humors, distinguished the sanguine, the melancholic, the choleric, and the phlegmatic dispositions, and ascribed them to the blood, the black bile, the yellow bile, and the phlegm. The latest theories, such as one finds them in Cannon,' Adler,' Kempf,' appear to follow much the same scent, from the outward behavior and the inner consciousness to the physiology of the body. But in spite of an im- mensely improved technique, no one would be likely to claim that there are setded conclusions which enable us to set apart nature from nurture, and ab> stract the native character from the acquired. It is only in what Joseph Jastrow has called the slums of psychology that the explanation of character is regarded as a fixed system to be applied by phrenol- ogists, palmists, fortune-tellers, mind-readers, and a few political professors. There you will still find it asserted that "the Chinese are fond of colors, and have their eyebrows much vaulted " while " the heads of the Calmucks are depressed from above, but very lai^e laterally, about the organ which gives the inclination to acquire; and this nation's pro- pensity to steal, etc., is admitted." * The modern psychologists are disposed to regard the outward behavior of an adult as an equation between a number of variables, such as the resistance of the environment, repressed cravings of several ' Tkf Autonomic FuTictioni and ike Ferionatity; Piyckopalhoiogy. C}. also Louis Berman: The Clavdi Rtgidating Ptriontdity. * Jastrcm, op. til., p. 156. SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 177 maturities, and the manifest personality.^ They permit us to suppose, though I have not seen the notion formulated, that the repression or control of cravings, is fixed not in relation to the whole person all the time, but more or less in respect to his various selves. There are things he will not do as a patriot that he will do when he is not thinking of himself as a patriot. No doubt there are impulses, more or less incipient in childhood that are never exercised again in the whole of a man's life, except as they enter obscurely and indirectly into combina- tion with other impulses. But even that is not certain, ^nce repression is not irretrievable. For just as psychoanalysis can bring to the surface a buried impulse, so can social situations." It is only when our surroundings remain normal and placid, when what is expected of us by those we meet is consistent, that we live without knowledge of many of our dispositions. When the unexpected occurs, we learn much about ourselves that we did not know. The selves, which we construct with the help of all who influence us, prescribe which impulses, how em- ' Fonnulated by Kempf, Piychopatiology, p. 74, at followt: Muufesl wishes Later ReprcMcd Wiihei AdfJescEiit Repretscd Wiihe* Prcidoleicetil Repreiud Wuhet * Cf. the very interetdng book of Everett Dean Maitin, Tke Btkmor ofCnmdt. Alw Hobbes, Leviadum, Part II, Ch. a;. " For the panioiu of men, which asunder are moderate, as (he heat of one brand, in an auembly ■IE tike many brands, that inflame one another, especially when they blow one another with oraliona. . . ." LcBoo, Tlu Crovd, elaborate* this obterratioa of Hobbei'i. 178 PUBLIC OPINION phasized, how directed, are appropriate to certiun typical situations for which we have learned pre- pared attitudes. For a recc^nizable type of exper- ience, there is a character which controls the out- ward manifestations of our whole being. Murderous hate is, for example, controlled in civil life. Though you choke with rage, you must not display it as a parent, child, employer, politician. You would not wish to display a personality that exudes murderous hate. You frown upon it, and the people around you also frown. But if a war breaks out, the chances are that everybody you admire will begin to feel the justification of killing and hating. At first the vent for these feelings is very narrow. The selves which come to the front are those which are attuned to a real love of country, the kind of feeling that you find in Rupert Brooke, and in Sir Edward Grey's speech on August 3, 1914, and in President Wilson's address to Congress on April 2, 1917. The reality of war is still abhorred, and what war actually means is learned but gradually. For previous wars are only trans- figured memories. In that honeymoon phase, the realists of war righdy insist that the nation is not yet awake, and reassure each other by saying: "Wait for the casualty lists." Gradually the impulse to " kill becomes the main business, and alt those char- acters which might modify it, disintegrate. The impulse becomes central, is sanctified, and gradually turns unmanageable. It seeks a vent not alone on the idea of the enemy, which is all the enemy most people actually see during the war, but upon all the persons and objects and ideas that have always been SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 179 hateful. Hatred of the enemy is legitimate. These other hatreds have themselves legitimized by the crudest analogy^ and by what, once having cooled off, we recognize as the most far-fetched analogy. It takes a long time to subdue so powerful an impulse once it goes loose. And therefore, when the war is over in fact, it takes time and stru^le to regain self-control, and to deal with the problems of peace in civilian character. Modem war, as Mr. Herbert Croly has satd, is inherent in the political structure of modern society, but outlawed by its ideals. For the civilian popula- tion there exists no ideal code of conduct in war, such as the soldier still possesses and chivalry once prescribed. The civilians are without standards, except those that the best of them manage to im- provise. The only standards they possess make war an accursed thing. Yet chough the war may be a necessary one, no moral training has prepared them for it. Only their higher selves have a code and patterns, and when they have to act in what the higher regards as a lower character profound disturb- ance results. The prq>aration of characters for all the situa- tions in which men may find themselves is one func- tion of a moral education. Clearly then, it depends for its success upon the sincerity and knowledge with which the environment has been explored. For in a world falsely conceived, our own characters are falsely conceived, and we misbehave. So the moralist must choose: either he must offer a pattern of conduct for every phase of life, however distaste- i8o PUBLIC OPINION ful some of its phases may be, or he must guarantee that his pupils will never be confronted by the situa- tions he disapproves. Either he must abolish war, or teach people how to wage it with the greatest psychic economy; either he must abolish the economic life of man and feed him with Stardust and dew, or he must investigate all the perplexities of economic life and offer patterns of conduct which are applicable in a world where no man is self-supporting. But that is just what the prevailing moral culture so generally revises to do. In its best aspects it is diffident at the awful complication of the modern world. In its worst, it is just cowardly. Now whether the moralists study economics and politics and psychology, or whether the social scientists educate the moralists is no great matter. Each generation will go unpre- pared into the modern world, unless it has been taught to conceive the kind of personality it will have to be among the issues it will most likely meet. Most of this the naive view of self-interest leaves out of account. It forgets that self and interest are both conceived somehow, and that for the most part they are conventionally conceived. The ordin- ary doctrine of self-interest usually omits altogether the cognitive function. So insistent is it on the fact that human bdngs finally refer all things to them- selves, that it does not stop to notice that men's ideas of all things and of themselves are not instinc- tive. They are acquired. Thus it may be true enough, as James Madison SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED i8i wrote in the tenth paper of the Federalist, that " a landed interest^ a manufacturing interest, a mercan- tile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views." But if you exam- ine the context of Madison's paper, you discover something which I think throws light upon that view of instinctive fatalism, called sometimes the . economic interpretation of history. Madison was arguing for the federal constitution, and "among the numerous advantages of the union" he set forth "its tendency to break and control the violence of faction." Faction was what worried Madison. And the causes of faction he traced to "the nature of man," where latent dispositions are "brought into different degrees of activity, according to the differ- ent circumstances of civil society. A zeal for differ- ent opinions concerning religion, concerning govern- ment and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and power, or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual ani- mosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufHcient to kindle their unfriendly pas- i82 PUBLIC OPINION sions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factioTis has been the various and unequal distribution of property." Madison's theory, therefore, is that the propensity to faction may be kindled by religious or political opinions, by leaders, but most commonly by the distribution of property. Yet note that Madison claims only that men are divided by their relation to property. He does not say that their property and their opinions are cause and eifect, but that differences of property are the causes of differences of opinion. The pivotal word in Madison's argu- ment is "different." From the existence of differing economic situations you can tentatively infer a probable difference of opinions, but you cannot infer what those opinions will necessarily be. This reservation cuts radically into the claims of the theory as that theory is usually held. That the reservation is necessary, the enormous contradic- tion between dt^ma and practice among orthodox socialists bears witness. They argue that the next stage in social evolution is the inevitable result of the present stage. But in order to produce that in- evitable next stage they organize and agitate to pro- duce " class consciousness." Why, one asks, does not the economic situation produce consciousness of class in everybody? It just doesn't, that is all. And there- fore the proud claim will not stand that the socialist philosophy rests on prophetic insight into destiny. It rests on an hypothesis about human nature.' 'C/. Thorstein Veblen, "The Socialist Economics of Kirl Mant and His Followers," in The Place of Science in Modern CiaUkation, esp. pp. 4'3-4'B. SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 183 The socialist practice is based on a belief that if men are economically situated in different ways, they can then be induced to hold certain views. Undoubtedly they often come to believe, or can be induced to believe different things, as they are, for example, landlords or tenants, employees or em- ployers, skilled or unskilled laborers, wageworkers or salaried men, buyers or sellers, farmers or middle- men, exporters or importers, creditors or debtors. Differences of Income make a profound difference in contact and opportunity. Men who work at ma- chines will tend, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen has so brilliantly demonstrated,' to interpret experience differently from handicraftsmen or traders. If this were all that the materialistic conception of politics as- serted, the theory would be an immensely valuable hy- pothesis that every interpreter of opinion would have to use. But he would often have to abandon the theory, and he would always have to be on guard. For in trying to explain a certain public opinion, it is rarely obvious which of a man's many social rela- tions is effecting a particular opinion. Does Smith's opinion arise from his problems as a landlord, an im- porter, an owner of railway shares, or an employer? Does Jones's opinion, Jones bang a weaver in a textile mill, come from the attitude of his boss, the competi- tion of new immigrants, his wife's grocery bills, or the ever present contract with the firm which is sell- ing him a Ford car and a house and lot on the in- stalment plan? V^thout sp«:ial Inquiry you cannot tell. The economic determinist cannot tell. ■ TJu Ttuoty of B*niuu EnUrprut. 184 PUBLIC OPINION A man's various economic contacts limit or en- large the range of his opinions. But which of the contacts, in what guise, on what theory, the material- istic conception of politics cannot predict. It can predict, with a high d^r^ of probability that if a man owns a factory, his ownership will figure in those opinions w}uch seem to have some bearing on that factory. But how the function of bdng an owner will figure, no economic determinist as such, can tell you. There is no fixed set of opinions on any question that go with bong the owner of a factory, no views on labor, on property, on manage- ment, let alone views on less immediate matters. The determinist can predict that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the owner will resist attempts to deprive him of ownership, or that he will favor l^slation which he thinks will increase his profits. But since there is no magic in ownership which enables a business man to know what laws will make him prosper, there is no chain of cause and effect de- scribed in economic materialism which enables any- one to prophesy whether the owner will take a long view or a short one, a competitive or a cooperative. Did the theory have the validity which is so often claimed for it, it would enable us to prophesy. We could analyse the economic interests of a people, and deduce what the people was bound to do. Marx tried that, and after a good guess about the trusts, went wholly wrong. The first socialist experiment came, not as he predicted, out of the culmination of capitalist development in the West, but out of the collapse of a pre-capitalist system in the East. Why SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 185 did he go wrong? Why did his greatest disciple, Lenin, go wrong? Because the Marxians thought that men's economic position would irresistibly produce a clear conception of thm economic inter- ests. They thought they themselves possessed that clear conception, and that what they knew the rest of mankind would learn. The event has shown, not only that a clear conception of interest does not, arise automadcally in everyone, but that it did not arise even in Marx and Lenin themselves. After all that Marx and Lenin have written, the social behavior of mankind is still obscure. It ought not to be, if economic position alone determined public opinion. Position ought, if their theory were correct, not only to divide mankind into classes, but to supply each class with a view of its interest and a coherent policy for obtaining tt. Yet nothing is more cert^n than that all classes of men are in constant perplexity as to what their interests are.^ This dissolves the impact of economic determin- ' At a miner of hex, nhen it came to the test, Lenin completely abandoned the mateiiahsdc interpretation of politics. Had he held ■inceiely to the Marxian formula when heidied power in 1917, he would have said to himidf: accordioi to the teachings of Mar%, socialism will develop out of a mature capitalism . . . here am I, in control of a natioD that is only enteiing upon a capitalist development ... it is true that I am a sod;diit, but! am a scientific socialist ... it follows that for the present all idea of a socialist republic is out of the question ... we must advance capitalism in order that the evolution which Man pre- dicted may take ^lace. But Lenin did nothing of the sort. Instead of waiting for evolution to evolve, he tried by will, force, and education, to ith the historical process which his philosophy assumed. Wice this was written Lenin has abandoned communism on the ground that Russia docs not possess the necessary bads in a mature capitalism. He now says that Russia must create capitalism, which will create a proletariat, which will some day create communism. This is at least consistent with Marxist dogma. But it shows how little determinism thett is in the opinions ci a determinist. i86 PUBLIC OPINION ism. For if our economic interests are made up of our variable concepts of those interests, then as the master key to social processes the theory fails. That theory assumes that men are capable of adopting only one version of their interest, and that having adopted it, they move fatally to realize it. It as- sumes the existence of a specific class interest. That assumption is false. A class interest can be conceived largely or narrowly, selfishly or unselfishly, in the light of no facts, some facts, many facts, truth and error. And so collapses the Marxian remedy for class conflicts. That remedy assumes that if aU property could be held in common, class diflferences would disappear. The assumption is false. Prop- erty might well be held in common, and yet not be conceived as a whole. The moment any group of people failed to see communism in a communist manner, they would divide into classes on the basis of what they saw. In respect to the existing social order Marxian socialism emphasizes property conflict as the maker of opinion, in respect to the loosely defined working class it ignores property conflict as the basis of agitation, in respect to the future it imagines a society without property conflict, and, therefore, without conflict of opinion. Now in the existing social order there may be more instances where one man must lose if another is to gain, than there would be under socialism, but for every case where one must lose for another to gain, there are endless cases where men simply imagine the conflict because they are uneducated. And under socialism, though you SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 187 removed every instance of absolute conflict, the partial access of each man to the whole range of facts would nevertheless create conflict. A socialist state will not be able to dispense with education, morality, or liberal science, though on strict mater- ialistic grounds the communal ownership of proper- ties ought to make them superfluous. The commun- ists in Russia would not prop^ate their faith with such unfla^jing zeal if economic determinism were alone determining the opinion of the Russian people. 5 The socialist theory of human nature is, like the hedonistic calculus, an example of false determinism. Both assume that the unlearned dispositions fatally but intelligently produce a certain type of behavior. The socialist believes that the dispositions pursue the economic interest of a class; the hedonist believes that they pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Both theories rest on a naive view of instinct, a view, defined by James,' though radically qualified by him, as " the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends and without previous education in the performance." It is doubtful whether instinctive action of this sort figures at all in the social life of mankind. For as James pointed out: * "every instinctive act in an animal with memory must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated." Whatever the equipment at birth, the innate dispositions are from earliest infancy ' PrineipUi of Pjyehcloey, Vol. II, p. 38J. 'Of. «(.,V(iL II, p. 390. i88 PUBLIC OPINION inunersed in experience which determines what shall excite them as stimulus. "They become capable," as Mr. McDougall says,' "of being initiated, not only by the perception of objects of the kind which directly excite the innate disposition, the natural or native excitants of the instinct, but also by ideas of such objects, and by perceptions and by ideas of objects of other kinds." * It is only the "central part of the disposition"' says Mr. McDougall further, "that retains its spe- cific character and remains common to all individuals and all situations in which the instinct is excited." The cognitive processes, and the actual bodily move- ments by which the instinct achieves its end may be indefinitely complicated. In other words, man has an instinct of fear, but what he will fear and how he will try to escape, is determined not from birth, but by experience. If it were not for this variability, it would be difficult to conceive the inordinate variety of human nature. But when you consider that all the import- ant tendencies of the creature, his appetites, his loves, his hates, his curiosity, his sexual cravings, his fears, and pugnacity, are freely attachable to all sorts of objects as stimulus, and to all kinds of objects as gratification, the complexity of human nature is not so inconceivable. And when you think that each new generation is the casual victim of ' Introduction to Sorial Piychology, Fourth Edi ""Most definitions of instincts and inst--"- only of their conative aspects . . . and it is the cognitive and alTective aspects of the Fixitnote op. cil.. p, 29. ' P- 34 SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED 189 the way a previous generation was conditioned, as well as the inheritor of the environment that resulted, the possible combinations and permu- tations are enormous. There is no prima facie case then for supposing that because persons crave some particular thing, or behave in some particular way, that human nature is fatally constituted to crave that and act thus. The craving and the action are both learned, ■ and in another generation might be learned differentiy. Analytic psychology and social history unite in sup- porting this conclusion. Psychology indicates how essentially casual is the nexus between the particular stimulus and the particular response. Anthropol(^ in the widest sense rwnforces the view by demonstrat- ing that the things which have excited men's pas- sions, and the means which they have used to realize them, differ endlessly from age to age and from place to place. Men pursue thwr interest. But how they shall pursue it is not fatally determined, and, therefore, witlun whatever limits of time this planet will con- tinue to support human life, man can set no term upon the creative energies of men. He can issue no doom of automatism. He can say, if he must, that for his life there will be no changes which he can recc^nize as good. But in saying that he will be confining his life to what he can see with his eye, rejecting what he might see with his mind; he will be taking as the measure of good a measure which is only the one he happens to possess. He can find no ground for abandoning his highest hopes and relaxing 190 PUBLIC OPINION his conscious effort unless he chooses to r^ard the unknown as the unknowable, unless he elects to believe that what no one knows no one will know, and that what someone has not yet learned no one will ever be able to teach. PART V THE MAKING OF A COMMON WILL Chapter 13. The Transfer of Interest " I4. Yes or No " 15. Leaders and the Rank and File CHAPTER XIII THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST This goes to show that there are many variables in each man's impressions of the invisible world. The points of contact vary, the stereotyped expec- tations vary, the interest enlisted varies most subtly of all. The living impressions of a large number of people are to an immeasurable d^ree personal in each of them, and unmanageably complex in the mass. How, then, is any practical relationship established between what is in people's heads and what is out there beyond their ken in the environ- ment? How in the language of democratic theory, do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so abstract a picture, develop any common will? How does a simple and constant idea emerge from this complex of variables. How are those things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or Public Opinion crystalized out of such fleecing and casual imagery? That there is a real difficulty here was shown by an angry tilt in the spring of 1921 between the Amer- ican Ambassador to England and a very lai^e number of other Americans. Mr. Harvey, speaking at a British dinner table, had assured the world without the least sign of hesitancy what were the motives 194 PUBLIC OPINION of Americans in 1917.* As he described them, they were not the motives which President Wilson had insisted upon when he enunciated the American mind. Now, of course, neither Mr. Harvey nor Mr. WIson, nor the critics and friends of either, nor any one else, can know quantitatively and qualitatively what went on in thirty or forty million adult minds. But what everybody knows is that a war was fought and won by a multitude of efforts, stimulated, no one knows in what proportion, by the motives of Wilson and the motives of Harvey and all kinds of hybrids of the two. People enlisted and fought, worked, paid taxes, sacrificed to a common end, and yet no one can begin to say exactly what moved each person to do each thing that he did. It is no use, then, Mr. Harvey telling a soldier who thought this was a war to end war that the soldier did not think any such thing. The soldier who thought that thought that. And Mr. Harvey, who thought something else, thought something else. In the same speech Mr. Harvey formulated with equal clarity what the voters of 1920 had in th«r minds. That is a rash thing to do, and, if you simply assume that all who voted your ticket voted as you did, then it is a disingenuous thing to do. The count shows that sixteen millions voted Republican, and nine millions Democratic. They voted, says Mr. Harvey, for and agaJnst the League of Nations, and in support of this claim, he can point to Mr. Wilson's request for a referendum, and to the undeni- able fact that the Democratic party and Mr. Cox ■ Naa York Timrs, May 20, igii. THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 195 insisted that the League was the issue. But then, saying that the League was the issue did not make the League the issue, and by counting the votes on elec- tion day you do not know the real division of opinion about the League. There were, for example, nine million Democrats. Are you endded to believe that all of them are staunch supporters of the League? Certainly you are not. For your knowledge of American politics tells you that many of the millions voted, as they always do, to maintain the existing social system in the South, and that whatever their views on the League, they did not vote to express their views- Those who wanted the League were no doubt pleased that the Democratic party wanted it too. Those who disliked the League may have held their noses as they voted. But both groups of South- erners voted the same dcket. Were the Republicans more unanimous? Any- body can pick Republican voters enough out of his circle of friends to cover the whole gamut of opinion from the irreconcilability of Senators Johnson and Knox to the advocacy of Secretary Hoover and Chief Justice Taft. No one can say definitely how many people felt in any parricular way about the League, nor how many people let their feelings on that sub- ject determine their vote. When there are only two ways of expressing a hundred variedes of feeling, there is no certain way of knowing what the decisive combinadon was. Senator Borah found in the Re- publican dcket a reason for vodng Republican, but so did President Lowell. The Republican majority was composed of men and women who thought a 196 PUBLIC OPINION Republican victory would kill the League, plus those who thought it the most practical way to secure the League, plus those who thought it the surest way offered to obtain an amended League. All these voters were inextricably entangled with thar own desire, or the desire of other voters to improve business, or put labor in its place, or to punish the Democrats for going to war, or to punish them for not having gone sooner, or to get rid of Mr. Burleson, or to improve the price of wheat, or to lower taxes, or to stop Mr. Daniels from outbuilding the world, or to help Mr. Harding do the same thing. And yet a sort of decision emerged; Mr. Harding moved into the White House. For the least com- mon denominator of all the votes was that the Demo- crats should go and the Republicans come in. That was the only factor remaining after all the contra- dictions had cancelled each other out. But that factor was enough to alter policy for four years. The precise reasons why change was desired on that November day in 1920 are not recorded, not even in the memories of the individual voters. The reasons are not fixed. They grow and change and melt into other reasons, so that the public opinions Mr. Hard- ing has to deal with are not the opinions that elected him. That there is no inevitable connection be- tween an assortment of opinions and a particular line of action everyone saw in 1916. Elected appar- ently on the cry that he kept us out of war, Mr. Wilson within five months led the country into war. The working of the popular will, therefore, has always called for explanation. Those who have been THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 197 most impressed by its erratic working have found a prophet in M. LeBon, and have welcomed generali- zadons about what Sir Robert Peel called "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, ri^t feeling, obstinacy and newspaper para- graphs which is called public opinion." Others have concluded that ^nce out of drift and incoherence, settled aims do appear, there must be a mysterious contrivance at work somewhere over and above the inhabitants of a nation. They invoke a collective soul, a narional mind, a spirit of the age which im- poses order upon random opinion. An oversoul seems to be needed, for the emotions and ideas in the members of a group do not disclose anything so simple and so crystalline as the formula which those same individuals will accept as a true statement of thdr Public Opinion. But the facts can, I think, be explained more convincingly without the help of the oversoul in any of its disguises. After all, the art of inducing all sorts of people who think ditFerently to vote alike is practiced in every political campaign. In 1916, for example, the Republican candidate had to produce Republican votes out of many different kinds of Republicans. Let us look at Mr. Hughes' first speech after accepting the nomination.' The con- text is still clear enough in our minds to obviate much explanation; yet the issues are no longer contentious. The candidate was a man of unusually ' Ddivered ai Canie^e Hal), New York City, July 31, 1916. 198 PUBLIC OPINION plain speech, wKo had been out of politics for several ■ years and was not personally committed on the issues of the recent past. He had, moreover, none of that wizardry which popular leaders like Roosevelt, Wilson, or Lloyd George possess, none of that his- trionic ^ft by which such men impersonate the feel- ings of their followers. From that aspect of politics he was by temperament and by tr^ning remote. But yet he knew by calculation what 'the politician's technic is. He was one of those people who know just how to do a thing, but who can not quite do it themselves. They are often better teachers than the virtuoso to whom the art is so much second nature that he himself does not know how he does it. The statement that those who can, do; those who cannot, teach, is not nearly so much of a reflection on the teacher as it sounds. Mr. Hughes knew the occasion was momentous, and he had prepared his manuscript carefully. In a box sat Theodore Roosevelt just back from Missouri. All over the house sat the veterans of Armageddon in various stages of doubt and dismay. On the plat- form and in the other boxes the ex-whited sepulchres and ex-second-story men of 1912 were to be seen, obviously in the best of health and in a melting mood. Out beyond the hall there were powerful pro-Ger- mans and powerful pro-Allies; a war party in the East and in the big cities; a peace party in the middle and far west. There was strong feeling about Mexico. Mr. Hughes had to form a majority against the Democrats out of people divided into all sorts of combinations on Taft vs. Roosevelt, pro-Germans vs. THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 199 pro-Allies, war vs. neutrality, Mexican intervention vs. non-intervention. About the morality or the wisdom of the affair we are, of course, not concerned here. Our only interest is in the method by which a leader of heterogeneous opinion goes about the business of securing a homo- geneous vote. "This reprtseiUaiit>e gathering is a happy augury. It means the strength of reunion. It means that the party of Lincoln is restored. . . ." The italicized words are binders: Lincoln in such a speech has of course, no relation to Abraham Lincoln. It is merely a stereotype by which the piety which surrounds that name can be transferred to the Re- publican candidate who now stands in his shoes. Lincoln reminds the Republicans, Bull Moose and Old Guard, that before the schism they had a com- mon history. About the schism no one can afford to speak. But it is there, as yet unhealed. The speaker must heal it. Now the schism of 1912 had arisen over domestic questions; the reunion of 1916 was, as Mr. Roosevelt had declared, to be based on a common indignation against Mr. Wilson's conduct of international affairs. But international affairs were also a dangerous source of conflict. It was necessary to find an opening subject which would not only ignore 1912 but would avoid also the explosive conflicts of 1916. The speaker skilfiilly selected the spoils system in diplomatic appoint- ments. "Deserving Democrats" was a discr^ting phrase, and Mr. Hughes at once evokes it. The 400 PUBLIC OPINION record being indefensible, there is.no he^tation in the vigor of the attack. Lo^cally it was an ideal intn>< duction to a common mood. Mr. Hughes then turns to Mexico, beginning with an historical review. He had to conader the general sentiment that affairs were going badly in Mexico; also, a no less general sentiment that war should be avoided; and two powerful currents of opinion, one of which s^d President Wilson was right in not rect^- nizing Huerta, the other which preferred Huerta to Carranza, and intervention to both. Huerta was the first sore spot in the record. ■ . "He was certainly m fact the head of the Government in Mexico." But the moralists who regarded Huerta as a drunken murderer had to be placated. "Whether or not he should be recognized was a question to be detemiined in the exercise of a sound discretion, but according to correct principles." So instead of saying that Huerta should have been recognized, the candidate says that correct principles ought to be applied. Everybody believes in correct principles, and everybody, of course, believes he possesses them. To blur the issue still further President Wilson's policy is described as "inter- vention." It was that in law, perhaps, but not in the sense then currently meant by the word. By stretching the word to cover what Mr. Wilson had done, as well as what the real interventionists THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 201 wanted, the issue between the two factions was to be repressed. Having got by the two explosive points "Huerta" and " interoention" by letting the words mean all things to all men, the speech passes for a while to safer groimd. The candidate tells the story of Tam- pico, Vera Cruz, Villa, Santa Ysabel, Columbus and Carrizal. Mr. Hughes is specific, either because the facts as known from the newspapers are irntating, or because the true explanation is, as for example in r^ard to Tampico, too complicated. No contrary passions could be aroused by such a record. But at the end the candidate had to take a position. His audience expected it. The indictment was Mr. Roosevelt's. Would Mr. Hughes adopt his remedy, intervention? "The nation has no policy of aggression toward Mexico. We have no desire for any part of her territory. We wish her to have peace, stability and prosperity. We should be ready to aid her in binding up her wounds, in relieving her from starvation and distress, in giving her in every prac- ticable way the benefits of our disinterested friendship. The conduct of this administradon has created difficulties which we shall have to surmount. . . . We shall have to adopt a new policy, a policy of firmness and consistency through which alone we can promote an enduring friend- ship." The theme friendship is for the non-interventionists, the theme "new policy" and "firmness" is for the interventionists. On the non-contentious record, the det^ is overwhelming; on the issue everything is cloudy. 202 PUBLIC OPINION Concerning the European war Mr. Hughes em- ployed an ingenious formula: "I stand for the unfiinching maintenance of all American rights on land and sea." In order to understand the force of that statement at the time it was spoken, we must remember how each faction during the period of neutrality believed that the nations it opposed in Europe were alone violating American rights. Mr. Hughes seemed to say to the pro-Allies: I would have coerced Germany. But the pro-Germans had been insisting that British sea power was violating most of our rights. The formula covers two diametrically opposed purposes by the symbolic phrase "American rights." But there was the Lusi tania. Like the 1913 schism, it was an invincible obstacle to harmony. "... I am confident that there would have been no destruction of American lives by the sinking of the Lusi- tania." Thus, what cannot be compromised must be obliter- ated, when there is a question on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend that it does not exist. About the future of American relations with Europe Mr. Hughes was silent. Nothing he could say would possibly please the two irreconcilable fac- tions for whose support he was bidding. It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Hughes did not invent this technic and did not employ it with the utmost success. But he illustrated how a public opinion constituted out of divergent opinions is clouded; how its meaning approaches the neutral tint THE TIA^STK OF IXfXKE?! ari; fbnned oat otf^ iW Ucn^i^ fff xnMinr .crdcr^ WIkst aup o fajj l kamuM B i s ■Ac ms md ccmftr: i^ tici. Afanosx xiways vtgtKSXSt sx x £mc3W pconi m pusmc dcMlC B S STBBOQB OK C Bat bov B it tfcn a ragoe idea » ofaai kss tk power to unite OLLpli kIi: opEnans? Tflcse ofssaons^ we Tccall, huwetci deefty Aer mzy be iAiy aie not ia amtuiaa] and pungent ooaitact widi die &cTs they pro- fess tD treat. On tiie ™«'i'^*« envinxuiKnt, Mexico^ (Ik European war, our grip is s£^t tboi^t our feding may be intense. The ori^nal [Mctuies and words wluch aroused it have not anytfaing Uke the fonx of the fcding itself. The account of what has happened out ctf si^t and bfaring in a place where we have never been, has not and never can have, except Iviefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of reality. But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than the realit}'. For the trigger can be pulled by mme than one stimulus. The stimulus which raiginally pulled the trigger may have been a series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words. These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady; their contours and their pulse fluctuate. Gradually the process sets in of knowing what you feel without being enrirely certain why you feel it. The fading pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the substituted images and names. Even in severe 204 PUBLIC OPINION thinking these substitutions take place, for if a man is trying to compare two compHcated situations, he soon finds exhausting the attempt to hold both fully in mind in all their detail. He employs a shorthand of names and signs and samples. He has to do this if he is to advance at all, because he cannot carry the whole ba^age in every phrase through every step he takes. But if he forgets that he has substituted and simplified, he soon lapses into verbalism, and begins to talk about names regardless of objects. And then he has no way of knowing when the name divorced from its first thing is carrying on a misalliance with some other thing. It is more difficult still to guard ag^nst changelings in casual politics. For by what is known to psychologists as condi- tioned response, an emotion is not attached merely to one idea. There are no end of things which can arouse the emotion, and no end of things which can satisfy it. This is particularly true where the stimulus is only dimly and indirectly perceived, and where the ob- jective is likewise indirect. For you can associate an emotion, say fear, first with something immediately dangerous, then with the idea of that thing, then with something similar to that idea, and so on and on. The whole structure of human culture is in one re- spect an elaboration of the stimuli and responses of which the original emotional capacities remain a fairly fixed center. No doubt the quality of emotion has changed in the course of history, but with nothing like the speed, or elaboration, that has characterized the conditioning of it. People differ widely in their susceptibility to ideas. THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 205 There are some in whom the idea of a starving child in Russia is practically as vivid as a starving child within sight. There are others who are almost incapable of being excited by a distant idea. There are many gradations between. And there are people who are insensitive to facts, and aroused only by ideas. But though the emotion is aroused by the idea, we are unable to satisfy the emotion by act- ing ourselves upon the scene itself. The idea of the starving Rusaan child evokes a desire to feed the child. But the person so aroused cannot feed it. He can only give money to an impersonal organi- zation, or to a personification which he calls Mr. Hoover. His money does not reach that child. It goes to a general pool from which a mass of children are fed. And so just as the idea is second hand, so are the effects of the action second hand. The cognition is indirect, the conation is indirect, only the atFect is immediate. Of the three parts of the process, the stimulus comes from somewhere out of sight, the response reaches somewhere out of sight, only the emotion exists entirely within the person. Of the child's hunger he has only an idea, of the child's relief he has only an idea, but of his own desire to help he has a real experience. It is the central fact of the business, the emotion within himself, which is first hand. Within limits that vary, the emotion is transferable both as r^ards stimulus and response. Therefore, if among a number of people, posses^ng various tend- encies to respond, you can find a stimulus which will arouse the same emotion in many of them, you can 3o6 PUBLIC OPINION substitute it for the original sdmuli. If, for example, one man dislikes the League, another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis of what they all hate. Suppose that symbol is Americanism. The first man may read it as meaning the preservation of American isolation, or as he may call it, independence; the second as the rejection of a politician who clashes with his idea of what an American president should be, the third as a call to resist revolution. The symbol in itself signi- fies literally no one thing in particular, but it can be associated with almost anything. And because of that it can become the common bond of common feelings, even though those feelings were originally attached to disparate ideas. When political parties or newspapers declare for Americanism, Progress! vism, Law and Order, Jus- tice, Humanity, they hope to amalgamate the emo- tion of conflicting factions which would surely divide, if, instead of these symbols, they were invited to discuss a specific program. For when a coalition around the symbol has been effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than toward critical scrutiny of the measures. It is, I think, convenient and technically correct to call multiple phrases like these symbolic. They do not stand for specific ideas, but for a sort of truce or junc- tion between ideas. They are like a strategic rail- road center where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their ultimate destina- tion. But he who captures the symbols by which THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 307 public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy. And as long as a particular symbol has the power of coali- tion, ambitious factions will fight for possession. Think, for example, of Lincoln's name or of Roose- velt's. A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master of the current situation. There are limits, of course. Too violent abuse of the actualities which groups of people think the symbol represents, or too great resistance in the name of that symbol to new purposes, will, so to speak, burst the symbol. In this manner, during the year 1917, the imposing symbol of Holy Rus^a and the Little Father burst under the impact of suffering and defeat. The tremendous consequences of Russia's collapse were felt on all the fronts and among all the peoples. They led directly to a striking experiment in the crystallizadon of a common opinion out of the varieties of opinion churned up by the war. The Fourteen Points were addressed to all the govern- ments, allied, enemy, neutral, and to all the peoples. They were an attempt to knit together the chief imponderables of a world war. Necessarily this was a new departure, because this was the first great war in which all the deciding elements of mankind could be brought to think about the same ideas, or at least about the same names for ideas, simultaneously. Without cable, radio, telegraph, and daily press, the experiment of the Fourteen Points would have 2o8 PUBLIC OPINION been impossible. It was an attempt to exploit the modern machinery of communication to start the return to a "common consciousness" throughout the world. But first we must examine some of the circum- stances as they presented themselves at the end of 1917. For in the form which the document finally assumed, all these considerations are somehow repre- sented. During the summer and autumn a series of events had occurred which profoundly affected the temper of the people and the course of the war. In July the Russians had made a last offensive, had been disastrously beaten, and the process of demoral- ization which led to the Bolshevik revolution of November had begun. Somewhat earlier the French had suffered a severe and almost disastrous defeat in Champagne which produced mutinies in the army and a defeatist agitation among the civiUans. England was suffering from the effects of the submarine raids, from the terrible losses of the Flanders battles, and in November at Cambrai the British armies met a reverse that appalled the troops at the front and the leaders at home. Extreme war weariness pervaded the whole of western Europe. In effect, the agony and disappointment had jarred loose men's concentration on the accepted version of the war. Their interests were no longer held by the ordinary official pronouncements, and their attention b^an to wander, fixing now upon their own suffer- ing, now upon their party and class purposes, now upon general resentments against the governments. That more or less perfect organization of perception THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 209 by official propaganda, of interest and attention by the stimuli of hope, fear, and hatred, which is called morale, was by way of breaking down. The minds of men everywhere b^an to search for new attach- ments that promised relief. Suddenly they beheld a tremendous drama. On the Eastern front there was a Christmas truce, an end of slaughter, an end of noise, a promise of peace. At Brest-IJtovsk the dream of all simple people had come to life: it was possible to negotiate, there was some other way to end the ordeal than by matching lives with the enemy. Timidly, but with rapt atten- tion, people b^an to turn to the East. Why not, they asked? What is tt all for? Do the politicians know what they are doing? Are we really fighting for what they say? Is it possible, perhaps, to secure it without fighting? Under the ban of the censor- ship, little of this was allowed to show itself in print, but, when Lord Lansdowne spoke, there was a re- sponse from the heart. The earlier symbols of the war had become hackneyed, and had lost their power to unify. Beneath the surface a wide schism was opening up in each Allied country. Something amilar was happening in Central Europe. There too the original impulse of the war was weakened; the union sacr£e was broken. The verdcal cleavages along the battle front were cut across by horizontal divisions running in all kinds of unforeseeable ways. The moral crisis of the war had arrived before the military decision was in sight. All this President Wilson and his advisers realized. They had not, of course, a perfect knowl- 2IO PUBLIC OPINION edge of the situation, but what I have sketched they knew. They knew also that the Allied Governments were bound by a series of engagements that in letter and in spirit ran counter to the popular conception of what the war was about. The resolutions of the Paris Economic Conference were, of course, public property, and the network of secret treaties had been published by the Bolsheviks in November of 1917.* Their terms were only vaguely known to the peoples, but it was definitely believed that they did not com* port with the idealistic slogan of self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities. Popular ques- tioning took the form of asking how many thousand English lives Alsace-Lorraine or Dalmatia were worth, how many French lives Poland or Meso- potamia were worth. Nor was such questioning entirely unknown in America. The whole Allied cause had been put on the defensive by the refusal to participate at Brest-Li tovsk. Here was a highly sensitive state of mind which no competent leader could fail to consider. The ideal response would have been joint action by the Allies. That was found to be impossible when it was con- sidered at the Interallied Conference of October. But by December the pressure had become so great that Mr. George and Mr. Wilson were moved inde- pendently to make some response. The form selected ' President Wilson stated at his conference with the Senators that he had never heard of these treaties until he reached Paris. That statement is perplexing. The Fourteen Points, as the teit shows, could not have been formulated without a knowledge of the secret treaties. The sub- stance of those treaties was before the President when he and Colonel House prepared the final published text of the Fourteen Poinu. THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 211 by the President was a statement of peace terms under fourteen heads. The numberihg of them was an artifice to secure precision, and to create at once the impression that here was a business-like docu- ment. The idea of stating "peace terms" instead of "war aims" arose from the necessity of estab- lishing a genuine alternative to the Brest-Litovsk ne^tiations. They were intended to compete for attention by substituting for the spectacle of Russo- German parleys the much grander spectacle of a public world-wide debate. Having enlisted the interest of the world, it was necessary to hold that interest unified and flexible for all the different possibilities which the situation contained. The terms had to be such that the major- ity among the Allies would regard them as worth while. They had to meet the national aspirations of each people, and yet to limit those aspirations so that no one nation would r^ard itself as a catspaw for another. The terms had to satisfy ofiicial interests so as not to provoke ofiicial disunion, and yet they had to meet popular conceptions so as to prevent the spread of demoralization. They had, in short, to preserve and confirm Allied unity in case the war was to go on. But they had also to be the terms of a possible peace, so that in case the German center and left were ripe for agitation, they would have a text with which to smite the governing class. The terms had, therefore, to push the Allied governors nearer to their people, drive the German governors away from their people, and establish a line of common under- 212 PUBLIC OPINION standing between the Allies, the non^official Ger- mans, and the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary. The Fourteen Points were a daring attempt to raise a standard to which almost everyone might repair. If a sufficient number of the enemy people were ready there would be peace; if not, then the Allies would be better prepared to sustain the shock of war. All these considerations entered into the making of the Fourteen Points. No one man may have had them all in mind, but all the men concerned had some of them in mind. Against this background let us examine certain aspects of the document. The first five points and the fourteenth deal with "open diplomacy," "freedom of the seas," "equal trade opportunities," " reduction of armaments," no imper- ialist annexation of colonies, and the League of Nations. They might be described as a statement of the popular generalizations in which everyone at that time professed to believe. But Number Three is more specific. It was aimed consciously and directly at the resolutions of the Paris Economic Conference, and was meant to relieve the German people of their fear of suffocation. Number six is the first point dealing with a par- ticular nation. It was intended as a reply to Russian suspicion of the Allies, and the eloquence of its promises was attuned to the drama of Brest-Li tovsk. Number seven deals with Belgium, and is as un- qualified in form and purpose as was the conviction of practically the whole world, including very large sections of Central Europe. Over number eight we must pause. It begins with an absolute demand for THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 213 evacuation and restoration of French territoryj and then passes on to the question of Alsace-Lorraine. The phrasing of this clause most perfecdy illustrates the character of a public statement which must condense a vast complex of interests in a few words. "And the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has un- setded the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, shoiJd be righted. . . ." Every word here was chosen with meticulous care. The wrong done should be righted; why not say that Alsace-Lorraine should be restored? It was not said, because it was not certain that all of the French at that time would fight on indefinitely for reannexation if they were oifered a plebiscite; and because it was even less certiun whether the English and Italians would fight on. The formula had, therefore, to cover both contingencies. The word "righted" guaranteed sat- isfaction to France, but did not read as a commit- ment to simple annexation. But why speak of the wrong done by Prussia in iS^i? The word Prussia was, of course, intended to remind the South Ger- mans that Alsace-Lorraine belonged not to them but to Prussia. Why speak of peace unsetded for "fifty years," and why the use of "1871"? In the first place, what the French and the rest of the world remembered was 1871. That was the nodal point of their grievance. But the formulators of the Fourteen Points knew that French ofiicialdom planned for more than the Alsace-Lorraine of 1871. Hie secret memoranda that had passed between the Czar's ministers and French officials in 1916 covered 214 PUBLIC OPINION the annexation 'of the Saar Valley and some sort of dismemberment of the Rhineland. It was planned to include the Saar Valley under the term "Alsace- Lorraine " because it had been part of Alsace-Lorraine in 1 8 14, though ithadbeendetachedini8i5, and was no part of the territory at the close of the Franco- Prus«an war. The ofEcial French formula for annexing the Saar was to subsume it under "Alsace- Lorraine" meaning the Alsace-Lomdne of 1814- 1815. By insistence on "1871" the Preadent was really defining the ultimate boundary between Ger- many and France, was adverting to the secret treaty, and was casting it aside. Number nine, a litde less subdy, does the same thing in respect to Italy. "Clearly recognizable lines of nationality" are exactly what the lines of the Treaty of London were not. Those lines were partly strategic, partly economic, partly imperial- istic, partly ethnic. The only part of them that could possibly procure allied sympathy was that which would recover the genuine Italia Irredenta. All the rest, as everyone who was informed knew, merely delayed the impending Jugoslav revolt. 5 It would be a mistake to suppose that the ap- parently unanimous enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on a pro- gram. Everyone seemed to find something that he liked and stressed this aspect and that detml. But no one risked a discussion. The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the civilized world. THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 215 were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but they evoked a common emotion. And to that ex- tent they played a part in rallying the western peoples for the desperate ten months of war which they had still to endure. As long as the Fourteen Points dealt with that hazy and happy future when the agony was to be over, the real conflicts of interpretation were not made manifest. They were plans for the settlement of a wholly invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public hope. For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes's speech, is a hierarchy of symbols. As you ascend the hier- archy in order to include more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional connec- tion though you lose the intellectual. But even the emotion becomes thinner. As you go further away from experience, you go higher into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little. Yet the people whose emotions are entrained do not remain passive. As the public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the emotion is stirred while the meaning is dis- persed, their very private meanings are given a universal application. Whatever you want badly is the Rights of Humanity. For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of meaning almost anything. 3i6 PUBLIC OPINION Boon comes to mean pretty nearly everything. Mr. Wilson's phrases were understood in endlessly dif- ferent ways in every comer of the earth. No docu- ment negotiated and made of puhhc record ensted to correct the confusion.' And so, when the day of setdement came, everybody expected everything. The European authors of the treaty had a lai^ choice, and they chose to realize those expectations which were held by those of their countrymen who wielded the most power at home. They came down the hierarchy from the Rights of Humanity to the Rights of France, Britiun and Italy. They did not abandon the use of symbols. They abandoned only those which after die war had no permanent roots in the imagination of their constituents. They preserved the unity of France by the use of symbolism, but they would not risk any- thing for the unity of Europe. The symbol France was deeply attached, the symbol Europe had only a recent history. Nevertheless the distinction between an omnibus like Europe and a symbol like France is not sharp. The history of states and empires reveals times when the scope of the unifying idea increases and also times when it shrinks. One cannot say that men have moved consistently from smaller loyalties to larger ones, because the facts will not bear out the clmm. The Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire bellied out further than those national uni- fications in the Nineteenth Century from which be- lievers in a World State argue by analogy. Never- THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST 217 theless> it is probably true that the real integration has increased regardless of the temporary inflation and deflation of empires. Such a real integration has undoubtedly occurred in American history. In the decade before 1789 most men, it seems, felt that their state and their community were real, but that the confederation of states was unreal. The idea of thur state, its flag, its most conspicuous leaders, or whatever it was that represented Massachusetts, or Virginia, were genuine symbols. That is to say, they were fed by actual experiences .from childhood, occupation, residence, and the hke. The span of men's experience had rarely traversed the imaginary boundaries of their states. The word Virginian was related to pretty nearly everything that most Virginians had ever known or felt. It was the most extensive political idea which had genuine contact with their experience. Thdr experience, not their needs. For their needs arose out of their real environment, which in those days was at least as large as the thirteen colonies. They needed a common defense. They needed a financial and economic regime as extensive as the Confederation. But as long as the pseudo-environ- ment of the state encompassed them, the state symbols exhausted their political interest. An inter- state idea, like the Confederation, represented a powerless abstraction. It was an omnibus, rather than a symbol, and the harmony among divergent groups, which the omnibus creates, is transient. 2i8 PUBLIC OPINION I have said that the idea of confederation was a powerless abstraction. Yet the need of unity existed in the decade before the Constitution was adopted. The need existed, !n the sense that affairs were askew unless the need of unity was taken into account. Gradually certain classes in each colony b^an to break through the state experience. Their personal interests led across the state lines to interstate ex- periences, and gradually there was constructed in their minds a picture of the American environment which was truly national in scope. For them the idea of federation became a true symbol, and ceased to be an omnibus. The most imaginative of these men was Alexander Hamilton. It happened that he had no primitive attachment to any one state, for he was born in the West Indies, and had, from the very beginning of his active life, been associated with the common interests of all the states. Thus to most men of the time the question of whether the capital should be in Virginia or in Philadelphia was of enormous importance, because they were locally minded. To Hamilton this question was of no emo- tional consequence; what he wanted was the assimip- tion of the state debts because they would further nationalize the proposed union. So he gladly traded the site of the capitol for two necessary votes from men who represented the Potomac district. To Hamilton the Union was a symbol that represented all his interests and his whole experience; to White and Lee from the Potomac, the symbol of their province was the highest political entity they served, and they served it though they hated to pay the THE TRANSFfeR OF INTEREST 219 price. They agreed, says Jefferson, to change their votes, "White with a revulsion of stomach almost convulsive." • In the crystallizing of a common will, there is always an Alexander Hamilton at work. > Works, Vol. IX, p. 87. Gted by Beud, Bcoiumk Origiiu of J^tf mnuK Dmocraty, p. 173. CHAPTER XIV YES OR NO Symbols are often so useful and so mysteriously powerful that the word itself exhales a magical gla- mor. In thinking about symbols it is tempting to treat them as if they possessed independent energy. Yet no end of symbols which once provoked ecstasy have quite ceased to affect anybody. The museums and the books of folklore are full of dead emblems and incantations, since there is no power in the symbol^ except that which it acquires by association in the human mtnd. The symbols that have lost their f>ower, and the symbols incessantly suggested which fail to take root, remind us that if we were patient enough to study in detail the circulation of a symbol, we should behold an entirely secular history. In the Hughes campaign speech, in the Fourteen Points, in Hamilton's project, symbols are employed. But they are employed by somebody at a particular moment. The words themselves do not crystallize random feeling. The words must be spoken by people who are strategically placed, and they must be spoken at the opportune moment. Otherwise they are mere wind. The symbols must be earmarked. For in themselves they mea:n nothing, and the choice of possible symbols is always so great that we should. YES OR NO 221 like the donkey who stood equidistant between two bales of hay, perish from sheer indecision among the symbols that compete for our attention. Here, for example, are the reasons for their vote as stated by certain private citizens to a newspaper just before the election of 1920. For Harding: "The patriotic men and women of to-day, who cast their ballots for Harding and Coolidge will be held by posterity to have signed our Second Declaration of Independence." Mr. Wilmot , inventor. "He will see to it that the United States does not enter into 'entangling alliances.' Washington as a dty will benefit by changing the control of the government from the E>emocrats to the Republicans." Mr. Qarence— — , salesman. For Cox: "The people of the United States realize that it is our duty pledged on the fields of France, to join the League of Nations. We must shoulder our share of the burden of enforcing peace throughout the world." Miss Marie , stenographer "We should lose our own respect and the respect of other nations were we to refuse to enter the League of Narions in obtaining intemarional peace." Mr. Spencer , starisucian. The two sets of phrases are equally noble, equally true, and almost reversible. Would Clarence and Wilmot have admitted for an instant that they in- tended to default in our duty pledged on the fields of France; or that they did not desire international 222 PUBLIC OPINION peace? CcPtainly not. Would Marie and Spencer have admitted that they were in favor of entangling alliances or the surrender of American independence? They would have argued with you that the League was, as President Wilson called it, a disentangling alliance, as well as a Declaration of Independence for all the world, plus a Monroe Doctrine for the planet. Since the oiFering of symbols is so generous, and the meaning that can be imputed is so elastic, how does any particular symbol take root in any parti- cular person's mind? It is planted there by another human being whom we recc^ize as authoritative. If it is planted deeply enough, it may be that later we shall call the person authoritative who waves that symbol at us. But in the first instance symbols are made congenial and important because they are intro- duced to us by congenial and important people. For we are not born out of an egg at the age of eighteen with a realistic imagination; we are still, as Mr. Shaw recalls, in the era of Burge and Lubin, where in infancy we are dependent upon older beings for our contacts. And so we make our connections with the outer world through certain beloved and authorita- tive persons. They are the first bridge to the invisi- ble world. And though we may gradually master for ourselves many phases of that larger environment, there always remains a vaster one that is unknown. To that we still relate ourselves through authorities. Where all the facts are out of sight a true report and a plausible error read alike, sound alike, feel alike. YES OR NO 2J3 Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters.' Theoretically we ought to choose the most expert on each subject. But the choice of the expert, though a good deal easier than the choice of truth, is still too difficult and often impracticable. Tlie experts them- selves are not in the least certain who among them is the most expert. And at that, the expert, even when we cfJi identify him, is, likely as not, too busy to be consulted, or impossible to get at. But there are people whom we can identify easily enough because they are the people who are at the head of afFairs. Parents, teachers, and masterM friends are the first people of this sort we encounter. Into the diffi- cult question of why children trust one parent rather than another, the history teacher rather than the Sunday school teacher, we need not try to enter. Nor how trust gradually spreads through a news- paper or an acquaintance who is interested in public afFairs to public personages. The literature of psy- choanalysis is rich in suggestive hypothesis. At any rate we do find ourselves trusting certain people, who constitute our means of junction with pretty nearly the whole realm of unknown things. Strangely enough, this fact is sometimes regarded as inherently undignified, as evidence of our sheep-like, ape-like nature. But complete independence in the universe is simply unthinkable. If we could not take > Sec in intereninB, nthcr quaint old book: Gcmie Comewall Lcwii, A» Eitay on ih liifiufnet oj Jmliority in JUmitj ef Opinio*, 224 PUBLIC OPINION practically everything for granted, we should spend our lives in utter triviality. The nearest thing to a wholly independent adult is a hermit, and the range of a hermit's action is very short. Acting entirely for himself, he can act only within a tiny radius and for simple ends. If he has time to think great thoughts we can be certain that he has accepted without ques- tion, before he went in for being a hermit, a whole repertory of painfully acquired information about how to keep warm and how to keep from being hungry, and also about what the great questions are. On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has brought into the argu- ment. We shall see later how the democratic theory proceeds on the opposite assumption and assumes for the purposes of government an unlimited supply of self-sufficient individuals. The people on whom we depend for contact with the outer world are those who seem to be running it.' They may be running only a very small part of the worid. The nurse feeds the child, bathes it, and puts it to bed. That does not constitute the nurse an au- ' Cj. Bryce, Modern Dimocracin, Vol. II, pp. S44-54S- YES OR NO 225 thority on physics, zoology, and the Higher Criticism. Mr. Smith runs, or at least hires, the man who runs the factory. That does not make him an authority on the Constitution of the United States, nor on the effects of the Fordney tariff. Mr. Smoot runs the Republican party in the State of Utah. That in it- self does not prove he is the best man to consult about taxation. But the nurse may nevertheless determine for a while what zoology the child shall learn, Mr. Smith will have much to say on what the Constitution shall mean to his wife, his secretary, and perhaps even to his parson, and who shall define the Hmits of Senator Smoot's authority? , The priest, the lord of the manor, the captains and the kings, the party leaders, the merchant, the boss, however these men are chosen, whether by birth, inheritance, conquest or election, they and their organized following administer human affurs. They are the officers, and although the same man may be field marshal at home, second lieutenant at the office, and scrub private in politics, although in many institutions the hierarchy of rank is vague or con- cealed, yet in every institution that requires the cooperation of many persons, some such hierarchy exists. ' In American politics we call it a machine, or "the organization." 3 There are a number of important distinctions between the members of the machine and the rank ' Cf. M. Oslrogonki, Drmacraiy atid lie Organaaiion of Political Parliti, passim: R. Michdi, Political Parties, faiiin; and Bryce, Modern Democ- nuies, particulirlv Chip. LXXV) ilto Ron, PriiuipUi of Sociology, Chapi. XXII-XXIV. 226 PUBLIC OPINION and file. The leaders, the steering committee and the inner circle, are in direct contact with their environ- ment. They may, to be sure, have a very limited notion of what they ought to define as the environ- ment, but they are not dealing almost wholly with abstractions. There are particular men they hope to see elected, particular balance sheets they wish to see improved, concrete objectives that must be at- tained. I do not mean that they escape the human propensity to stereotyped vision. Their stereotypes often make them absurd routineers. But whatever thar limitations, the chiefs are in actual contact with some crucial part of that larger environment. They decide. They give orders. They bai^n. And . something definite, perhaps not at all what they imagined, actually happens. Their subordinates are not tied to them by a com- mon conviction. That is to say the lesser members of a machine do not dispose their loyalty according to independent judgment about the wisdom of the leaders. In the hierarchy each is dependent upon a superior and is in turn superior to some class of his dependents. What holds the machine together is a system of privileges. These may vary according to the opportunities and the tastes of those who seek them, from nepotism and patronage in all their aspects to clannishness, hero-worship or a fixed idea. They vary from military rank in armies, through land and services in a feudal system, to jobs and publicity in a modern democracy. That is why you can break up a particular machine by abolish- ing its privileges. But the machine in every coherent YES OR NO 227 group is, 1 believe, certain to reappear. For privilege is entirely relative, and uniformity is impossible. Imagine the most absolute communism of which your mind is capable, where no one possessed any object that everyone else did not possess, and still, if the communist group had to take any action what- ever, the mere pleasure of being the friend of the man who was going to make the speech that secured the most votes, would, I am convinced, be enough to crystallize an organization of insiders around him. It is not necessary, then, to invent a collective intelligence in order to expliun why the judgments of a group are usually more coherent, and often more true to form than the remarks of the man in the street. One mind, or a few can pursue a train of thought, but a group trying to think in concert can as a group do littie more than assent or dissent. The members of a hierarchy can have a corporate tradition. As apprentices they learn the trade from the masters, who in turn learned it when they were apprentices, and in any enduring society, the change of personnel within the governing hierarchies is slow enough to permit the transmission of certain great stereotypes and patterns of behavior. From father to son, from prelate to novice, from veteran to cadet, certain ways of seeing and doing are taught. These ways become familiar, and are recc^ized as such by the mass of outsiders. Distance alone lends enchantment to the view that masses of human beings ever cooperate in any m8 public opinion complex affair without a central machine managed by a very few people. "No one," says Bryce,* " can have had some years ' experience of the conduct of affairs in a I^slature or an administration without observing how extremely small is the number of persons by whom the world is governed." He is referring, of course, to affairs of state. To be sure if you consider all the affairs of mankind the number of people who govern is considerable, but ifyou take any particular institudon, be it a le^slature, a party, a trade union, a nationalist movement, a factory, or a club, the number of those who govern is a very small percentage of those who are theoretic- ally supposed to govern. Landslides can turn one machine out and put another in; revolutions sometimes abolish a particu- lar machine altogether. The democratic revolution set up two alternating machines, each of which in the course of a few years reaps the advantage from the mistakes of the other. But nowhere does the ma- chine disappear. Nowhere is the idyllic theory of democracy realized. Certainly not in trades unions, nor in socialist parties, nor in communist govern- ments. There is an inner circle, surrounded by con- centric circles which fade out gradually into the disinterested or uninterested rank and file. Democrats have never come to terms with this commonplace of group life. They have invariably regarded it as perverse. For there are two visions of democracy: one presupposes the self-sufficient indi- vidual; the other an Oversoul regulating everything. >0^.c»i., Vol. II, p. 543. YES OR NO 229 Of the two the Oversoul has some advantage because it does at least recognize that the mass makes deci- sions that are not spontaneously born in the breast of every member. But the Oversoul as presiding genius in cor|X)r^te behavior is a superfluous mystery if we fix our attention upon the machine. The machine is a quite prosaic reality. It consists of human beings who wear clothes and live in houses, who can be named and described. They perform all the duties usually assigned to the Oversoul. 5 The reason for the machine is not the perversity of human nature, it is that out of the private notions of any group no common idea emerges by itself. For the number of ways is limited in which a multitude of people can act directly upon a situation beyond their reach. Some of them can migrate, in one form or another, they can strike or boycott, they can applaud or hiss. They can by these means occasionally resist what they do not like, or coerce those who obstruct what they desire. But by mass action nothing can be constructed, devised, negotiated, or administered. A public as such, without an ot^anlzed hierarchy around which it can gather, may refuse to buy if the prices are too high, or refuse to work if wages are too low. A trade union can by mass action in a strike break an opposition so that the union officials can negotiate an agreement. It may win, for ex- ample, the right to joint control. But it cannot exercise the right except through an organization. A narion can clamor for war, but when it goes to I30 PUBLIC OPINION war it must put itself under orders from a general SMfF. The limit of direct action is for all practical pur- poses the power to say Yes or No on an issue pre- sented to the mass.' For only in the very simplest cases does an issue present itself in the same form spontaneously and approximately at the same time to all the members of a public. There are unorgan- ized strikes and boycotts, not merely industrial ones, where the grievance is so plain that virtually without leadership the same reaction takes place in many people. But even in these rudimentary cases there are persons who know what they want to do more quickly than the rest, and who become impromptu ringleaders. Where they do not appear a crowd will mill about aimlessly beset by all its private aims, or stand by fatalistically, as did a crowd of fifty persons the other day, and watch a man commit suicide. For what we make out of most of the impressions that come to us from the invisible world is a kind of pantomime played out in revery. The number of times IS small that we consciously decide anything about events beyond our sight, and each man's opin- ion of what he could accomplish if he tried, is slight. There is rarely a practical issue, and therefore no great habit of decision. This would be more evident were it not that most information when it reaches us carries with it an aura of suggestion as to how we ' C/. Jimea, Somt ProbUmi of PkUosofky, p. 227. "Bjt for most of our emcTECncics, fractional lolutions xrc impossible. Sddom can we act fractionally." Cf. Lowdl, Puilie Opinion and Popular GoBtrnmenl, pp. 91, 92. YES OR NO 23< ought to feel about the news. That suggestion we need, and if we do not find it in the news we turn to the editorials or to a trusted adviser. The revery, if we feel ourselves implicated, is uncomfortable un- til we know where we stand, that is, until the facts have been formulated so that we can feel Yes or No in r^ard to them. When a number of people all say Yes they may have all kinds of reasons for saying it. They gener- ally do. For the pictures in their minds, are, as we have already noted, varied in subde and intimate ways. But this subtlety remains within their minds; it becomes represented publicly by a number of symbolic phrases which carry the individual emotion after evacuating most of the intention. The hier- archy, or, if it is a contest, then the two hierarchies, associate the symbols with a definite action, a vote of Yes or No, an attitude pro or con. Then Smith who was against the League and Jones who was against Article X, and Brown who was against Mr. Wilson and all his works, each for his own reason, all in the name of more or less the same symbolic phrase, raster a vote against the Democrats by voting for the Republicans. A common will has been expressed. A concrete choice had to be presented, the choice had to be connected, by the transfer of interest through the symbols, with individual opinion. The professional politicians learned this long before the democratic philosophers. And so they organized the caucus, the nominating convention, and the steering committee, as the means of formulating a definite 232 PUBLIC OPINION choice. Everyone who wishes to accomplish any- thing that requires the cooperation of a large number of people follows th^r example. Sometimes it is done rather brutally as when the Peace Conference reduced itself to the Council of Ten, and the Council of Ten to the Big Three or Four; and wrote a treaty which the minor allies, their own constituents, and the enemy were permitted to take or leave. More consultation than that is generally possible and de- sirable. But the essential fact remains that a small number of heads present a choice to a large group. The abuses of the steering committee have led to various proposals such as the initiative, referendum and direct primary. But these merely postponed or obscured the need for a machine by complicating the elections, or as H. G. Wells once said with scrupu- lous accuracy, the selections. For no amount of balloting can obviate the need of creating an issue, be it a measure or a candidate, on which the voters can say Yes, or No. There is, in fact, no such thing as "direct legislation," For what happens where it is supposed to exist? The citizen goes to the polls, receives a ballot on which a number of measures are printed, almost always in abbreviated form, and, if he says anything at all, he says Yes or No. The most brilliant amendment in the world may occur to him. He votes Yes or No on that bill and no other. You have to commit violence against the English language to call that legislation. I do not argue, of course, that there are no benefits, whatever you YES OR NO 233 call the process, i think that for certain kinds of issues there are distinct benefits. But the necessary simplicity of any mass decision is a very important fact in view of the inevitable complexity of the world in which those decisions operate. The most compli- cated form of voting that anyone proposes is, I suppose, the preferential ballot. Among a number of candidates presented the voter under that system, instead of saying yes to one candidate and no to all the others, states the order of his choice. But even here, immensely more flexible though it is, the action of the mass depends upon the quality of the choices presented.' And those choices are presented by the energetic coteries who husde about with petitions and round up the delegates. The Many can elect after the Few have nominated. '£y. H. J. Luki, FonnJations of SeMTtigniy, p. 114. ". . . pro- poitional leprewntidoa ... by leading, at it leemj to lead, to the jmup lyneni . . . may deprive the electors of their choice of leaden." The group fytlem undoubtedly tendi, ai Mr. Liab layi, to make the taecnon of the executive more indirect, but there ii no doubt alio that it ttndj to produce le^stative aucmbliei in which curtentt of ^nion are more fully repietented. Whether that ii good or bad cannot be determioed a pnori. But one can lay that succeiiful co- operation lod reiponsibility in a more accurately representative at- tembly require a higher organization of political intcJIigeoce and political habit, than in a rigid two-party house. It is a more complex political fonn and may therefore work lew wdL CHAPTER XV LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE Because of their transcendent practical import- ance, no successful leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols which organize his following. What privileges do within the hierarchy, symbols do for the rank and file. They conserve unity. From the totem pole to the national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham, symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged. The detached observer may scorn the "star- spangled" ritual which hedges the symbol, perhaps as much as the king who told himself that Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows by experience that only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasyof real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates what he calls destructive criti- cism, sometimes called by free spirits the elimination of buncombe. "Above all things," says Bagehot, "our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it. "' For poking ' The English Constitution, p. 127. D. A ppleton &( Company, 1914. LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 235 about with clear definitions and candid statements serves all high purposes known to man, except the easy conservation of a common will. Poking about, as every responsible leader suspects, tends to break the transference of emotion from the individual mind to the institutional symbol. And the first result of that is, as he rightly says, a chaos of individualism and warring sects. The disintegration of a symbol, like Holy Russia, or the Iron Diaz, is always the beginning of a long upheaval. These great symbols possess by transference all the minute and detailed loyalties of an ancient and stereotyped society. They evoke the feeling that each individual has for the landscape, the furniture, the faces, the memories that are his first, and in a static society, his only reality. That core of images and devotions without which he is unthinkable to himself, is nationality. The great symbols take up these devotions, and can arouse them without calling forth the primitive images. The lesser symbols of public debate, the more casual chatter of politics, are always referred back to these proto-symbols, and if possible associated with them. The question of a proper fare on a municipal subway is symbolized as an issue between the People and the Interests, and then the People is inserted in the symbol American, so that finally in the heat of a campaign, an eight cent fare becomes unAmerican. The Revolutionary fathers died to prevent it. Lincoln suffered that it might not come to pass, resistance to it was implied in the death of those who sleep in France. Because of its power to siphon emotion out of 236 PUBLIC OPINION distinct ideas, the symbol is both a mechanism of solidarity, and a mechanism of exploitation. It enables people to work for a common end, but just because the few who are strat^cally placed must choose the concrete objectives, the symbol is also an instrument by which a few can fatten on many, deflect criticism, and seduce men into facing agony for objects they do not understand. Many aspects of our subjection to symbols are not flattering if we choose to think of ourselves as realis- tic, self-sufEcient, and self-governing personalities. Yet it is imposMble to conclude that symbols are altc^ther instruments of the devil. In the realm of science and contemplation they are undoubtedly the tempter himself. But in the world of action they may be beneficent, and are sometimes a neces^ty. The necessity is often imagined, the peril manu- factured. But when quick results are imperative, the manipulation of masses through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing done. It is often more important to act than to understand. It is sometimes true that the action would fail if everyone understood it. There arc many affairs which cannot wait for a referendum or endure pub- licity, and there are times, during war for example, when a nation, an army, and even its commanders must trust strategy to a very few minds; when two conflicting opinions, though one happens to be right, are more perilous than one opinion which is wrong. The wrong opinion may have bad results, but the two opinions may entail disaster by dissolving unity." ■ Captain Peter S. Wright, Assistant Secietary of the Supreme Wai LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 237 Thus Foch and Sir Henry Wilson, who foresaw the impending disaster to Gough's army, as a conse- quence of the divided and scattered reserves, never- theless kept their opinions well within a small circle, knowing that even the risk of a smashing defeat was less certainly destructive, than would have been an excited debate in the newspapers. For what matters most under the kind of tenaon which prev^led in March, 1918, is less the lightness of a particular move than the unbroken expectation as to the source of command. Had Foch "gone to the people" he might have won the debate, but long before he could have won it, the armies which he was to command would have dissolved. For the spectacle of a row on Olym- pus is diverting and destructive. But so also is a conspiracy of ^ence. Says Cap> tiun Wright: "It is in the High Command and not in the line, that the art of camouflage is most practiced, and reaches to highest flights. All chiefs everywhere are now kept punted, by the busy work of number- less publicists, so as to be mistaken for Napoleons — at a distance. . . .It becomes almost impossible to displace these Napoleons, whatever their incom- petence, because of the enormous public suppwrt created by hiding or glossing failure, and exaggera- ting or inventing success. . . . But the most insidi- ous and worst effect of this so highly organized falsity is on the generals themselves: modest and patriotic as they mostiy are, and as most men must be to take up and follow the noble profession of arms, they them- Council, At ikt Sufttmt War CouniU, a wdl worth careful reading m Mcrecy and unity of comniand, even though in retpect to the allied lead- en he vagea a pasnonatc polemic. 138 PUBLIC OPINION selves are ultimately affected by these universal illusions, and reading it every morning in the paper, they also grow persuaded they are thunderbolts of war and infallible, however much they fail, and that thdr m^ntenance in command is an end so sacred that it justifies the use of any means. . . . These various conditions, of which this great deceit is the greatest, at last emancipates all General Staffs from all control. They no longer live for the nation: the nation lives, or rather dies, for them. Victory or defeat ceases to be the prime interest. What matters to these semi-sovereign corporations is whether dear old Willie or poor old Harry is going to be at their head, or the Chantilly party prev^l over the Boule- vard des Invalides party. " ' j Yet Captain Wright who can be so eloquent and so discerning about the dangers of silence is forced nevertheless to approve the silence of Foch in not publicly destroying the illusions. There is here a complicated paradox, arising as we shall see more fully later on, because the traditional democratic view of life is conceived, not for emergencies and dangers, but for tranquility and harmony. And so where masses of people must cooperate in an uncer- tain and eruptive environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility without real consent. The symbol does that. It obscures personal inten- tion, neutralizes discrimination, and obfuscates in- dividual purpose. It immobilizes personality, yet at the same time it enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group, as nothing else in a ' Op. cit; pp. 9B1 loi-ioj. LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 239 crisis can weld it, to purposeful action. It renders the mass mobile though it immobilizes personality. The symbol is the instrument by which in the short run the mass escapes from its own inertia, the in- ertia of indecision, or the inertia of headlong move- ment, and is rendered capable of bang led along the zigzag of a complex situation. But in the longer run, the give and take increases between the leaders and the led. The word most often used to describe the state of mind in the rank and file about its leaders is morale. That is sud to be good when the individuals do the part allotted to them with all thar energy; when each man's whole strength is evoked by the command from above. It follows that every leader must plan his policy with this in mind. He must consider his de- cision not only on " the merits," but also in its effect on any part of his following whose continued sup- port he requires. If he is a general planning an attack, he knows that his organized military units will scatter into mobs if the percentage of casualties rises too high. In the Great War previous calculations were upset to an extraordinary d^ee, for "out of every nine men who went to France five became casualties." ' Tlie limit of endurance was far greater than anyone had supposed. But there was a limit somewhere. frencb. J the EngliA louc« altme, pottibly t 240 PUBLIC OPINION And so, partly because of its effect on the enemy, but also in great measure because of its effect on the troops and their families, no command in this war dared to publish a candid statement of its losses. In France the casualty lists were never published. In England, America, and Germany publication of the losses of a big battle were spread out over long periods so as to destroy a unified impression of the total. Only the insiders knew until long afterwards what the Somme had cost, or the Flanders battles; ' and Ludendorff undoubtedly had a very much more accurate idea of these casualties than any private person in London, Paris or Chicago. All the leaders in every camp did their best to limit the amount of actual war which any one soldier or civilian could vividly conceive. But, of course, among old veterans like the French troops of 1917, a great deal more is known about war than ever reaches the public. Such an army begins to judge its commanders in terms of its own suffering. And then, when another extravagant promise of victory turns out to be the customary bloody defeat, you may find that a mutiny breaks out over some comparatively minor blunder,- like Nivelle's offensive of 1917, because it is a cumulative blunder. Revolutions and mutin- ies generally follow a small sample of a big series of evils.' ' Op cil., p. 34, the Somme cose nearly 500,000 casualties; the Am« and Flanders offensives of 1917 cost 650,000 British casualties. ' The Allies suffered many bloodier defeats than that on the Chemin des Dames. * C/. Pienefeu's account, op, dt., on the causes of the Soisson) mutinies, and the method adopted by Petain to deal with them. Vol. 1, Part III, el stq. LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 241 The incidence of policy detennines the relation between leader and following. If those whom he needs in his plan are remote from the place where the action takes place, if the results are hidden or postponed, if the individual obligations are indirect or not yet due, above all if assent is an exercise of some pleasurable emotion, the leader is likely to have a free hand. Those programs are immediately most popular, like prohibition among teetotalers, which do not at once impinge upon the private habits of the followers. That is one great reason why govern- ments have such a free hand in foreign affairs. Most of the frictions between two states involve a series of obscure and long-winded contentions, occasion- ally on the frontier, but far more often in regions about which school geographies have supplied no precise ideas. In Czechoslovakia America is re- garded as the Liberator; in American newspaper paragraphs and musical comedy, in Ajnerican con- versation by and large, it has never been finally settled whether the country we liberated is Czecho- slavia or Jugoslovakia. In foreign affairs the incidence of policy is for a very long time confined to an unseen environment. Nothing that happens out there is felt to be wholly real. And so, because in the ante-bellum period, nobody has to fight and nobody has to pay, govern- ments go along according to their lights without much reference to their people. In local affairs the cost of a policy is more easily visible. And therefore, all but the most exceptional leaders prefer policies in which the costs are as far as possible indirect. »42 PUBLIC OPINION They do not like direct taxation. They do not like to pay as they go. They like long term debts. They like to have the voters believe that the foreigner will pay. They have always been compelled to calculate prosperity in terms of the producer rather than in terms of the consumer, because the inddence on the consumer is distributed over so many trivial items. Labor leaders have always preferred an increase of money wages to a decrease in prices. There has always been more popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but comparatively unimportant, than in the wastes of the industrial system, which are huge but elusive. A le^slature dealing with a shortage of houses, such as exists when this is written, illustrates this rule> first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses, second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by investigating the profiteering builders and working men. For a constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while a greedy landlord, or a profiteering plumber is visible and immediate. But while people will readily believe that in an untmagined future and in unseen places a certwi policy will benefit them, the actual working out of policy follows a different logic from their opinions. A nation may be induced to believe that jacking up the freight rates will make the railroads prosperous. But that belief will not make the roads prosperous, if the impact of those rates on farmers and shippers is such as to produce a commodity price beyond what the consumer can pay. Whether the consumer LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 243 will pay the price depends not upon whether he nodded his head nine months previously at the proposal to raise rates and save business, but on whether he now wants a new hat or a new automo- bile enough to pay for them. 3 Leaders often pretend that they have merely un- covered a program which existed in the minds of thdr public. When they believe it, they are usually deceiving themselves. Programs do not invent themselves synchronously in a multitude of minds. That is not because a multitude of minds is necessar- ily inferior to that of the leaders, but because thought is the function of an organism, and a mass is not an organism. This fact is obscured because the mass is con- stantly exposed to suggestion. It reads not the news, but the news with an aura of suggestion about it, indicating the line of action to be taken. It hears reports, not objective as the facts are, but already stereotyped to a certain pattern of behavior. Thus the ostensible leader often finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor. But if, as in a laboratory, one could remove all suggestion and lead- ing from the experience of a multitude, one would, I think, find something like this: A mass exposed to the same stimuli would develop responses that could theoretically be charted in a polygon of error. There would be a certain group that felt sufficiently alike to be classified tt^ether. There would be variants of feeling at both ends. These classifica- 444 PUBLIC OPINION tions would tend to harden as individuals in each of the classifications made their reactions vocal. That is to say, when the vague feelings of those who felt Vilely had been put into words, they would know more definitely what they felt, and would then feel it more definitely. Leaders in touch with popular feeling are quickly conscious of these reactions. They know that high prices are pressing upon the mass, or that certain classes of individuals are becoming unpopular, or that feeling towards another nation is friendly or hostile. But, always barring the effect of suggestion which is merely the assumption of leadership by the reporter, there would be nothing in the feeling of the mass that fatally determined the choice of any particular policy. All that the feeling of the mass demands is that policy as it is developed and exposed shall be, if not logically, then by analogy and association, connected with the original feeling. So when a new policy is to be launched, there is a preliminary bid for community of feeling, as in Mark Antony's speech to the followers of Brutus." In the first phase, the leader vocalizes the prevalent opinion of the mass. He identifies himself with the familiar attitudes of his audience, sometimes by telling a good story, sometimes by brandishing his patriotism, often by pinching a grievance. Finding that he Is trustworthy, the multitude milling hither and thither may turn in towards him. He will then be expected to set forth a plan of campaign. But he will not find that plan in the slogans which ' EicdlcDtly analysed m Martin, The BikoBtoT of Crowds, pp. IJO-I J3, LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 24S convey the feelings of the mass. It will not even always be indicated by them. Where the incidence of policy is remote, all that is essential is that the program shall be verbally and emotionally connected at the start with what has become vocal in the multitude. Trusted men in a familiar role subscrib- ing to the accepted symbols can go a very long way on thar own initiative without expl^ning the sub- stance of their programs. But wise leaders are not content to do that. Pro- vided they think publicity will not strengthen op- position too much, and that debate will not delay action too long, they seek a certain measure of con- sent. They take, if not the whole mass, then the subordinates of the hierarchy suiEciendy into thdr confidence to prepare them for what might happen, and to make them feel that they have freely willed the result. But however sincere the leader may be, there is always, when the facts are very complicated, a certwi amount of illusion in these consultations. For it is impossible that all the contingencies shall be as vivid to the whole public as they are to the more experienced and the more imaginative. A fairly large percentage are bound to agree without having taken the time, or without posses^ng the background, for appreciating the choices which the leader presents to them. No one, however, can ask for more. And only theorists do. If we have had our day in court, if what we had to say was heard, and then if what is done comes out well, most of us do not stop to consider how much our opinion ef- fected the bu^ness in hand. 2+6 PUBLIC OPINION And therefore, if the established powers are sen- stive and welUinformed, if they are visibly trying to meet popular feeling, and actually removing some ot the causes of dissatisfaction, no matter how slowly they proceed, provided they are seen to be proceed- ing, they have little to fear. It takes stupendous and persistent blundering, plus almost infinite tactlessness, to start a revolution from below. Palace revolutions, interdepartmental revolurions, are a different matter. So, too, is demagogy. That stops at relieving the tension by expressing the feel- ing. But the statesman knows that such relief is temporary, and if indulged too often, unsanitary. He, therefore, sees to it that he arouses no feeling which he cannot sluice into a program that deals with the facts to which the feelings refer. But all leaders are not statesmen, all leaders hate to resign, and most leaders find it hard to believe that bad as things are, the other fellow would not make them worse. They do not passively wait for the public to feel the incidence of policy, because the incidence of that discovery is generally upon their own heads. They are, therefore, intermittently engaged in mending their fences and consolidating their position. The mending of fences consists in offering an occasional scapegoat, in redressing a minor griev- ance affecting a powerful individual or faction, rearranging certain jobs, placating a group of people who want an arsenal in their home town, or a law to stop somebody's vices. Study the daily activity of any public official who depends on election and LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 247 you can enlai^ this list. There are Congressmen elected year after year who never think of dissipating thdr energy on public affairs. They prefer to do a little service for a lot of people on a lot of little sub- jects, rather than to engage in trying to do a big service out there in the void. But the number of people to whom any organization can be a suc- cessful valet is limited, and shrewd politicians take care to attend either the influential, or somebody so blatandy uninfluential that to pay any atten- tion to him is a mark of sensational magnanimity. The far greater number who cannot be held by favors, the anonymous multitude, receive propa- ganda. The established leaders of any organization have great natural advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information. The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the important conferences. TTiey met the important people. They have responability. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great deal of control over the access to the facts. Every official is in some d^ee a censor. And since no one can suppress information, either by concealing it or foi^tting to mention it, without some notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some degree a propagandist. Strat^cally placed, and compelled often to choose even at the best between the equally cedent though conflicting ideals of safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the official flnds himself deciding more and more 248 PUBLIC OPINION consciously what facts, in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know. That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The pro- cess by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enotjgh. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psycho- It^cal research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political cal- culation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE 249 dt^ma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human afffurs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self- deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach. THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY "I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself." Alexis de Tocqueville. Chapter i6. The Self-Centered Man " 17. The Self-Contain ED Community " 18. The Role of Force, Patronage AND Privilege " 19. The Old Image in a New Form: Guild Socialism " 30. A New Image CHAPTER XVI THE SELF-CENTERED MAN Since Public Opinion is supposed to be the prime mover in democracies, one might reasonably expect to find a vast literature. One does not find it. There are excellent books on government and parties, that is, on the machinery which in theory re^sters public opinions after they are formed. But on the sources from which these public opinions arise, on the pro- cesses by which they are derived, there is relatively little. The existence of a force called Public Opinion is in the main taken for granted, and American political writers have been most interested either in finding out how to make government express the common will, or in how to prevent the common will from subverting the purposes for which they believe the government exists. According to thdr traditions they have wished either to tame opnion or to obey it. Thus the editor of a notable series of text-books writes that " the most difficult and the most moment- ous question of government (is) how to transmit the force of individual opinion into public action." * But surely there is a still more momentous question, the question of how to validate our private versions ' Albert Buihndl Han in the lotraductocy note to A. Lawrence Lowetl'i Pvblic Opinion and Popular GaetrnmnL 254 PUBLIC OPINION of the political scene. There is, as I shall tty to indicate further on, the prospect of radical improve- ment by the development of principles already in operation. But this development will depend on how well we learn to use knowledge of the way opinions are put together to watch over our own opinions when they are bang put together. For casual opinion, being the product of partial contact, of tradition, and personal interests, cannot in the nature of things take kindly to a method of political thought which is based on exact record, measurement, analysis and comparison. Just those qualities of the mind which determine what shall seem interesting, important, familiar, personal, and dramatic, are the qualities which in the first instance realistic opinion frustrates. Therefore, unless there is in the community at large a growing conviction that prejudice and intuition are not enough, the working out of realistic opinion, which takes time, money, labor, conscious effort, patience, and equanimity, will not find enough sup- port. That conviction grows as self-criticism in- creases, and makes us conscious of buncombe, con- temptuous of ourselves when we employ it, and on guard to detect it. Without an ingrained habit of analyzing opinion when we read, talk, and decide, most of us would hardly suspect the need of better ideas, nor be interested in them when they appear, nor be able to prevent the new technic of political intelligence from being manipulated. Yet democracies, if we are to judge by the oldest and most powerful of them, have made a mystery out of public opinion. There have been skilled THE SELF-CENTERED MAN 255 cu^anizers of opinion who understood the mystery well enough to create majorities on election day. But these organizers have been re^u-ded by political science as low fellows or as "problems," not as possessors of the most effective knowledge there was on how to create and operate public opinion. The tendency of the people who have voiced the ideas of democracy, even when they have not manned its action, the tendency of students, orators, editors, has been to look upon Public Opinion as men in other societies looked upon the uncanny forces to which they ascribed the last word in the irection of events. For in almost every political theory there is an in- scrutable element which in the heyday of that theory goes unexamined. Behind the appearances there is a Fate, there are Guardian Spirits, or Mandates to a Chosen People, a Divine Monarchy, a Vice-Regent of Heaven, or a Class of the Better Bom. The more obvious angels, demons, and kings are gone out of democratic thinking, but the need for believing that there are reserve powers of guidance persists. It perasted for those thinkers of the Eighteenth Cen- tury who designed the matrix of democracy. They had a pale god, but warm hearts, and in the doctrine of popular sovereignty they found the answer to their need of an infallible origin for the new social order. There was the mystery, and only enemies of the people touched it with profane and curious hands. They cUd not remove the veil because they were practical polidcians in a bitter and uncertain struggle. 2S6 PUBLIC OPINION They had themselves felt the aspiration of democ- racy, which is ever so much deeper, more intimate and more important than any theory of government. They were engaged, as against the prejudice of ages, in the assertion of human dignity. What possessed them was not whether John Smith had sound views on any public question, but that John Smith, scion of a stock that had always been considered inferior, would now bend his knee to no other man. It wa^ this spectacle that made it bliss "in that dawn to be alive." But every analyst seems to degrade that dignity, to deny that all men are reasonable all the time, or educated, or informed, to note that people are fooled, that they do not always know thdr own interests, and that all men are not equally fitted to govern. The critics were about as welcome as a small boy with a drum. Every one of these observations on the fallibility of man was being exploited ad nauseam. Had democrats admitted there was truth in any of the aristocratic arguments they would have opened a breach in the defenses. And so just as Aristotle had to insist that the slave was a slave by nature, the democrats had to insist that the free man was a legis- lator and administrator by nature. They could not stop to explain that a human soul might not yet have, or indeed might never have, this technical equipment, and that nevertheless it had an inalienable right not to be used as the unwilling instrument of other men. The superior people were still too strong and too unscrupulous to have refrained from capitalizing so candid a statement. THE SELF-CENTERED MAN 257 So the early democrats insisted that a reasoned righteousness welled up spontaneously out of the mass of men. All of them hoped that it would, many of them believed that it did, although the cleverest, like Thomas Jefferson, had all sorts of private reser- vations. But one thing was certain: if public opinion did not come forth spontaneously, nobody in that age believed it would come forth at all. For in one fundamental respect the political science on which de- mocracy was based was the same science that Aristotle formulated. It was the same science for democrat and aristocrat, royalist and republican, in that its major premise assumed the art of government to be a natural endowment. Men differed radically when they tried to name the men so endowed; but they agreed in thinking that the greatest question of all was to find those in whom political wisdom was innate. Royalists were sure that kings were born to govern. Alexander Hamilton thought that while "there are strong minds in every walk of life . . . the repre- sentative body, with too few exceptions to have any influence on the spirit of the government, will be composed of landholders, merchants, and men of the learned professions." ' Jefferson thought the politi- cal faculties were deposited by God in farmers and planters, and sometimes spoke as if they were found in all the people.* The main premise was the same: to govern was an instinct that appeared, according to your social preferences, in one man or a chosen few, in all males, or only in males who were white ' The Ftitraliit, No*. ]5, 36. Cf. comnieat by Heary Jonei Ford m hi* Risi and Groank of Amtneon Politkt. Cb. V. ■ See below p. i6i. 358 PUBLIC OPINION and twenty-one, perhaps even in all men and all women. In deciding who was most fit to gorern, knowledge of the world was taken for granted. The aristocrat believed that those who dealt with large affairs pos- sessed the instinct, the democrats asserted that all men possessed the instinct and could therefore deal with large affairs. It was no part of political science in either case to think out how knowledge of the world could be brought to the ruler. If you were for the people you did not try to work out the question of how to keep the voter informed. By the age of twenty-one he had his political faculties. What counted was a good heart, a reasoning mind, a bal- anced judgment. These would ripen with age, but it was not necessary to consider how to inform the heart and feed the reason. Men took tn thar facts as they took in their breath. But the facts men could come to possess in this effortless way were limited. They could know the customs and more obvious character of the place where they lived and worked. But the outer world they had to conceive, and they did not conceive it instinctively, nor absorb trustworthy knowledge of it just by living. Therefore, the only environment in which spontaneous politics were possible was one confined within the range of the ruler's direct and certain knowledge. There is no escaping this con- clusion, wherever you found government on the natural range of men's faculties. "If," as Aristotle THE SELF-CENTERED MAN 259 s^d,' "the citizens of a state are to judge and distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other's characters; where they do not possess this knowledge, both the election to offices and the deci^on of law suits will go wrong. " Obviously this maxim was binding upon every school of political thought. But it presented peculiar difficulties to the democrats. Those who believed in class government could fairly claim that in the court of the king, or in the country houses of the gentry, men did know each other's characters, and as long as the rest of mankind was passive, the only characters one needed to know were the characters of men in the ruling class. But the democrats, who wanted to raise the dignity of all men, were im- mediately involved by the immense size and con- fusion of their ruling class — the male electorate. Their science told them that politics was an in- stinct, and that the instinct worked in a limited environment. Their hopes bade them insist that all men in a very large environment could govern. In this deadly conflict between their ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of God. The paradox was too great, the stakes too big, their ideal too precious for critical examination. They could not show how a citizen of Boston was to stay in Boston and conceive the views of a Vir- ginian, how a Virginian in Virginia could have real opinions about the government at Washington, " PoUHci, Bk. vn, Ch. 4. 26o PUBLIC OPINION how Congressmen in Washington could have opinions about China or Mexico. For in that day it was not possible for many men to have an unseen environ- ment brought into the field of thdr judgment. There had been some advances, to be sure, Mnce Aristotle. There were a few newspapers, and there were books, better roads perhaps, and better ships. But there was no great advance, and the political assumptions of the Eighteenth Century had essen- tially to be those that had prevailed in political science for two thousand years. The pioneer demo- crats did not possesss the material for resolving the conflict between the known range of man's attention and their illimitable faith in his dignity. Their assumptions antedated not only the modern newspaper, the world-wide press services, photog- raphy and moving pictures, but, what is really more significant, they antedated measurement and record, quantitative and comparative analysis, the canons of evidence, and the ability of psycholf^cal analysis to correct and discount the prejudices of the witness. I do not mean to say that our records are satisfactory, our analysis unbiased, our measure- ments sound. I do mean to say that the key in- ventions have been made for bringing the unseen world into the field of judgment. They had not been made in the time of Aristode, and they were not yet important enough to be visible for political theory in the age of Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Thomas Jefferson. In a later chapter I think we shall see that even in the latest theory of human reconstruction, that of the English Guild Socialists, THE SELF-CENTERED MAN 261 all the deeper premises have been taken over from this older system of political thought. That systemj whenever it was competent and honest, had to assume that no man could have more than a very partial experience of public affairs. In the sense that he can give only a litde time to them, that assumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence. But ancient theory was compelled to assume, not only that men could give little attention to public questions, but that the attention available would have to be confined to matters dose at hand. It would have been visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and complicated events could conceivably be reported, analyzed, and presented in such a form that a really valuable choice could be made by an amateur. That time is now in sight. There is no longer any doubt that the continuous reporting of an unseen environment is fea^ble. It is often done badly, but the fact that it is done at all shows that it can be done, and the fact that we be^n to know how badly it is often done, shows that it can be done better. With varying d^rees of skill and honesty distant com- plexities are reported every day by engineers and accountants for business men, by secretaries and dvil servants for officials, by intelligence officers for the General Staff", by some journalists for some readers. These are crude b^nnings but radical, far more radical in the literal meaning of that word than the repetition of wars, revolutions, abdications and restorations; as radical as the change in the scale of human life which has made it pos^ble for 262 PUBLIC OPINION Mr. Lloyd Geoi^ to discuss Welsh coal mining after breakfast in London, and the fate of the Arabs before dinner in Paris. For the possibility of bringing any aspect of human affairs within the range of judgment breaks the spell which has lain upon political ideas. There have, of course, been plenty of men who did not realize that the range of attention was the main premise of political science. They have built on sand. They have demonstrated in their own persons the effects of a very limited and self-centered knowledge of the world. But for the political thinkers who have counted, from Plato and Aristotle through Machia- velli and Hobbes to the democratic theorists, specu- lation has revolved around the self-centered man who had to see the whole world by means of a few pictures in his head. CHAPTER XVII THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY That groups of self-centered people would engage in a stni^e for existence if they rubbed against each other has always been evident. This much truth there is at any rate in that famous passage in the Leviathan where Hobbes says that "though there had never been any time wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another> yet at all times kings and persons of sovereign au- thorily because of their independency ^ are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another. . ." ' a To circumvent this conclusion one great branch of human thought, which had and has many schools, proceeded in this fashion: it conceived an ideally just pattern of human relations in which each person had well defined functions and rights. If he con- scientiously filled the role allotted to him, it did not matter whether his opinions were right or wrong. He did his duty, the next man did his, and all the dutiful people together made a harmonious world. 26+ PUBLIC OPINION Every caste system illustrates this principle; you lind it in Plato's Republic and in Aristotle, in the feudal ideal, in the circles of Dante's Paradise, in the bureaucratic type of socialism, and in liussez- faire, to an amazing d^rec in syndicalism, guild socialism, anarchism, and in the system of interna^ tional law idealized by Mr. Robert Lanang. All of them assume a pre-established harmony, inspired, imposed, or innate, by which the self-opinionated person, class, or community is orchestrat«I with the rest of mankind. The more authoritarian imagine a conductor for the symphony who sees to it that each man plays his part; the anarchistic are inclined to think that a more divine concord would be heard if each player improvised as he went along. But there have also been philosophers who were bored by these schemes of rights and duties, took conflict for granted, and tried to see how their side might come out on top. They have always seemed more realistic, even when they seemed alarming, because all they had to do was to generalize the experience that nobody could escape. Machiavelli is the classic of this school, a man most mercilessly maligned, because he happened to be the first na- turalist who used plain language in a field hitherto preempted by supernaturalists.' He has a worse name and more disciples than any political thinker who ever lived. He truly described the technic of his AUxendir Hamillon, says of Machiavelli he conditions which exist — the nature of man nchangeable, he proceeds in a calm, unrooril n fro^, to show how a valiant and sagaciojs ruler to his own advantage and the security of his dy- THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY 265 existence for the self-contained state. That is why he has the disciples. He has the bad name chiefly because he cocked his eye at the MetUci family, dreamed in his study at night where he wore Ms "noble court dress" that Machiavelli was himself the Pnnce, and turned a pungent description of the way things are done into an eulogy on that way of doing them. In his most infamous chapter ^ he wrote that "a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who hears and sees him altc^ther merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, ba:ause it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result. . . . One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and dther, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and kingdom many a time." i66 PUBLIC OPINION That is cynical. But it is the cynicisni of a man who saw truly without knowing quite why he saw what he saw. Machiavelli is thinking of the run of men and princes "who judge generally more by the eye than by the hand," which is his way of saying that their judgments are subjective. He was too close to earth to pretend that the Italians of his day saw the world steadily and saw it whole. He would not indulge in fantasies, and he had not the materials for imagining a race of men that had learned how to correct their vision. The worldj as he found it, was composed of people whose vision could rarely be corrected, and Machiavelli knew that such people, since they see all public relations in a private way, are invx^ved in perpetual strife. What they see is their own per- sonal, class, dynasric, or municipal version of affairs that in reality extend far beyond the boundaries of their vision. They see their aspect. They see it as right. But they cross other people who are similarly self-centered. Then their very existence is endangered, or at least what they, far unsuspected private reasons, regard as their existence and take to be a danger. The end, which is impregnably based on a real though private experience justifies the means. They will sacrifice any one of these ideals to save all of them, .... "one judges by the result. . ." 3 These elemental truths confronted the democratic philosophers. Consciously or otherwise, they knew THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY tfyj that the range of political knowledge was limited, that the area of self-^vemment would have to be limited, and that self-contained states when they nibbed against each other were in the posture of gladiators. But they knew just as certunly, that there was in men a will to decide their own fate, and to find a peace that was not imposed by force. How could they reconcile the msh and the fact? They looked about them. In the dty states of Greece and Italy they found a chronicle of cor- ruption, intrigue and war.' In their own cities they saw faction, artificiality, fever. This was no environment in which the democratic ideal could prosfier, no place where a group of independent and equally competent people managed their own affairs spontaneously. They looked further, guided somewhat perhaps by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to remote, unspoiled country villages. They saw enough to convince themseJves that there the ideal was at home. Jefferson in particular felt this, and Jefferson more than any other man formulated the American image of democracy. From the townships had come the power that had carried the American Revoludon to victory. From the townships were to come the votes that carried Jefferson's party to power. Out there in the farming communities of Massachusetts and Virginia, if you wore glasses that obliterated the slaves, you could see mth your- mind's eye the image of what democracy was to be. "The American Revolution broke out," says de ' "Dnnocradei have erer bran ipectidei of turbulence and conten- tion . . . and have in general been at than in theit livei ai they have been violent in thdt deathi." Madiion, FiitrtHit, No. lo. 268 PUBLIC OPINION Tocquevillc,' "and the doctrine of the soverMgnty of the people, which had been nurtured in the town- ships, took possession of the state." It certainly took possession of the minds of those men who formulated and popularized the stereotypes of democracy. "The cherishment of the people was our principle," wrote Jefferson.* But the people he cherished almost exclu^vely were the small land- owning farmers: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example." However much of the romantic return to nature may have entered into this exclamation, there was also an element of solid sense. Jefferson was right in thinking that a group of independent farmers comes nearer to fulfilling the requirements of spontaneous democracy than any other human society. But if you are to preserve the ideal, you must fence off these ideal communities from the abominations of the world. If the farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine affairs to those they are accustomed to managing. Jeffer- son drew all these logical conclusions. He disap- proved of manufacture, of foreign commerce, and a ' Dtmocran in Amrnca, Vol. i, p. 51. Third Edition. * Cited in Qiarles Beard, EtinumU Origins of Jtfffrionian Democracy. THE SELF-CX)NTAINED COMMUNITY 269 navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory of any form of govermnent that was not centered in the small self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked that "wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough, in reality, to defend ourselves ^iunst every invader, we might enjoy an eternal rusticity and live, for- ever, thus apathized and vulgar under the shelter of a selfish, satisfied indifference." ' The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisting of an ideal environment and a selected class, did not conflict with the political science of his time. It did conflict with the realities. And when the ideal was stated in absolute terras, partly through exuberance and partly for campaign pur- poses, it was soon forgotten that the theory was originally devised for very special conditions. It became the political gospel, and supplied the stereo- types through which Americans of all parties have looked at politics. That gospel was fixed by the necessity that in Jefferson's time no one could have conceived public opinions that were not spontaneous and subjective. The democratic tradition is therefore always trying to see a world where people are exclusively con- cerned with affairs of which the causes and effects all operate within the region they inhabit. Never has democraoc theory been able to conceive itself in the context of a wide and unpredictable environ- 'Op.cit., p. 4a6. 270 PUBLIC OPINION ment. The mirror is concave. And although dem- ocrats ncog^TC that they are in contact with ex- ternal affairs, they see quite surely that every contact outside that self-contiuned group is a threat to democracy as originally conceived. That is a wise fear. If democracy is to be spontaneousj the interests of democracy must remun ^mple, in- telligible, and ea^ly managed. Conditions must approximate those of the isolated rural township if the supply of information is to be left to casual experience. The environment must be confined within the range of every man's direct and certain knowledge. The democrat has understood what an analysis of public opinion seems to demonstrate: that in dealing with an unseen environment decisions "are mani- festly settled at haphazard, which clearly they ought not to be." ^ So he has always tried in one way or another to minimize the importance of that unseen environment. He feared foreign trade be- cause trade involves foreign connections; he dis- trusted manufactures because they produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had nevertheless to have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of self-sufficiency. When he could not find these conditions in the real world, he went passion- ately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian communities far from foreign contacts. His slogans reveal his prejudice. He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination, Independence. Not one of these ideas carries with it any notion of consent or ' Ariicotle. PoUtici, Bk. VII, Ch. IV. THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY 371 commimity beyond the frontiers of the self-governing groups. The field of democratic action is a cir- cumscribed area. Within protected boundaries the aim has been to achieve self-sufficiency and avoid entanglement. This rule is not confined to for^gn policy, but it is plainly evident there, because life out^de the national boundaries is more dis- tincdy alien than any life within. And as history shows, democracies in their foreign policy have had generally to choose between splendid isolation and a diplomacy that violated their ideals. The most successful democracies, in fact, Switzerland, Den- mark, Australia, New Zealand, and America until recently, have had no foreign policy in the European sense of that phrase. Even a rule like the Monroe Doctrine arose from the desire to supplement the two oceans by a glacis of states that were sufficiently republican to have no foreign policy. Whereas danger ts a great, perhaps an indis- pensable condition of autocracy,' security was seen to be a necesaty if democracy was to work. There must be as little disturbance as possible of the premise of a self-contained community. Insecurity involves surprises. It means that there are people acting upon your life, over whom you have no control, with whom you cannot considt. It means that forces are at large which disturb the familiar routine, and present novel problems about which ' Fiiher Ames, frightened by the democratic rertduiion of 1800^ wrote to Rufui Khe in iSoi: "We need, »t all nation! do, the comprenioa on the outtide (/our circle of a formidable ndghboi, who«e pretence AM at all rimei excite itronger fean than dcmacoBun can inipire the people widi towards thedr goremment." Cited by Ford, Riri and Groalk of JnuricoK Politici, p. 69. J72 PUBLIC OPINION quick and unusual decisions are required. Every democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are incompatible with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of masses is such that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow ratho- blindly. This has not made non-resistants out of democrats, but it has resulted in all democratic wars being fought for pacifist iums. Even when the wars are in fact wars of conquest, they are sincerely believed to be wars in defense of civilization. These various attempts to enclose a part of the earth's surface were not inspired by cowardice, apathy, or, what one of Jefferson's critics called a willingness to live under monkish disdpline. The democrats had caught sight of a dazzling pos^bility, that every human being should rise to his full stature, freed from man-made limitations. With what they knew of the art of government, they could, no more than Aristotle before them, conceive a society of autonomous individuals, except an enclosed and simple one. They could, then, select no other prem- ise if they were to reach the conclusion that aJI the people could spontaneously manage their public affairs. 5 Having adopted the premise because it was neces- sary to their keenest hope, they drew other conclu- sions as well. Since in order to have spontaneous self-government, you had to have a simple self- contained community, they took it for granted that one man was as competent as the next to manage THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY 273 these ample and self-contained affairs. Where the wish is father to the thought such logic is convincing. Moreover, the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes true in the rural town- ship. Everybody in a village sooner or later tries his hand at everything the village does. There is rotation in office by men who are jacks of all trades. There was no serious trouble with the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen until the democratic stereo- type was universally applied, so that men looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village. Not only was the mdividual citizen fitted to deal with all public aff»rs, but he was consistendy public- spirited and endowed with unflagging interest. He was public-spirited enough in the township, where he knew everybody and was interested in everybody's business. The idea of enough for the township turned easily into the idea of enough for any purpose, for as we have noted, quantitative thinking does not suit a stereotype. But there was another turn to the circle. Since everybody was assumed to be interested enough in important affairs, only those affairs came to seem important in which everybody was interested. This meant that men formed their picture of the world outside from the unchallenged pictures in their heads. These pictures came to them well stereotyped by their parents and teachers, and were litde corrected by their own experience. Only a few men had affairs that took them across state lines. Even fewer had reason to go abroad. Most voters lived their whole lives in one environment, and with 274 PUBLIC OPINION nothing but a few feeble newspapers, some pamphlets, political speeches, their rel^ous training, and rumor to go on, they had to conceive that larger environ- ment, of commerce and finance, of war and peace. The number of public opinions based on any objec- tive report was very small in proportion to those based on casual fancy. And so for many different reasons^ self-suifidency was a spiritual ideal in the formative period. The physical isolation of the township, the loneliness of the pioneer, the theory of democracy, the Protestant tradition, and the limitations of political science all converged to make men believe that out of thdr own consciences they must extricate political wisdom. It is not strange that the deduction of laws from abso- lute prindples should have usurped so much of thdr free energy. The American political mind had to live on its capital. In legalism it found a tested body of rules from which new rules could be spun without the labor of earning new truths from experience. The formulce became so curiously sacred that every good foreign observer has been amazed at the contrast between the dynamic practical enei^ of the Ameri- can people and the static theorism of their public life. That steadfast love of fixed principles was simply the only way known of achieving self- sufficiency. But it meant that the public opinions of any one community about the outer world con- sisted chiefly of a few stereotyped images arranged in a pattern deduced from their legal and their moral codes, and animated by the feeling aroused by local experiences. THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY 275 Thus democratic theory, starting from its fine vision of ultimate human <^gnity, was forced by lack of the instruments of knowlet^ for reporting its environment, to, Adl back upon the wisdom and experience which happened to hare accumulated in the -voter. God had, in the words of Jefferson, made men's breasts "His peculiar deposit for substan- tial and genuine virtue." These chosen people in their self-contained environment had all the facts befbre_them. The environment was so familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking about substantially the same things. The only real disagreements, therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts. There was no need to guar- antee the sources of information. They were obvious, and equally accessible to all men. Nor was there need to trouble about the ultimate criteria. In the self- contiuned community one could assume, or at least did assume, a homogeneous code of morals. The only place, therefore, for differences of opinion was in the It^cal application of accepted standards to accepted facts. And since the reasoning faculty was also well standardized, an error in reasoning would be quickly exposed in a free discussion. It followed that truth could be obtiuned by liberty within these limits. The community could take its supply of information for grantexl; its codes it pa^ed on through school, church, and family, and the power to draw deductions from a premise, rather than the ability to find the premise, was r^arded as the chief end of intellectual training. CHAPTER XVIII THE ROLE OF FORCE, PATRONAGE AND PRIVILEGE "It has happened as was to have been foreseen," wrote Hamilton,' " the measures of the Union have not been executed; the delinquencies of the States have, step by step, matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested all the wheels of the national government and brought them to an awful stand." . . . For "in our case the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills is requisite, under the confederation, to the complete execution of every important measure that proceeds from the Union." How could it be otherwise, he asked: "The rulers of the respective members . , . will under- take to judge of the propriety of the measures themselves. They will consider the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate interests or aims; the momentary conveniences or inconveniences that would attend its adoption. All this will be done, and in a spirit of interested and suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge of na- tional circumstances and reasons of state which is essential to right judgment, and with that strong ' Federalisl, No. IJ. 176 FORCE, PATRONAGE, AND PRIVILEGE 277 predilection in favor of local objects which can hardly fail to mislead the decision. The same process must be repeated in every member of which the body is constituted; and the execution of the plans framed by the councils of the whole, will always fluctuate on the discretion of the ill-informed and prejudiced opinion of every part. Those who have been con- versant in the proceedings of popular assemblies, who have seen how difficult it often is, when there is no exterior pressure of circumstances, to bring them to harmonious resolutions on important points, will readily conceive how impossible it must be to induce a number of such assemblies, deliberating at a distance from each other, at different times, and under different impressions, long to cooperate in the same views and pursuits." Over ten years of storm and stress with a congress that was, as John Adams said,* "only a diplomatic assembly," had furnished the leaders of the revolu- ion "with an instructive but afflicting lesson"* in what happens when a number of self-centered com- munities are entangled in the same environment. And so, when they went to Philadelphia in May of 1787, ostensibly to revise the Articles of Confedera- tion, they were really in full reaction against the fundamental premise of Eighteenth Century democ- racy. Not only were the leaders consciously opposed to the democratic spirit of the time, feeling, as Mad- ison s«d, that "democracies have ever been spec- tacles of turbulence and contention," but within the national frontiers they were determined to offset ' Ford, of. cit., p. 36. » Ftdtraliit, No. IS- 278 PUBLIC OPINION as far as they could the ideal of self-governing com~ munities in self-contained environments. The col- lisions and failures of concave democracy, where men spontaneously manned all their own affairs, were before their eyes. The problem as they saw it, was to restore government as against democracy. They understood government to be the power to make national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation; democracy they believed was the insistence of localities and classes upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests and aims. They could not consider in their calculations the possibility of such an organization of knowledge that separate communities would act ^multaneously on the same version of the facts. We just b^n to conceive this possibility for certain parts of the world where there is free circulation of news and a common language, and then only for certain aspects of life. The whole idea of a voluntary federalism in industry and world politics is still so rudimentary, that, as we see in our own experience, it enters only a little, and only very modestly, into practical poli- tics. What we, more than a century later, can only conceive as an Incentive to generations of intellec- tual effort, the authors of the Constitution had no reason to conceive at all. In order to set up na- tional government, Hamilton and his colleagues had to make plans, not on the theory that men would cooperate because they had a sense of com- mon interest, but on the theory that men could be governed, if special interests were kept in FORCE, PATRONAGE, AND PRIVILEGE 279 equilibrium by a balance of power. "Ambition," Madison said^' ''must be made to counteract am- bition." They did not, as some writers have supposed, intend to balance every interest so that the govern- ment would be in a perpetual deadlock. They in- tended to deadlock local and class interest to prevent these from obstructing government. "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men," wrote Madison,* "the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the gooemetl, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." In one very important sense, then, the doctrine of checks and balances was the remedy of the federalist leaders for the problem of public opinion. They saw no other way to substitute "the mild influence of the magistracy" for the "san- guinary agency of the sword" ' except by devising an ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion. They did not understand how to manipulate a lai^ electorate, any more than they saw the possibility of common consent upon the basis of common infor- mation. It is true that Aaron Burr taught Hamilton a lesson which impressed htm a good deal when he seized control of New York City in 1800 by the aid of Tammany Hall. But Hamilton was killed before he was able to take account of this new discovery, and, as Mr. Ford says,* Burr's pistol blew the bnuns out of the Federal party. ^Federaliit, No. 51, cited by Ford, op. cit., p. 60. • Federalitt, No. 15. * Ford, op. lit., p. 1 19. PUBLIC OPINION When the constitution was written, "politics could still be managed by conference and agreement among gentlemen" ^ and it was to the gentry that Hamilton turned for a government. It was intended that they should manage national affiurs when local prejudice had been brought into equilibrium by the constitutional checks and balances. No doubt Hamilton, who belonged to this class by adoption, had a human prejudice in their favor. But that by itself is a thin explanation of his statecraft. Cer- tainly there can be no question of his consuming passion for union, and it is, I think, an inversion of the truth to argue that he made the Union to protect class privil^es, instead of saying that he used class privileges to make the Union. "We must take man as we find him " Hamilton s^d, " and if we expect him to serve the public we must interest his passions in doing so." ' He needed men to govern, whose passions coutd be most quickly attached to a na- tional interest. These were the gentry, the public creditors, manufacturers, shippers, and traders,' and there is probably no better instance in history of the adaptation of shrewd means to clear ends, than in the seties of fiscal measures, by which Hamilton attached the provincial notables to the new govern- ment. Although the constitutional convention worked behind closed doors, and although ratification was Wp.eit.,p.tn. *0p.cU.,p.47. * Bcatd, £c Beird, op. cit., p. 315. a8i PUBLIC OPINION 3 Jefferson referred to his election as "the great revolution of 1800," but more than anything else it was a revolution in the mind. No great policy- was altered, but a new tradition was established. For it was Jefferson who first taught the American people to r^ard the Constitution as an instrument of democracy, and he stereotyped the images, the ideas, and even many of the phrases, in which Americans ever since have described politics to each other. So complete was the mental victory, that twenty-five years later de Tocqueville, who was received in Federalist homes, noted that even those who were "galled by its continuance" — were not uncommonly heard to "laud the delights of a repub- lican government, and the advantages of democratic institutions when they are in public." ' The Constitutional Fathers with all their sagacity had failed to see that a frankly undemocratic con- stitution would not long be tolerated. The bold denial of popular rule was bound to offer an easy point of attack to a man, like Jefferson, who so far as his constitutional opinions ran, was not a bit more ready than Hamilton to turn over government to the "unrefined" will of the people.^ The Federalist leaders had been men of definite convictions who stated them bluntly. There was little real discrep- ancy between their public and their private views. But Jefferson's mind was a mass of ambiguities, not ' Dimacriuy in Amirica, Vol. I, Ch. X (Third Edition, 1838), p. 116. * Cf, his plan for the Constitution of Virginia, his ideas for a senate of properly holders, and his views on the judicial veto. Beard, Economic Origini of Jefersonian Demacracy, pp. 450 tt stq. FORCE, PATRONAGE, AND PRIVILEGE 283 solely because of its defects, as Hamilton and his biographers have thought, but because he believed in a union and he believed in spontaneous democracies, and in the political science of his age there was no satisfactory way to reconcile the two. Jefferson was confused in thought and action because he had a vision of a new and tremendous idea that no one had thought out in all its bearings. But though popular sovereignty was not clearly understood by anybody, it seemed to imply so great an enhance- ment of human life, that no constitution could stand which frankly denied it. The frank denials were therefore expunged from consciousness, and the document, which is on its face an honest example of limited constitutional democracy, was talked and thought about as an instrument for direct popular rule. Jefferson actually reached the point of believ- ing that the Federalists had perverted the Constitu- tion, of which in his fancy they were no longer the authors. And so the Constitution was, in spirit, rewritten. Partly by actual amendment, partly by practice, as in the case of the electoral collie, but chiefly by looking at ic through another set of stereo- types, the facade was no longer p>ermitted to look oligarchic. The American people came to believe that their Constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such. They owe that fiction to the vic- tory of Thomas Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction it has been. It is a fur guess that if everyone had always r^arded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Consdtution would have been 284 PUBLIC OPINION violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Con- stitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible. Jefferson resolved that para- dox by teaching the American people to read the Constitution as an expression of democracy. He himself stopped there. But in the course of twenty- five years or so sodal conditions had changed so radically, that Andrew Jackson carried out the political revolution for which Jefferson had prepared the tradition.' 4 The political center of that revolution was the question of patronage. By the men who founded the government public office was r^arded as a species of property, not lightly to be disturbed, and it was undoubtedly their hope that the offices would remain in the hands of their social class. But the democratic theory had as one of its main principles the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen. Therefore, when people began to look at the Constitution as a demo- cratic instrument, it was certain that permanence in office would seem undemocratic. The natural ambi- tions of men coincided here with the great moral impulse of their age. Jefferson had popularized the idea without carrying it ruthlessly into practice, and removals on party grounds were comparatively few under the Virginian Presidents. It was Jackson who founded the practice of turning public office into patronage. ' The teader who has any doubts as to the extent of the revol jtion that eepataced Hamilton's opinions from Jackson's practice should tutn to Nit. Henry Jones Foid'j Rise and Groteth of American Politics. FORCE, PATRONAGE, AND PRIVILEGE 285 Curious as it sounds to us, the principle of rota- tion in office with short terms was r^^arded as a great reform. Not only did it acknowledge the new dignity of the average man by treating him as fit for any office, not only did it destroy the monopoly of a small social class and appear to open careers to talent, but "it had been advocated for centuries as a soverugn remedy for political corruption," and as the one way to prevent the creation of a bureau- cracy.^ The practice of rapid change tn public office was the application to a great territory of the image of democracy derived from the self- contained village. Naturally it did not have the same results in the nation that it had in the ideal community on wluch the democratic theory was based. It produced quite unexpected results, for it founded a new governing class to take the place of the submei^ed federalists. Unintentionally, patronage did for a large electorate what Hamilton's fiscal measures had done for the upper classes. We often fail to realize how much of the stability of our government we owe to pa- tronage. For it was patronage that weaned natural leaders from too much attachment to the self- centered community, it was patronage that weakened the local spirit and brought together in some kind of peaceful cooperation, the very men who, as provincial celebrities, would, in the absence of a sense of common interest, have torn the union apart. But of course, the democratic theory was not supposed to produce a new governing class, and it ' Ford, op. fit., p. 169. 286 PUBLIC OPINION has never accommodated itself to the fact. When the democrat wanted to abolish monopoly of offices, to have rotation and short terms, he was thinking of the township where anyone could do a public service, and return humbly to his own farm. The idea of a special class of politicians was just what the democrat did not like. But he could not have what he did like, because his theory was derived from an ideal environment, and he was living in a real one. The more deeply he felt the moral im- pulse of democracy, the less ready he was to see the profound truth of Hamilton's statement that com- munities deliberating at a distance and under different impressions could not long cooperate in the same views and pursuits. For that truth post- pones anything like the full realization of democracy in public affairs until the art of obtiuning common consent has been radically improved. And so while the revolution under Jefferson and Jackson produced the patronage which made the two party system, which created a substitute for the rule of the gentry, and a discipline for governing the deadlock of the checks and balances, all that happened, as it were, invisibly. Thus, rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in practice the offices oscillated between the henchmen. Tenure might not be a permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was per- manent. Government might be, as President Harding once said, a simple thing, but winning elections was a sophisticated performance. The salaries in office might be as ostentatiously frugal as FORCE, PATRONAGE, AND PRIVILEGE 287 Jefferson's home-spun, but the expenses of party organization and the fruits of victory were in the grand manner. The stereotype of democracy con- trolled the visible government; the corrections, the exceptions and adaptations of the American people to the real facts of their environment have had to be invisible, even when everybody knew all about them. It was only the words of the law, the speeches of politicians, the platforms, and the formal machinery of administration that have had to conform to the pristine image of democracy. 5 If one had asked a philosophical democrat how these self-cont^ned communities were to cooperate, when thdr public opinions were so self-centered, he would have pointed to representative govern- ment embodied in the Congress. And nothing would surprise him more than the discovery of how steadily the prestige of representative government has declined, while the power of the Presidency has grown. Some critics have traced this to the custom of sending only local celebrities to Washington. They have thought that if Congress could consist of the nationally eminent men, the life of the capital would be more brilliant. It would be, of course, and it would be a very good thing if retiring Presi- dents and Cabinet officers followed the example of John Quincy Adams. But the absence of these men does not explain the plight of Congress, for its decline began when it was relatively the most 288 PUBLIC OPINION eminent branch of the government. Indeed it is more probable that the reverse is true, and that Congress ceased to attract the eminent as it lost direct influence on the shaping of national policy. The main reason for the discredit, which is world wide, is, I think, to be found in the fact that a congress of representatives is essentially a group of blind men in a vast, unknown world. \^th some exceptions, the only method recc^ized in the Con- stitution or in the theory of representative govern- ment, by which Congress can inform itself, is to exchange opinions from the districts. There is no systematic, adequate, and authorized way for Congress to know what is going on in the world. The theory is that the best man of each district brings the best wisdom of his constituents to a central place, and that all these wisdoms combined are all the wisdom that Congress needs. Now there is no need to question the value of expressing local opinions and exchanging them. Congress has great value as the market-place of a continental nation. In the coatrooms, the hotel lobbies, the boarding houses of Capitol Hill, at the tea-parties of the Congressional matrons, and from occasional entries into the drawing rooms of cosmopolitan Washington, new vistas are opened, and wider horizons. But even if the theory were applied, and the districts always sent their wisest men, the sum or a combination of local impressions is not a wide enough base for national policy, and no base at all for the control of foreign policy. Since the real effects of most laws are subtle and hidden, they roicE, rsnaiMx, xsd iwilege 09 CMUiOt DC lllMJCIWiMM Iff flUJIIIg nOU ClfHJJLBCCS throi^ li local states of nimL TWj* cm be b»«a only t^ contraAed Rpomng and abgecB^ sbu^sk. And just V tK ■On a a ■»££ nctniy CMWMjt. know how ^ti di i it it by taDdng id tbe iiscauoi, bat most ajumine aaa Atea and data that only an afTTHi w t jwf can ue cut nc fc™i. so tnc u.wuudb' docs not ani*c at a tiiK ]aLtuic of the state of the union by pUiiug tPBCtiM' a mosnc of local pi c tme s^ . He needs to know die kical pctiircs, but unless he possesses instmmenls far caEbratii^ than, one pic- ture is as good as the nex^ and a |^eat deal better. The Ptcndent docs come to Ac assistance of Congress by defivtfii^ mcsss^cs on the state of the Union. He is in a positian to do that because he preades over a Tast coDectiaa of b ureau s and their agents, which report as wdl as acC Bat he tdls Congress what he chooses to tell it. He cannot be he ck led, and die censoralup as to what is compatiUe with the pul^ interest is in his hands. It is a whcUy one-sided and tricky relationship, which somedmes readies such heights of absurdity, that Congress, in order to secure an important document has to thank the enterprise of a Chicago newspaper, a- the calculated indiscretion of a subordinate official. So bad is the contact of legislators with necessary facts diat they are forced to rely cither cm private tips or on that l^alized atrodty, the Con- gresfflCMia] investigation, where Congressmen, starved of their le^timate food for thought, go on a wild and feverish man-hunt, and do not stop at can- nibalism. ago PUBLIC OPINION Except for the little that these investigations yield, the occasional communications from the executive departments, interested and disinterested data collected by private persons, such newspapers, periodicals, and books as Congressmen read, and a new and excellent practice of calling for help from expert bodies like the Interstate Commerce Com- mission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Tariff Commission, the creation of Congressional opinion is incestuous. From this it follows ather that legislation of a national character is prepared by a few informed insiders, and put through by partisan force; or that the legislation is broken up into a collection of local items, each of which is enacted for a local reason. Tariff schedules, navy yards, army posts, rivers and harbors, post offices and federal buildings, pensions and patronage: these are fed out to concave communities as tangible evidence of the benefits of national life. Being concave, they can see the white marble building which rises out of federal funds to raise local realty values and employ local contractors more readily than they can judge the cumulative cost of the pork barrel. It is fair to say that in a large assembly of men, each of whom has practical knowledge only of his own district, laws dealing with translocal affairs are rejected or accepted by the mass of Congressmen without creative participation of any kind. They participate only in making those laws that can be treated as a bundle of local issues. For a legislature without effective means of information and analysis must oscillate between blind regularity, tempered FORCE, PATRONAGE, AND PRIVILEGE 291 by occasional insurgency, and logrolling. And it is the logrolling which makes the regularity palatable, because it is by logrolling that a Congressman proves to his more active constituents that he is watching their interests as they conceive them. This is no fault of the individual Congressman's, except when he is complacent about it. The cleverest and most industrious representative cannot hope to understand a fraction of the bills on which he votes. The best he can do is to specialize on a few bills, and take somebody's word about the rest. I have known Congressmen, when they were boneing up on a subject, to study as they had not studied since they passed their final examinations, many large cups of black coffee, wet towels and all. They had to dig for information, sweat over arranging and verifying facts, which, in any consciously organized government, should have been easily available in a form suitable for decision. And even when they really knew a subject, their anxieties had only begun. For back home tjie editors, the board of trade, the central federated union, and the women's clubs had spared themselves these labors, and were prepared to view the Congressman's performance through local spectacles. What patronage did to attach political chieftains to the national government, the infmite variety of local subsidies and pHvil^es do for self-centered communities. Patronage and pork amalgamate and stabilize thousands of special opinions, local *93 PUBLIC OPINION discontents, prirate ambitions. Hiere are but two other alternatives. One is govemment by terror and obedience, the other is gOTcmment based on such a highly developed system of information, analy^, and self-consciousness that "the knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state" is evident to all men. The autocradc system is in decay, the voluntary system is in its very earliest development; and so, in calculating the prospects of association among large groups of people, a L^igue of Nadons, industrial government, or a federal union of states, the d^ree to which the material (or a common consciousness exists, determines how far cooperation will depend upon force, or upon the milder altemadve to force, which is patronage and privil^;e. The secret of great state-builders, like Alexander Hamilton, is that they know how to calculate these principles. CHAPTER XIX THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM: GUILD SOCIALISM. Whenever the quarrels of self-centered groups become unbearable, reformers in the past found themselves forced to choose between two great alternatives. They could take the path to Rome and impose a Roman peace upon the warring tribes. They could take the path to isolation, to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Almost alwajrs they chose that path which they had least recently travelled. If they had tried out the deadening monotony of empire, they cherished above all other things the simfde freedom of their own community. But if they had seen this simple freedom squandered in parochial jealoudes they longed for the spacious order of a great and powerful state. Whichever choice they made, the essential diffi- culty was the same. If decisions were decentralized they soon floundered in a chaos of local opinions. If they were centralized, the policy of the state was based on the opinions of a small social set at the capital. In any case force was necessary to defend one local right agmnst another, or to impose law and order on the localities, or to resist class government at the center, or to defend the whole society, centralized or decentralized, against the outer barbarian. 394 PUBLIC OPINION Modern democracy and the industrial system were both born in a time of reaction agmnst kings, crown government, and a regime of detMled economic r^;ulation. In the industrial sphere this reaction took the form of extreme devolution, known as laissez-faire individualism. Each economic decision was to be made by the man who had tide to the property involved. Since almost everything was owned by somebody, there would be somebody to manage everything. This was plural sovereignty with a vengeance. It was economic government by anybody's eco- nomic philosophy, though it was supposed to be controlled by immutable laws of political economy that must in the end produce harmony. It pro- duced many splendid things, but enough sordid and terrible ones to start counter-currents. One of these was the trust, which established a kind of Roman peace within industry, and a Roman preda- tory imperialism outside. People turned to the legislature for relief. They invoked representative government, founded on the image of the township farmer, to regulate the semi-sovereign corporations. The working class turned to labor organization. There followed a period of increasing centralization and a sort of race of armaments. The trusts inter- locked, the craft unions federated and combined into a labor movement, the political system grew stronger at Washington and weaker in the states, as the reformers tried to match its strength against big business. In this period practically all the schools of socialist THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM 295 thought from the Marxian left to the New National- ists around Theodore Roosevelt, looked upon cen- tralization as the first stage of an evolution which would end in the absorption of all the semi-sovereign powers of business by the political state. The evolu- tion never took place, except for a few months during the war. That was enough, and there was a turn of the wheel ag^nst the omnivorous state in favor of several new forms of pluralism. But this time society was to swing back not to the atomic individualism of Adam Smith's economic man and Thomas Jefferson's farmer, but to a sort of molecular individualism of voluntary groups. One of the interesting things about all these oscillations of theory is that each in turn promises a world in which no one will have to follow Machia- velli in order to survive. They are all established by some form of coercion, they all exercise coercion in order to maintain themselves, and they are all discarded as a result of coercion. Yet they do not accept coercion, either physical power or special position, patronage, or privilege, as part of their ideal. The individualist said that self-enlightened self-interest would bring internal and external peace. The socialist is sure that the motives to aggression will disappear. The new pluralist hopes they will.' Coercion is the surd in almost all social theory, except the Machiavellian. The temptation to ignore it, because it is absurd, inexpressible, and unmanageable, becomes overwhelming in any man who is trying to radonalize human life. ' See G. D. H. Cole, Social Thiory, p. 141. 296 PUBLIC OPINION The lengths to which a clever man will sometimes go in order to escape a full recognition of the role of force is shown by Mr. G. D. H. Cole's book on Guild Socialism. The present state, he says, "is primarily an instrument of coercion;" ' in a guild socialist society there will be no soverwgn power, though there will be a coordinating body. He calls this body the Commune. He then begins to enumerate the powers of the Commune, which, we recall, is to be primarily not an instrument of coercion.* It settles price disputes. Sometimes it fixes prices, allocates the surplus or distributes the loss. It allocates natural resources, and controls the issue of credit. It also "allocates communal labor-power." It ratifies the budgets of the guilds and the civil services. It levies taxes. "All questions of income" fall within its jurisdiction. It "allocates" income to the non-productive mem- bers of the community. It is the iinal arbiter in all questions of policy and jurisdiction between the guilds. It passes constitutional laws fixing the functions of the functional bodies. It appoints the judges. It confers coercive powers upon the guilds, and ratifies their by-laws wherever these involve coercion. It declares war and makes peace. It controls the armed forces. It is the supreme rep- resentative of the nation abroad. It settles bound- ary questions within the national state. It calls into existence new functional bodies, or distributes new functions to old ones. It runs the police. It ' Cole, Gitiid Socialiim, p. IC7. ' Op. eU., Ch. VIII. THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM 297 makes whatever laws are necessary to regulate per- sonal conduct and personal property. These powers are exercised not by one commune, but by a federal structure of local and provincial communes with a National commune at the top. Mr. Cole is, of course, welcome to insist that this is not a sovereign state, but if there is a coercive power now enjoyed by any modern government for which he has forgotten to make room, I cannot think of it. He tells us, however, that Guild society will be non-coercive: "we want to build a new society which will be conceived in the spirit, not of coercion, but of free service." ' Everyone who shares that hope, as most men and women do, will therefore look closely to see what there is in the Guild Socialist plan which promises to reduce coercion to its lowest limits, even though the Guildsmen of to-day have already reserved for their communes the widest kind of coercive power. It is acknowledged at once that the new society cannot be brought into ex- istence by universal consent. Mr. Cole is too honest to shirk the element of force required to make the transition.* And while obviously he cannot predict how much civil war there might be, he is quite clear that there would have to be a period of direct action by the trade unions. 3 But leaving a^de the problems of transition, and any consideration of what the effect is on their future action, when men have hacked thdr way ' 0^ rii.. p. 141. ' CJ. op. cii., Ch. X. 298 PUBLIC OPINION through to the promised land, let us imagine the Guild Society in being. What keeps it running as a non-coercive society? Mr. Cole has two answers to this question. One is the orthodox Marxian answer that the abolition of capitalist property will remove the motive to agression. Yet he does not really believe that, because if he did, he would care as little as does the average Marxian how the working class is to run the government, once it is in control. If his diagnosis were correct, the Marxian would be quite right: if the disease were the capitalist class and only the capitalist class, salvation would automatically follow its extinction. But Mr. Cole is enormously con- cerned about whether the society which follows the revolution is to be run by state collectivism, by guilds or cooperative societies, by a democratic parliament or by functional representation. In fact, it is as a new theory of representative govern- ment that guild socialism challenges attention. The guildsmen do not expect a miracle to result from the disappearance of capitalist property rights. They do expect, and of course quite rightly, that if equality of income were the rule, social relations would be profoundly altered. But they differ, as far as I can make out, from the orthodox Russian commimist in this respect: The communist proposes to establish equality by force of the dictatorship of the proletariat, believing that if once people were equalized both in income and in service, they would then lose the incentives to aggression. The guildsmen also propose to establish equality by force, but are THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM 299 shrewd enough to see that if an equilibrium is to be maintained they have to provide institutions for maintaining Jt. Guildsmen, therefore, put their faith in what they believe to be a new thrary of democracy. Their object, says Mr. Cole, is "to get the me- chanism right, and to adjust it as far as possible to the expression of men's social wills." ' These wills need to be given opportunity for self-expression in self-government "in any and every form of social action." Behind these words is the true democratic impulse, the desire to enhance human dignity, as well as the traditional assumption that this human dignity is impugned, unless each person's will enters into the management of everything that aifects him. The guildsman, like the earlier democrat therefore, looks about him for an environment in which this ideal of self-government can be realized. A hundred years and more have passed since Rousseau and Jefferson, and the center of interest has shifted from the country to the city. The new democrat can no longer turn to the idealized rural township for the image of democracy. He turns now to the work- shop. "The spirit of association must be given free play in the sphere in which it is best able to find expression. This is manifestiy the factory, in which men have the habit and tradition of working to- gether. The factory is the natural and fundamental unit of industrial democracy. This involves, not only that the factory must be free, as far as possible, to manage its own affairs, but also that the dem- ■ Of- But dispute would arise as to what constitute the internal affairs of a shop. Obvi-- ously the biggest interests, like wages, standards of production, the purchase of supplies, the marketing of the product, the larger planning of work, are by no means purely internal. The shop democracy has freedom, subject to enormous limiting concUtions from the outside. It can deal to a certain extent with the arrangement of work laid out for the shop, it can deal with the temper and temperament of individuals, it can administer petty industrial justice, and act as a court of first instance in somewhat larger individual disputes. Above all it can act as a unit in dealing with other shops, and perhaps mth the plant as a whole. But isolation is impossible. The unit of industrial democracy is thoroughly en- tangled in foreign affairs. And it is the management of these external relations that constitutes the test of the guild socialist theory. They have to be managed by representative government arranged in a federal order from the shop to the plant, the plant to the industry, the industry to the nadon, with intervening regional grouping of representatives. But all this structure derives from the shop, and all its peculiar virtues are ascribed to this source. The representatives who choose the representatives who choose the repre- sentatives who finally "coordinate" and "r^ulate" the shops are electwi, Mr. Cole asserts, by a true democracy. Because they come originally from a self-^verning unit, the whole federal organism will ' Aciltotle, PalitUi, Bk. VII, Ch. IV. 302 PUBLIC OPINION be inspired by the spirit and the reality of self-govern- ment. Representatives will aim to carry out the workers* "actual will as understood by themselves," ' that is, as understood by the individual in the shops. A government run literally on this principle would, if history is any guide, be either a perpetual logroll, or a chaos of warring shops. For while the worker in the shop can have a real opinion about matters entirely within the shop, his "will" about the rela- tion of that shop to the plant, the industry, and the nation is subject to all the limitations of access, stereotype, and self-interest that surround any other self-centered opinion. His experience in the shop at best brings only aspects of the whole to his attention. His opinion of what is right within the shop he can reach by direct knowledge of the essential facts. His opinion of what is right in the great complicated environment out of sight is more likely to be wrong than right if it is a generalization from the experi- ence of the individual shop. As a matter of experi- ence, the representatives of a guild society would find, just as the higher trade union officials find to- day, that on a great number of questions which they have to decide there is no "actual will as understood" by the shops. 5 The guildsmen insist, however, that such criticism is blind because it ignores a great political discovery. You may be quite right, they would say, in thinking that the representatives of the shops would have to ' Op. cU., p. 43. THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM 303 make up their own minds on many questions about which the shops have no opinion. But you are simply entangled in an ancient fallacy: you are looking for somebody to represent a group of people. He cannot be found. The only representative pos- sible is one who acts for "some particular iunction," ' and therefore each person must help choose as many representatives "as there are distinct essential groups of functions to be performed. " Assume then that the representatives speak, not for the men in the shops, but for certain functions in which the men are interested. They are, mind you, disloyal if they do not carry out the will of the group about the function, as understood by the group.* These fimctional representatives meet. Their busi- ness is to coordinate and regulate. By what standard does each judge the proposals of the other, assuming, as we must, that there is conflict of opinion between the shops, since if there were not, there would be no need to coordinate and regulate? Now the peculiar virtue of functional democracy is supposed to be that men vote candidly according to their own interests, which it is assimied they know by daily escperience. They can do that within the self-contained group. But in its external relations the group as a whole, or its representadve. Is dealing with matters that transcend immediate experience. The shop does not arrive spontaneously at a view of thewholesituarion. Therefore, the public opinions of a shop about its rights and duties in the industry 304 PUBLIC OPINION and in society, are matters of education or propa- ganda, not the automatic product of shc^Mronsdous- ness. Whether the guildsmen elect a delate, or a representative, they do not escape the problem of the orthodox democrat. Either the group as a whole, or the elected spokesman, must stretch his mind beyond the limits of direct experience. He must vote on questions coming up from other shops, and on mat- ters coming from beyond the frontiers of the whole industry. The primary interest of the shop does not even cover the funcrion of a whole industrial voca- tion. The funcrion of a vocarion, a great industry, a district, a nation is a concept, not an experience, and has to be imagined, invented, taught and be- lieved. And even though you define fimction as carefully as possible, once you admit that the view of each shop on that function will not necessarily coin- cide with the view of other shops, you are saying that the representative of one interest is concerned in the proposals made by other interests. You are saying that he must conceive a common interest. And in voting for him you are choosing a man who will not simply represent your view of your funcrion, which is alt that you know at Arst hand, but a man who will represent your views about other people's views of that function. You are voting as indefinitely as the orthodox democrat. The guildsmen in their own minds have solved the question of how to conceive a common interest by playing with the word function. They imagine a THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM 305 society in which all the main work of the world has been analysed into functions^ and these functions in turn synthesized harmoniously. ' They suppose essential agreement about the purposes of society as a whole, and essential agreement about the role of every oi^anized group in carrying out those purposes. It was a nice sentiment, therefore, which led them to take the name of their theory from an institution that arose in a Catholic feudal society. But they should remember that the scheme of fimction which the wise men of that age assumed was not worked out by mortal man. It is unclear how the guildsmen think the scheme is going to be worked out and made acceptable in the modern world. Sometimes they seem to ai^e that the scheme will develop from trade union organization, at other times that the communes will de6ne the constitutional fijnction of the groups. But it makes a considerable practical difference whether they believe that the groups define their own fimctions or not. In either case, Mr. Cole assumes that society can be carried on by a social contract based on an ac- cepted idea of" distinct essential groups of functions." How does one recc^ize these distinct essential groups? So far as I can make out, Mr. Cole thinks that a function is what a group of people are inter- est^ in. "The essence of functional democracy is that a man should count as many times over as there are functions in which he is interested." * Now there are at least two meanings to the word interested. You can use it to mean that a man is involved, or > Cf. op. eii., Ch. XK. ' SotUJ Tktory, p. 103 rt itq. 3o6 PUBLIC OPINION that his mind is occupied- John Smith, for example, may have been tremendously interested in the Still- man divorce case. He may have read every word of the news in every lobster edition. On the other hand, young Guy Stillman, whose legidmacy was at stake, probably did not trouble himself at all. John Smith was interested in a suit that did not affect his "interests," and Guy was uninterested in one that would determine the whole course of his life. Mr. Cole, I am afraid, leans towards John Smith. He is answering the "very foolish objection" that to vote by functions is to be voting very often: "If a man is not interested enough to vote, and cannot be aroused to interest enough to make him vote, on, say, a dozen distinct subjects, he waives his right to vote and the result is no less democratic than if he voted blindly and without interest." Mr. Cole thinks that the uninstructed voter "waives his right to vote." From this it follows that the votes of the instructed reveal their interest, and their interest defines the function.' "Brown, Jones, and Robinson must therefore have, not one vote each, but as many different functional votes as there are different questions calling for associative action in which they are interested." * I am considerably in doubt whether Mr. Cole thinks that Brown, Jones and Robinson should qualify in any election where they assert that they are interested, or that somebody else, not named, picks the functions in which they are ' Cf. G>. XVIII of this book. "Since eveiybody was assumed to be interested enough in important afFiirs, only those affairs came to seem jortani in which everybody was interested." Guild Sodaliim, p. 24. THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM 307 entitled to be interested. If I were asked to say what I believe Mr. Cole thinks, it would be that he has smoothed over the difficulty by the enormously strange assumption that it is the uninstructed voter who waives his right to vote; and has concluded that whether functional voting is arranged by a higher power, or " from below " on the principle that a man may vote when it interests him to vote, only the instructed will be voting anyway, and therefore the institution will work. But there are two kinds of uninstructed voter. There is the man who does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an enlightened person. He is the man who waives his right to vote. But there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he is, or care. He can always be gotten to the polls, if the party machinery is working. His vote is the basis of the machine. And since the communes of the guild society have large powers over taxation, wages, prices, credit, and natural resources, it would be preposterous to assume that elections will not be fought at least as passionately as our own. The way people exhibit thar interest will not then delimit the functions of a functional society. There are two other ways that function might be defined. One would be by the trade unions which fought the battle that brought guild socialism into being. Such a stru^e would harden groups of men together in some sort of functional relation, and these groups would then become the vested interests of the guild socialist society. Some of them, like the miners and 3o8 PUBLIC OPINION railroad men, would be very strong, and probably deeply attached to the view of their function which they learned from the batde with capitalism. It is not at all unlikely that certain favorably placed trade unions would under a socialist state become the center of coherence and government. But a guild society would inevitably find them a tough problem to deal with, for direct action would have revealed their strategic power, and some of their leaders at least would not offer up this power readily on the altar of freedom. In order to "coordinate" them, guild society would have to gather together its strength, and fairly soon one would find, I think, that the radicals under guild socialism would be asking for communes strong enough to define the functions of the guilds. But if you are going to have the government (commune) define functions, the premise of the the- ory disappears. It had to suppose that a scheme of functions was obvious in order that the concave shops would voluntarily relate themselves to society. If there is no settled scheme of functions in every voter's head, he has no better way under guild socialism than under orthodox democracy of turning a self-centered opinion into a social judgment. And, of course, there can be no such settled scheme, because, even if Mr. Cole and his friends devised a good one, the shop democracies from which all power derives, would judge the scheme in operation by what they learn of it and by what they can imagine. The guilds would see the same scheme differently. And so instead of the scheme being the skeleton that THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM 309 keeps guild scx:iety together, the attempt to define what the scheme ought to be, would be under guild socialism as elsewhere, the main business of politics. Ifwe could allow Mr. Cole his scheme of functions we could allow him almost everything. Unfortunately he has inserted in his premise what he wishes a 'guild society to deduce.' ■ I have dealt with Mr. Coie'* theory rather than with the experience of Soviet Ruuia becauic, while the teitiinony ii (raKmentary, all cora- peicnt obterven wem to agree that Rustia in 1911 doa not illuitrate s communiil itate in working order. Ruttia ii in revolution, and what you can learn from Ruuia is what a revolution ii like. You can learn very little about what a communitt aodet^r would belike. It it, however, immenid^ tiKiiificant that, GrtI aa practical revi^udoniiu and then ai public official!, the Russian communiiti have relied not upon the tpon- taneoui democracy of the Russian people, but on the discipline, ipecial interest and the noblesse obliEc of a tpecialiaed clau — the loyal and indoctrinated raemben of the Communiit party. In the " irantidon," on which no time limit has been set, I bdieve, the cure for dais govenf ment and the coercive state is strictly homeopathic. There ii also the question of why I selected Mr. Cole's books rather than the much more closely reasoned "Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain" by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. I a