Public Opinion

CHAPTER X

THE DETECTION OF STEREOTYPES

1

Skilled diplomatists, compelled to talk out loud to the warring peoples, learned how to use a large repertory of stereotypes.They were dealing with a precarious alliance of powers, each of which was maintaining 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 obtain 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 claims were called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent Ruritanian.But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad.So holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to divide and conquer.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 peasants just dissolved into fog, and only the slope of the mountains was visible.The next sector was inhabited 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 commercial 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 frontier of another nation, never historically a part of Ruritania.But one of the provinces 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 necessity of defending civilization, the lands were claimed.Finally, there was a port wholly disconnected from Ruritania geographically, 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 accommodation did not prevail and that, therefore, the substance of peace was not there.For the moment you start to discuss factories, mines, mountains, 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, warehouses, 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 certain clues which often help in detecting 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 of contradictions showed that for each sector that stereotype was employed which would obliterate all the facts that interfered with the claim.Contradiction of this sort is often a good clue.

2

Inability to take account of space is another.In the spring of 1918, for example, large numbers of people, appalled by the withdrawal of Russia, demanded 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 unemployed Japanese army was to man the front, substituting for the Russian.But there was one insuperable obstacle.Between Vladivostok and the eastern battleline there were five thousand miles of country, spanned by one broken down railway.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 imagine the Great War they had conceived Germany held between France and Russia.One generation of strategists, 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 which 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 authorities 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, engrossed in the mobilization of their forces, had a vision of the western front which was itself a stereotype 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 compete with the traditional 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 consciousness, 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 characteristic of what we regard as "real." [Footnote: Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 300.] The French in despair remained fixed on their accepted image. And when facts, gross geographical facts, would not fit with the preconception, they were either censored 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. Between March and June 1918, there was supposed to be a German army operating in 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. [Footnote: See in this connection Mr. Charles Grasty's interview with Marshal Foch, New York Times, February 26, 1918. "Germany is walking through Russia. America and Japan, who are in a position to do so, should go to meet her in Siberia." See also the resolution by Senator King of Utah, June 10, 1918, and Mr. Taft's statement in the New York Times, June 11, 1918, and the appeal to America on May 5, 1918, by Mr. A.J.Sack, Director of the Russian Information Bureau: "If Germany were in the Allied place…she would have 3,000,000 fighting on the East front within a year."]

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 transportation, 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 destination, I curse as an unmitigated booby the man who tells me it is three miles, and does not mention a six 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.I 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 complications have arisen through failure to conceive 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.

4

But time, no less than space, fares badly. A common 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, [Footnote: The Letters of William James, Vol.I, p.6.]"to provide that his children (several of whom were under age when he died) should qualify themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony which he expected to bequeath 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 in its objection to perpetuities recognizes that there are distinct limits to the usefulness of allowing anyone to impose his moral stencil upon an unknown future.But the desire to impose it is a very human trait, 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 generations.There are, I believe, American state constitutions which are almost incapable of amendment.The men who made them could have had but little sense of the flux of time: 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 life should run after they were gone.And then because 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 restrictions that, given any decent humility about the future, ought to be no more permanent than an ordinary statute.

A presumption about time 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.Geological time is very different from biological time.Social time is most complex.The statesman has to decide whether to calculate for the emergency or for the long run.Some decisions 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 duration we have no direct 'realizing' sense." [Footnote: Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 638.] The longest duration which we immediately feel is what is called the "specious present." It endures, according to Titchener, for about six seconds. [Footnote: Cited by Warren, Human Psychology, p. 255.] "All impressions within this period of time are present to us at onceThis makes it possible for us to perceive changes and events as well as stationary objects.The perceptual present is supplemented by the ideational present.Through the combination of perceptions 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 said, is proportionate to the number of discriminations 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: [Footnote: Op.cit., Vol.I, p.639.]

"We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enormously 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; [Footnote: In the moving picture this effect is admirably produced by the ultra-rapid camera.]if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short.We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons.If born 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 1000th part of the sensations we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1000 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" [Footnote: 1 Vol. II, p. 605. See also James Harvey Robinson, The New History, p. 239.] 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 "Sargon 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 dead a thousand years… Stonehedge 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 moral perspective. Yet the astronomical measure of time, the geological, 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 Probable 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." [Footnote: In a review of The Salvaging of Civilization, The Literary Review of the N.Y.Evening Post, June 18, 1921, p.5.]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 because he is sentimentally overimpressed with an immediate 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 off an aggressive empire by indulging its appetite have allowed a specious present to interfere with the peace of their children.The people who will not be patient with a troublesome neighbor, who want to bring everything to a "showdown" are no less the victims of a specious present.

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Into almost every social problem the proper calculation 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 emergency, say the need for aeroplane spruce in a war, when the year's allowance must be exceeded.An alert government will recognize that and regard 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 geological 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 when that computation has been reached it must finally be squared with an ideal standard involving time.Suppose, for example, that engineers conclude that the present fuels are being exhausted at a certain rate; that barring new discoveries industry will have to enter a phase of contraction at some definite time in the future.We have then to determine 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 consider posterity?Our grandchildren?Our great grandchildren?Perhaps we shall decide to calculate on a hundred years, believing that to be ample time for the discovery of alternative fuels if the necessity is made clear at once.The figures are, of course, hypothetical.But in calculating 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 generation 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 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.

Popular 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 paintings, where Virgil and Dante sit side by side conversing.These perspectives and foreshortenings 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 using the argument from history you are fairly certain to select those dates in the past which support your view of what should be done now.

Arguments about "races" and nationalities often betray the same arbitrary view of time.During the war, under the influence of powerful feeling, the difference 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 emphasizing the common Teutonic origin of the West European peoples, and ethnologists would certainly 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-day 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 attention on the period before they were distinguishable; in the other on the period after which they became distinct.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 to start, or perhaps the earliest ancestor of which there is a record.But genealogical tables exhibit a deeper prejudice.Unless the female line happens to be especially remarkable descent is traced down through the males.The tree is male.At various moments females accrue to it as itinerant bees light upon an ancient apple tree.

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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 discussion 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.[Footnote: Cf.Carter L.Goodrich, The Frontier of Control.]Some of these require no training; some require a little training; others can be learned only in a lifetime.And the truly discriminating program of industrial democratization would be one 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 democracy, such as rotation in office, and contempt for the expert, are really nothing but the old myth that 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, [Footnote: Article XIX.]for example, that "the character of the mandate must differ according to the stage of the development of the people," as well as on other grounds.Certain communities, it asserts, "have reached a stage of development" where their independence can be provisionally recognized, subject to advice and assistance "until such time as they are able to stand alone."The way in which the mandatories and the mandated conceive that time will influence deeply their 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 tie 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 program of forwardness, a program with definite standards and definite estimates of time.Far more 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 morality 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.

8

In putting together 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 generalize.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 devoutly imagined that I understood.All they have done for me is to make me a little more conscious of how hard it is to classify and to sample, 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 picture of the mental equipment of the workers of that city for the impressionistic one they had. [Footnote: The Equipment of the Worker.]They wished to say, with some decent grounds for saying it, 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 questionnaire.For the sake of the illustration, assume that the questions were a fair test of mental equipment 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 104,000 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 thousand.

So the social workers consulted an eminent statistician, Professor Bowley. He advised them that not less than 408 men and 408 women would prove to be a fair sample. According to mathematical calculation this number would not show a greater deviation from the average than 1 in 22. [Footnote: Op.cit., p.65.]They had, therefore, to question at least 816 people before they could pretend to talk about the average workingman.But which 816 people should they approach?"We might have gathered particulars concerning workers to whom one or another of us had a pre-inquiry access; we might have worked through philanthropic gentlemen and ladies who were in contact with certain sections of workers at a club, a mission, an infirmary, a place of worship, a settlement.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 popularly 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 questionnaire, 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 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 statistically is wholly unsound.Thus the employer will judge labor by the most troublesome 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 little 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 supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

A great deal of confusion arises when people decline to classify themselves as we have classified them.Prophecy would be so much easier 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.Factory 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 attention on two or three million more or less confirmed 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 view 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 towards an ideal goal. The fiction deals with the future. In the future possibilities are almost indistinguishable 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." [Footnote: William James, Some Problems of Philosophy, p.224.]

"1.There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true, 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 ought to be true;

6. It must be true;

7. It shall be true, at any rate true for me."

And, as he added in another place, [Footnote: A Pluralistic Universe, p.329.]"your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making it securely true in the end."Yet no one would have insisted 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 certain 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 illustrates 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.

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And when we try to go one step further in order to seek the causes and effects of unseen and complicated affairs, 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 to scholars who have devoted years, let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage movements, 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 uncertain, 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 sequence or parallelism as equivalent to cause and effect.

This is most likely to happen when two ideas that come together arouse the same feeling.If they come together they are likely to arouse the same feeling; and even when they do not arrive together a powerful 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.

"IId IIm (1675) This day I hear that G[od] has shot an arrow into the midst of this Town. The small pox is in an ordinary ye sign of the Swan, the ordinary Keepers name is Windsor. His daughter is sick of the disease. It is observable that this disease begins at an alehouse, to testify God's displeasure agt the sin of drunkenness & yt of multiplying alehouses!" [Footnote: The Heart of the Puritan, p.177, edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom.]

Thus Increase Mather, and thus in the year 1919 a distinguished
Professor of Celestial Mechanics discussing the Einstein theory:

"It may well be that…. Bolshevist uprisings are in reality the visible objects of some underlying, deep, mental disturbance, world-wide in character…. This same spirit of unrest has invaded science." [Footnote: Cited in The New Republic, Dec.24, 1919, p.120.]

In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violently.They may have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Relativity and Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion.In a superstitious mind, like that of the Professor of Celestial Mechanics, emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and imbeds whatever it touches.When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, all 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 where anything that is dreaded is the cause of anything else that is dreaded.

10

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. [Footnote: Cf. Freud's discussion of absolutism in dreams, Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VI, especially pp. 288, et seq.]They clutter up sentences, and interfere with irresistible 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 absolutely,—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 democracy 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 impotence the pendulum swings.

Real space, real time, real numbers, real connections, real weights are lost.The perspective and the background and the dimensions of action are clipped and frozen in the stereotype.

PART IV

INTERESTS

CHAPTER 11.THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST " 12.SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED

CHAPTER XI

THE ENLISTING OF INTEREST

I

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 endlessly 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 quantities, and to dramatize relations.As some sort of allegory, except in acutely sophisticated minds, the affairs of the world are represented.Social Movements, Economic Forces, National Interests, Public Opinion are treated as persons, or persons like the Pope, the President, Lenin, Morgan or the King become 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 that we cannot keep them vividly in mind.Usually, then, we name them, and let the name stand for the whole impression.But a name is porous.Old meanings slip out and new ones slip in, and the attempt to retain the full meaning of the name is almost as fatiguing as trying to recall the original impressions.Yet names are a poor currency for thought.They are too empty, too abstract, too inhuman.And so we begin to see the name through some personal stereotype, to read into it, finally to see in it the incarnation of some human quality.

Yet human qualities are themselves vague and fluctuating.They are best remembered by a physical sign.And therefore, the human qualities we tend to ascribe to the names of our impressions, themselves tend to be visualized in physical metaphors.The people of England, the history of England, condense into England, and England becomes John Bull, who is jovial and fat, not too clever, but well able to take care of himself.The migration of a people may appear to some as the meandering of a river, and to others like a devastating flood.The courage people display may be objectified as a rock; their purpose as a road, their doubts as forks of the road, their difficulties as ruts and rocks, their progress as a fertile valley.If they mobilize their dread-naughts they unsheath a sword.If their army surrenders they are thrown to earth.If they are oppressed they are on the rack or under the harrow.

When public affairs are popularized in speeches, headlines, plays, moving pictures, cartoons, novels, statues or paintings, their transformation into a human interest requires first abstraction from the original, and then animation of what has been abstracted.We cannot be much interested in, or much moved by, the things we do not see.Of public affairs each of us sees very little, and therefore, they remain dull and unappetizing, until somebody, with the makings of an artist, has translated them into a moving picture.Thus the abstraction, imposed upon our knowledge of reality by all the limitations of our access and of our prejudices, is compensated.Not being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to think and talk about.Being flesh and blood we will not feed on words and names and gray theory.Being artists of a sort we paint pictures, stage dramas and draw cartoons out of the abstractions.

Or, if possible, we find gifted men who can visualize for us. For people are not all endowed to the same degree with the pictorial faculty. Yet one may, I imagine, assert with Bergson that the practical intelligence is most closely adapted to spatial qualities. [Footnote: Creative Evolution, Chs.III, IV.]A "clear" thinker is almost always a good visualizer.But for that same reason, because he is "cinematographic," he is often by that much external and insensitive.For the people who have intuition, which is probably another name for musical or muscular perception, often appreciate the quality of an event and the inwardness of an act far better than the visualizer.They have more understanding when the crucial element is a desire that is never crudely overt, and appears on the surface only in a veiled gesture, or in a rhythm of speech.Visualization may catch the stimulus and the result.But the intermediate and internal is often as badly caricatured by a visualizer, 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 difficulty in making them real to others.When he talks about them they sound like a sheaf of mist.For while intuition does give a fairer perception of human feeling, the reason with its spatial and tactile prejudice can do little with that perception.Therefore, where action depends 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.

2

Pictures have always been the surest way of conveying 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 some aspect of the picture. The identification, or what Vernon Lee has called empathy, [Footnote: Beauty and Ugliness.]may be almost infinitely subtle and symbolic.The mimicry may be performed without our being aware of it, and sometimes 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 identification 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. [Footnote: A fact which bears heavily on the character of news. CfPart VII.]But that is not enough.The audience must have something to do, and the contemplation 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 of its appeal.There is none so engrossing or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers.

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 Negroes or Asiatics, to speak of it at all would seem far-fetched. Only in moving pictures, novels, and some magazine fiction are industrial 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 enlistment of pugnacity. [Footnote: Cf. Frances Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship, pp.31-32."III.If the plot lacks suspense: 1.Add an antagonist, 2.Add an obstacle, 3.Add a problem, 4.Emphasize one of the questions in the minds of the spectator.,.."]

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 invention.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 [Footnote: Op.cit., pp.6-7.]insists that "suspense…constitutes 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 clear 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 pictures.Yet the motion 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 waiting.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 attention, it should be capable of translation 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 audience on to the stage, and wrestle as the hero for the victory of good over evil.We must breathe into the allegory the breath of our life.

3

And so, in spite of the critics, 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 plausible 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 beginning 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 experiences 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 and the court painters of other ages, 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 film is released six months from now.

The men who do alter the stereotypes, the pioneering 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 their 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 forgotten another thing in the unceasing war with Philistia.They have forgotten that they are measuring their 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 Sinclair Lewis in "Main Street," are men who have succeeded in projecting 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 Sinclair Lewis, has a quarrel with the public.

This quarrel is due not only to the conflict of stereotypes, but to the pioneering artist'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 regardless of the pain 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 together 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." [Footnote: Op.cit., p.46."The hero and heroine must in general possess youth, beauty, goodness, exalted self-sacrifice, and unalterable constancy."]

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 class conflict, is recognizable in the argument.There is a description of some aspect of the world which is convincing because it agrees with familiar ideas.But as the ideology deals with an unseen future, as well as with a tangible present, it soon crosses imperceptibly the frontier of verification.In describing 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 Armageddon, 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.But after the victory, eternal peace.Plenty of this is quite cynically deliberate.For the skilful propagandist 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 propagandist exhausts the interest in reality by a tolerably plausible beginning, and then stokes up energy for a long voyage by brandishing a passport to heaven.

The formula works when the public fiction enmeshes itself with a private urgency.But once enmeshed, in the heat of battle, the original self and the original stereotype which effected the junction may be wholly lost to sight.

CHAPTER XII

SELF-INTEREST RECONSIDERED

1

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 conception 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 meaning 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 fancy. But against rumor there is little or no checks and the original story, true or invented, grows wings and horns, hoofs 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. [Footnote: For an interesting example, see the case described by C. J. Jung, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 1911, Vol. I, p. 81. Translated by Constance Long, in Analytical Psychology, Ch.IV.]

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.

2

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 individual, 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 experience of his own, he conceives through his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions.He does not take his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment.He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargement 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 average people who project the happiness of their own lives into a general good will, or their unhappiness into suspicion and hate, there are the outwardly happy people who are brutal everywhere but in their own circle, as well as the people who, the more they detest their families, their friends, their jobs, the more they overflow with love for mankind.

As you descend from generalities to detail, it becomes more apparent that the character in which men deal with their affairs is not fixed.Possibly their different selves have a common stem and common 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 accumulating memory, since he is not an automaton.His character varies, not only in time, but according to circumstance.The legend of the solitary Englishman 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 unchanging routine testify to our sense of how hard it is to step twice in the Heraclitan river.

There is no one self always at work.And therefore it is of great importance in the formation of any public opinion, what self is engaged.The Japanese ask the right to settle in California.Clearly it makes a whole lot of difference whether you conceive 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 negotiations 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 different from the self which appears when we are thinking even potentially as the outraged head of 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 always distinguished several personalities in each human being.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 classification, we cannot fail to observe that distinctions exist.Instead of two antithetic selves, a modern man would probably note 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 categories, but he would recognize 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 superior; 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 necessities 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 their characters, so widely that they may cover the whole gamut of differences between a split soul like Dr. Jekyll's and an utterly singleminded Brand, Parsifal, or Don Quixote.If the selves are too unrelated, we distrust the man; if they are too inflexibly on one track we find him arid, stubborn, or eccentric.In the repertory of characters, meager 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, proprietor, 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 characters take their form from a man's conception 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 conceives 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 their 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 enters a variety of influences not easily separated. [Footnote: For an interesting sketch of the more noteworthy early attempts to explain character, see the chapter called "The Antecedents of the Study of Character and Temperament," in Joseph Jastrow's The Psychology of Conviction.] The analysis in its fundamentals is perhaps still as doubtful as it was in the fifth century B. C. when 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, [Footnote: Bodily Changes in Pleasure, Pain and Anger.] Adler, [Footnote: The Neurotic Constitution.] Kempf, [Footnote: The Autonomic Functions and the Personality; Psychopathology.Cf. also Louis Berman: The Glands Regulating Personality.] 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 immensely improved technique, no one would be likely to claim that there are settled conclusions which enable us to set apart nature from nurture, and abstract 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 phrenologists, 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 large laterally, about the organ which gives the inclination to acquire; and this nation's propensity to steal, etc., is admitted." [Footnote: Jastrow, op.cit., p.156.]

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 maturities, and the manifest personality. [Footnote: Formulated by Kempf, Psychopathology, p.74, as follows:

Manifest wishes } over } Later Repressed Wishes } Over } opposed by the resistance of the Adolescent Repressed Wishes } environment=Behavior Over } Preadolescent Repressed Wishes } ] 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 combination with other impulses. But even that is not certain, since repression is not irretrievable. For just as psychoanalysis can bring to the surface a buried impulse, so can social situations. [Footnote: Cf. the very interesting book of Everett Dean Martin, The Behavior of Crowds

Also Hobbes, Leviathan, Part II, Ch.25."For the passions of men, which asunder are moderate, as the heat of one brand, in an assembly are like many brands, that inflame one another, especially when they blow one another with orations…."

LeBon, The Crowd, elaborates this observation of Hobbes's.]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 emphasized, how directed, are appropriate to certain typical situations for which we have learned prepared attitudes.For a recognizable type of experience, there is a character which controls the outward 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 transfigured memories.In that honeymoon phase, the realists of war rightly 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 all those characters 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 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 struggle to regain self-control, and to deal with the problems of peace in civilian character.

Modern war, as Mr. Herbert Croly has said, is inherent in the political structure of modern society, but outlawed by its ideals.For the civilian population 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 improvise.The only standards they possess make war an accursed thing.Yet though 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 disturbance results.

The preparation of characters for all the situations in which men may find themselves is one function 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 distasteful some of its phases may be, or he must guarantee that his pupils will never be confronted by the situations 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 refuses 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 unprepared 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.

4

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 ordinary doctrine of self-interest usually omits altogether the cognitive function.So insistent is it on the fact that human beings finally refer all things to themselves, that it does not stop to notice that men's ideas of all things and of themselves are not instinctive.They are acquired.

Thus it may be true enough, as James Madison wrote in the tenth paper of the Federalist, that "a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile 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 examine 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 different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government 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 coöperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions 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 effect, but that differences of property are the causes of differences of opinion.The pivotal word in Madison's argument 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 contradiction between dogma 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 inevitable next stage they organize and agitate to produce "class consciousness." Why, one asks, does not the economic situation produce consciousness of class in everybody? It just doesn't, that is all. And therefore the proud claim will not stand that the socialist philosophy rests on prophetic insight into destiny. It rests on an hypothesis about human nature. [Footnote: Cf. Thorstein Veblen, "The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers," in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, esp. pp. 413-418.]

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 employers, 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 machines will tend, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen has so brilliantly demonstrated, [Footnote: The Theory of Business Enterprise.]to interpret experience differently from handicraftsmen or traders.If this were all that the materialistic conception of politics asserted, the theory would be an immensely valuable hypothesis 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 relations is effecting a particular opinion.Does Smith's opinion arise from his problems as a landlord, an importer, an owner of railway shares, or an employer?Does Jones's opinion, Jones being a weaver in a textile mill, come from the attitude of his boss, the competition of new immigrants, his wife's grocery bills, or the ever present contract with the firm which is selling him a Ford car and a house and lot on the instalment plan?Without special inquiry you cannot tell.The economic determinist cannot tell.

A man's various economic contacts limit or enlarge the range of his opinions.But which of the contacts, in what guise, on what theory, the materialistic conception of politics cannot predict.It can predict, with a high degree of probability, that if a man owns a factory, his ownership will figure in those opinions which seem to have some bearing on that factory.But how the function of being 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 being the owner of a factory, no views on labor, on property, on management, 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 legislation 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 described in economic materialism which enables anyone 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 analyze 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 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 their economic interests.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 automatically 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 it.Yet nothing is more certain than that all classes of men are in constant perplexity as to what their interests are.[Footnote: As a matter of fact, when it came to the test, Lenin completely abandoned the materialistic interpretation of politics.Had he held sincerely to the Marxian formula when he seized power in 1917, he would have said to himself: according to the teachings of Marx, socialism will develop out of a mature capitalism…here am I, in control of a nation that is only entering upon a capitalist development…it is true that I am a socialist, but I 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 Marx predicted may take place.But Lenin did nothing of the sort.Instead of waiting for evolution to evolve, he tried by will, force, and education, to defy the historical process which his philosophy assumed.

Since this was written Lenin has abandoned communism on the ground that Russia does not possess the necessary basis 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 there is in the opinions of a determinist.]

This dissolves the impact of economic determinism.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 assumes 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 all property could be held in common, class differences would disappear.The assumption is false.Property 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 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 materialistic grounds the communal ownership of properties ought to make them superfluous.The communists in Russia would not propagate their faith with such unflagging 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, [Footnote: Principles of Psychology, Vol.II, p.383.]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: [Footnote: Op.cit., Vol. II, p. 390.] "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 immersed in experience which determines what shall excite them as stimulus. "They become capable," as Mr. McDougall says, [Footnote: Introduction to Social Psychology, Fourth Edition, pp. 31-32.] "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." [Footnote: "Most definitions of instincts and instinctive actions take account only of their conative aspects… and it is a common mistake to ignore the cognitive and affective aspects of the instinctive mental process." Footnote op.cit., p.29.]

It is only the "central part of the disposition" [Footnote: p.34.]says Mr. McDougall further, "that retains its specific character and remains common to all individuals and all situations in which the instinct is excited."The cognitive processes, and the actual bodily movements 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 important 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 the way a previous generation was conditioned, as well as the inheritor of the environment that resulted, the possible combinations and permutations are enormous.

There is no prima facie case then for supposing that because persons crave some particular thing, or behave in some particular way, 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 differently.Analytic psychology and social history unite in supporting this conclusion.Psychology indicates how essentially casual is the nexus between the particular stimulus and the particular response.Anthropology in the widest sense reinforces the view by demonstrating that the things which have excited men's passions, and the means which they have used to realize them, differ endlessly from age to age and from place to place.

Men pursue their interest.But how they shall pursue it is not fatally determined, and, therefore, within whatever limits of time this planet will continue 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 recognize 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 his conscious effort unless he chooses to regard 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 " 14.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 expectations vary, the interest enlisted varies most subtly of all.The living impressions of a large number of people are to an immeasurable degree 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 environment?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 crystallized out of such fleeting and casual imagery?

That there is a real difficulty here was shown by an angry tilt in the spring of 1921 between the American Ambassador to England and a very large 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 of Americans in 1917. [Footnote: New York Times, May 20, 1921.] 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. Wilson, 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 their 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 against the League of Nations, and in support of this claim, he can point to Mr. Wilson's request for a referendum, and to the undeniable fact that the Democratic party and Mr. Cox 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 election day you do not know the real division of opinion about the League.There were, for example, nine million Democrats.Are you entitled 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 Southerners voted the same ticket.

Were the Republicans more unanimous?Anybody 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 particular way about the League, nor how many people let their feelings on that subject determine their vote.When there are only two ways of expressing a hundred varieties of feeling, there is no certain way of knowing what the decisive combination was.Senator Borah found in the Republican ticket a reason for voting Republican, but so did President Lowell.The Republican majority was composed of men and women who thought a 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 their 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 common denominator of all the votes was that the Democrats should go and the Republicans come in.That was the only factor remaining after all the contradictions 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. Harding has to deal with are not the opinions that elected him.That there is no inevitable connection between an assortment of opinions and a particular line of action everyone saw in 1916.Elected apparently 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 most impressed by its erratic working have found a prophet in M.LeBon, and have welcomed generalizations about what Sir Robert Peel called "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion."Others have concluded that since 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 national mind, a spirit of the age which imposes 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 their Public Opinion.

2

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 differently 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.[Footnote: Delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York City, July 31, 1916.]The context 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 plain speech, who 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 histrionic gift by which such men impersonate the feelings of their followers.From that aspect of politics he was by temperament and by training 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 platform 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-Germans 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. 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 homogeneous vote.

"This representative 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 Republican candidate who now stands in his shoes. Lincoln reminds the Republicans, Bull Moose and Old Guard, that before the schism they had a common 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 skilfully selected the spoils system in diplomatic appointments."Deserving Democrats" was a discrediting phrase, and Mr. Hughes at once evokes it.The record being indefensible, there is no hesitation in the vigor of the attack.Logically it was an ideal introduction to a common mood.

Mr. Hughes then turns to Mexico, beginning with an historical review.He had to consider 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 said President Wilson was right in not recognizing Huerta, the other which preferred Huerta to Carranza, and intervention to both.Huerta was the first sore spot in the record…

"He was certainly in 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 determined 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 "intervention."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 wanted, the issue between the two factions was to be repressed.

Having got by the two explosive points "Huerta" and "intervention" by letting the words mean all things to all men, the speech passes for a while to safer ground.The candidate tells the story of Tampico, Vera Cruz, Villa, Santa Ysabel, Columbus and Carrizal.Mr. Hughes is specific, either because the facts as known from the newspapers are irritating, or because the true explanation is, as for example in regard 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 practicable way the benefits of our disinterested friendship. The conduct of this administration 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 friendship."

The theme friendship is for the non-interventionists, the theme "new policy" and "firmness" is for the interventionists.On the non-contentious record, the detail is overwhelming; on the issue everything is cloudy.

Concerning the European war Mr. Hughes employed an ingenious formula:

"I stand for the unflinching 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 Lusitania.Like the 1912 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 Lusitania."

Thus, what cannot be compromised must be obliterated, 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 factions 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 formed out of the blending of many colors.Where superficial harmony is the aim and conflict the fact, obscurantism in a public appeal is the usual result.Almost always vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is a symptom of cross-purposes.

3

But how is it that a vague idea so often has the power to unite deeply felt opinions?These opinions, we recall, however deeply they may be felt, are not in continual and pungent contact with the facts they profess to treat.On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war, our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense.The original pictures and words which aroused it have not anything like the force of the feeling itself.The account of what has happened out of sight and hearing in a place where we have never been, has not and never can have, except briefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of reality.But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than the reality.For the trigger can be pulled by more than one stimulus.

The stimulus which originally 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 entirely 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 thinking these substitutions take place, for if a man is trying to compare two complicated 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 baggage 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 against changelings in casual politics.

For by what is known to psychologists as conditioned 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 objective 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 respect 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.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 acting ourselves upon the scene itself.The idea of the starving Russian child evokes a desire to feed the child.But the person so aroused cannot feed it.He can only give money to an impersonal organization, 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 effect 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 regards stimulus and response.Therefore, if among a number of people, possessing various tendencies to respond, you can find a stimulus which will arouse the same emotion in many of them, you can substitute it for the original stimuli.If, for example, one man dislikes the League, another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis of what they all hate.Suppose that symbol is Americanism.The first man may read it as meaning the preservation of American isolation, or as he may call it, independence; the second as the rejection of a politician who clashes with his idea of what an American president should be, the third as a call to resist revolution.The symbol in itself signifies literally no one thing in particular, but it can be associated with almost anything.And because of that it can become the common bond of common feelings, even though those feelings were originally attached to disparate ideas.

When political parties or newspapers declare for Americanism, Progressivism, Law and Order, Justice, Humanity, they hope to amalgamate the emotion of conflicting factions which would surely divide, if, instead of these symbols, they were invited to discuss a specific program.For when a coalition around the symbol has been effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than toward critical scrutiny of the measures.It is, I think, convenient and technically correct to call multiple phrases like these symbolic.They do not stand for specific ideas, but for a sort of truce or junction between ideas.They are like a strategic railroad center where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their ultimate destination.But he who captures the symbols by which public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy.And as long as a particular symbol has the power of coalition, ambitious factions will fight for possession.Think, for example, of Lincoln's name or of Roosevelt's.A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master of the current situation.There are limits, of course.Too violent abuse of the actualities which groups of people think the symbol represents, or too great resistance in the name of that symbol to new purposes, will, so to speak, burst the symbol.In this manner, during the year 1917, the imposing symbol of Holy Russia and the Little Father burst under the impact of suffering and defeat.

4

The tremendous consequences of Russia's collapse were felt on all the fronts and among all the peoples.They led directly to a striking experiment in the crystallization of a common opinion out of the varieties of opinion churned up by the war.The Fourteen Points were addressed to all the governments, allied, enemy, neutral, and to all the peoples.They were an attempt to knit together the chief imponderables of a world war.Necessarily this was a new departure, because this was the first great war in which all the deciding elements of mankind could be brought to think about the same ideas, or at least about the same names for ideas, simultaneously.Without cable, radio, telegraph, and daily press, the experiment of the Fourteen Points would have been impossible.It was an attempt to exploit the modern machinery of communication to start the return to a "common consciousness" throughout the world.

But first we must examine some of the circumstances as they presented themselves at the end of 1917.For in the form which the document finally assumed, all these considerations are somehow represented.During the summer and autumn a series of events had occurred which profoundly affected the temper of the people and the course of the war.In July the Russians had made a last offensive, had been disastrously beaten, and the process of demoralization which led to the Bolshevik revolution of November had begun.Somewhat earlier the French had suffered a severe and almost disastrous defeat in Champagne which produced mutinies in the army and a defeatist agitation among the civilians.England was suffering from the effects of the submarine raids, from the terrible losses of the Flanders battles, and in November at Cambrai the British armies met a reverse that appalled the troops at the front and the leaders at home.Extreme war weariness pervaded the whole of western Europe.

In effect, the agony and disappointment had jarred loose men's concentration on the accepted version of the war.Their interests were no longer held by the ordinary official pronouncements, and their attention began to wander, fixing now upon their own suffering, now upon their party and class purposes, now upon general resentments against the governments.That more or less perfect organization of perception by official propaganda, of interest and attention by the stimuli of hope, fear, and hatred, which is called morale, was by way of breaking down.The minds of men everywhere began to search for new attachments that promised relief.

Suddenly they beheld a tremendous drama.On the Eastern front there was a Christmas truce, an end of slaughter, an end of noise, a promise of peace.At Brest-Litovsk the dream of all simple people had come to life: it was possible to negotiate, there was some other way to end the ordeal than by matching lives with the enemy.Timidly, but with rapt attention, people began to turn to the East.Why not, they asked?What is it all for?Do the politicians know what they are doing?Are we really fighting for what they say?Is it possible, perhaps, to secure it without fighting?Under the ban of the censorship, little of this was allowed to show itself in print, but, when Lord Lansdowne spoke, there was a response from the heart.The earlier symbols of the war had become hackneyed, and had lost their power to unify.Beneath the surface a wide schism was opening up in each Allied country.

Something similar was happening in Central Europe.There too the original impulse of the war was weakened; the union sacrée was broken.The vertical cleavages along the battle front were cut across by horizontal divisions running in all kinds of unforeseeable ways.The moral crisis of the war had arrived before the military decision was in sight.All this President Wilson and his advisers realized.They had not, of course, a perfect knowledge of the situation, but what I have sketched they knew.

They knew also that the Allied Governments were bound by a series of engagements that in letter and in spirit ran counter to the popular conception of what the war was about.The resolutions of the Paris Economic Conference were, of course, public property, and the network of secret treaties had been published by the Bolsheviks in November of 1917.[Footnote: President Wilson stated at his conference with the Senators that he had never heard of these treaties until he reached Paris.That statement is perplexing.The Fourteen Points, as the text shows, could not have been formulated without a knowledge of the secret treaties.The substance of those treaties was before the President when he and Colonel House prepared the final published text of the Fourteen Points.]Their terms were only vaguely known to the peoples, but it was definitely believed that they did not comport with the idealistic slogan of self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities.Popular questioning took the form of asking how many thousand English lives Alsace-Lorraine or Dalmatia were worth, how many French lives Poland or Mesopotamia were worth.Nor was such questioning entirely unknown in America.The whole Allied cause had been put on the defensive by the refusal to participate at Brest-Litovsk.

Here was a highly sensitive state of mind which no competent leader could fail to consider.The ideal response would have been joint action by the Allies.That was found to be impossible when it was considered at the Interallied Conference of October.But by December the pressure had become so great that Mr. George and Mr. Wilson were moved independently to make some response.The form selected by the President was a statement of peace terms under fourteen heads.The numbering of them was an artifice to secure precision, and to create at once the impression that here was a business-like document.The idea of stating "peace terms" instead of "war aims" arose from the necessity of establishing a genuine alternative to the Brest-Litovsk negotiations.They were intended to compete for attention by substituting for the spectacle of Russo-German parleys the much grander spectacle of a public world-wide debate.

Having enlisted the interest of the world, it was necessary to hold that interest unified and flexible for all the different possibilities which the situation contained.The terms had to be such that the majority among the Allies would regard them as worth while.They had to meet the national aspirations of each people, and yet to limit those aspirations so that no one nation would regard itself as a catspaw for another.The terms had to satisfy official interests so as not to provoke official disunion, and yet they had to meet popular conceptions so as to prevent the spread of demoralization.They had, in short, to preserve and confirm Allied unity in case the war was to go on.

But they had also to be the terms of a possible peace, so that in case the German center and left were ripe for agitation, they would have a text with which to smite the governing class.The terms had, therefore, to push the Allied governors nearer to their people, drive the German governors away from their people, and establish a line of common understanding between the Allies, the non-official Germans, and the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary.The Fourteen Points were a daring attempt to raise a standard to which almost everyone might repair.If a sufficient number of the enemy people were ready there would be peace; if not, then the Allies would be better prepared to sustain the shock of war.

All these considerations entered into the making of the Fourteen Points.No one man may have had them all in mind, but all the men concerned had some of them in mind.Against this background let us examine certain aspects of the document.The first five points and the fourteenth deal with "open diplomacy," "freedom of the seas," "equal trade opportunities," "reduction of armaments," no imperialist annexation of colonies, and the League of Nations.They might be described as a statement of the popular generalizations in which everyone at that time professed to believe.But number three is more specific.It was aimed consciously and directly at the resolutions of the Paris Economic Conference, and was meant to relieve the German people of their fear of suffocation.

Number six is the first point dealing with a particular nation. It was intended as a reply to Russian suspicion of the Allies, and the eloquence of its promises was attuned to the drama of Brest-Litovsk. Number seven deals with Belgium, and is as unqualified in form and purpose as was the conviction of practically the whole world, including very large sections of Central Europe. Over number eight we must pause. It begins with an absolute demand for evacuation and restoration of French territory, and then passes on to the question of Alsace-Lorraine. The phrasing of this clause most perfectly illustrates the character of a public statement which must condense a vast complex of interests in a few words. "And the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted. …" Every word here was chosen with meticulous care. The wrong done should be righted; why not say that Alsace-Lorraine should be restored? It was not said, because it was not certain that all of the French at that time would fight on indefinitely for reannexation if they were offered a plebiscite; and because it was even less certain whether the English and Italians would fight on. The formula had, therefore, to cover both contingencies. The word "righted" guaranteed satisfaction to France, but did not read as a commitment to simple annexation. But why speak of the wrong done by Prussia in 1871?The word Prussia was, of course, intended to remind the South Germans that Alsace-Lorraine belonged not to them but to Prussia.Why speak of peace unsettled for "fifty years," and why the use of "1871"?In the first place, what the French and the rest of the world remembered was 1871.That was the nodal point of their grievance.But the formulators of the Fourteen Points knew that French officialdom planned for more than the Alsace-Lorraine of 1871.The secret memoranda that had passed between the Czar's ministers and French officials in 1916 covered the annexation of the Saar Valley and some sort of dismemberment of the Rhineland.It was planned to include the Saar Valley under the term "Alsace-Lorraine" because it had been part of Alsace-Lorraine in 1814, though it had been detached in 1815, and was no part of the territory at the close of the Franco-Prussian war.The official French formula for annexing the Saar was to subsume it under "Alsace-Lorraine" meaning the Alsace-Lorraine of 1814-1815.By insistence on "1871" the President was really defining the ultimate boundary between Germany and France, was adverting to the secret treaty, and was casting it aside.

Number nine, a little less subtly, does the same thing in respect to Italy."Clearly recognizable lines of nationality" are exactly what the lines of the Treaty of London were not.Those lines were partly strategic, partly economic, partly imperialistic, partly ethnic.The only part of them that could possibly procure allied sympathy was that which would recover the genuine Italia Irredenta.All the rest, as everyone who was informed knew, merely delayed the impending Jugoslav revolt.

5

It would be a mistake to suppose that the apparently unanimous enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on a program.Everyone seemed to find something that he liked and stressed this aspect and that detail.But no one risked a discussion.The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the civilized world, were accepted.They stood for opposing ideas, but they evoked a common emotion.And to that extent they played a part in rallying the western peoples for the desperate ten months of war which they had still to endure.

As long as the Fourteen Points dealt with that hazy and happy future when the agony was to be over, the real conflicts of interpretation were not made manifest.They were plans for the settlement of a wholly invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public hope.For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes's speech, is a hierarchy of symbols.As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional connection though you lose the intellectual.But even the emotion becomes thinner.As you go further away from experience, you go higher into generalization or subtlety.As you go up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little.Yet the people whose emotions are entrained do not remain passive.As the public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private meanings are given a universal application.Whatever you want badly is the Rights of Humanity.For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of meaning almost anything, soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything.Mr. Wilson's phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in every corner of the earth.No document negotiated and made of public record existed to correct the confusion.[Footnote: The American interpretation of the fourteen points was explained to the allied statesmen just before the armistice.]And so, when the day of settlement came, everybody expected everything.The European authors of the treaty had a large choice, and they chose to realize those expectations which were held by those of their countrymen who wielded the most power at home.

They came down the hierarchy from the Rights of Humanity to the Rights of France, Britain and Italy.They did not abandon the use of symbols.They abandoned only those which after the war had no permanent roots in the imagination of their constituents.They preserved the unity of France by the use of symbolism, but they would not risk anything for the unity of Europe.The symbol France was deeply attached, the symbol Europe had only a recent history.Nevertheless the distinction between an omnibus like Europe and a symbol like France is not sharp.The history of states and empires reveals times when the scope of the unifying idea increases and also times when it shrinks.One cannot say that men have moved consistently from smaller loyalties to larger ones, because the facts will not bear out the claim.The Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire bellied out further than those national unifications in the Nineteenth Century from which believers in a World State argue by analogy.Nevertheless, it is probably true that the real integration has increased regardless of the temporary inflation and deflation of empires.

6

Such a real integration has undoubtedly occurred in American history.In the decade before 1789 most men, it seems, felt that their state and their community were real, but that the confederation of states was unreal.The idea of their state, its flag, its most conspicuous leaders, or whatever it was that represented Massachusetts, or Virginia, were genuine symbols.That is to say, they were fed by actual experiences from childhood, occupation, residence, and the like.The span of men's experience had rarely traversed the imaginary boundaries of their states.The word Virginian was related to pretty nearly everything that most Virginians had ever known or felt.It was the most extensive political idea which had genuine contact with their experience.

Their experience, not their needs.For their needs arose out of their real environment, which in those days was at least as large as the thirteen colonies.They needed a common defense.They needed a financial and economic regime as extensive as the Confederation.But as long as the pseudo-environment of the state encompassed them, the state symbols exhausted their political interest.An interstate idea, like the Confederation, represented a powerless abstraction.It was an omnibus, rather than a symbol, and the harmony among divergent groups, which the omnibus creates, is transient.

I have said that the idea of confederation was a powerless abstraction. Yet the need of unity existed in the decade before the Constitution was adopted. The need existed, in the sense that affairs were askew unless the need of unity was taken into account. Gradually certain classes in each colony began to break through the state experience. Their personal interests led across the state lines to interstate experiences, and gradually there was constructed in their minds a picture of the American environment which was truly national in scope. For them the idea of federation became a true symbol, and ceased to be an omnibus. The most imaginative of these men was Alexander Hamilton. It happened that he had no primitive attachment to any one state, for he was born in the West Indies, and had, from the very beginning of his active life, been associated with the common interests of all the states. Thus to most men of the time the question of whether the capital should be in Virginia or in Philadelphia was of enormous importance, because they were locally minded. To Hamilton this question was of no emotional consequence; what he wanted was the assumption of the state debts because they would further nationalize the proposed union. So he gladly traded the site of the capitol for two necessary votes from men who represented the Potomac district. To Hamilton the Union was a symbol that represented all his interests and his whole experience; to White and Lee from the Potomac, the symbol of their province was the highest political entity they served, and they served it though they hated to pay the price. They agreed, says Jefferson, to change their votes, "White with a revulsion of stomach almost convulsive." [Footnote: Works, Vol. IX, p. 87. Cited by Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, p. 172.]

In the crystallizing of a common will, there is always an Alexander
Hamilton at work.

CHAPTER XIV

YES OR NO

1

Symbols are often so useful and so mysteriously powerful that the word itself exhales a magical glamor.In thinking about symbols it is tempting to treat them as if they possessed independent energy.Yet no end of symbols which once provoked ecstasy have quite ceased to affect anybody.The museums and the books of folklore are full of dead emblems and incantations, since there is no power in the symbol, except that which it acquires by association in the human mind.The symbols that have lost their power, and the symbols incessantly suggested which fail to take root, remind us that if we were patient enough to study in detail the circulation of a symbol, we should behold an entirely secular history.

In the Hughes campaign speech, in the Fourteen Points, in Hamilton's project, symbols are employed.But they are employed by somebody at a particular moment.The words themselves do not crystallize random feeling.The words must be spoken by people who are strategically placed, and they must be spoken at the opportune moment.Otherwise they are mere wind.The symbols must be earmarked.For in themselves they mean nothing, and the choice of possible symbols is always so great that we should, like the donkey who stood equidistant between two bales of hay, perish from sheer indecision among the symbols that compete for our attention.

Here, for example, are the reasons for their vote as stated by certain private citizens to a newspaper just before the election of 1920.

For Harding:

"The patriotic men and women of to-day, who cast their ballots for
Harding and Coolidge will be held by posterity to have signed our
Second Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilmot—, inventor.

"He will see to it that the United States does not enter into 'entangling alliances,' Washington as a city will benefit by changing the control of the government from the Democrats to the Republicans."

Mr. Clarence—, salesman.

For Cox:

"The people of the United States realize that it is our duty pledged on the fields of France, to join the League of Nations.We must shoulder our share of the burden of enforcing peace throughout the world."

Miss Marie—, stenographer.

"We should lose our own respect and the respect of other nations were we to refuse to enter the League of Nations in obtaining international peace."

Mr. Spencer—, statistician.

The two sets of phrases are equally noble, equally true, and almost reversible.Would Clarence and Wilmot have admitted for an instant that they intended to default in our duty pledged on the fields of France; or that they did not desire international peace?Certainly not.Would Marie and Spencer have admitted that they were in favor of entangling alliances or the surrender of American independence?They would have argued with you that the League was, as President Wilson called it, a disentangling alliance, as well as a Declaration of Independence for all the world, plus a Monroe Doctrine for the planet.

2

Since the offering of symbols is so generous, and the meaning that can be imputed is so elastic, how does any particular symbol take root in any particular person's mind?It is planted there by another human being whom we recognize as authoritative.If it is planted deeply enough, it may be that later we shall call the person authoritative who waves that symbol at us.But in the first instance symbols are made congenial and important because they are introduced to us by congenial and important people.

For we are not born out of an egg at the age of eighteen with a realistic imagination; we are still, as Mr. Shaw recalls, in the era of Burge and Lubin, where in infancy we are dependent upon older beings for our contacts.And so we make our connections with the outer world through certain beloved and authoritative persons.They are the first bridge to the invisible world.And though we may gradually master for ourselves many phases of that larger environment, there always remains a vaster one that is unknown.To that we still relate ourselves through authorities.Where all the facts are out of sight a true report and a plausible error read alike, sound alike, feel alike.

Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters. [Footnote: See an interesting, rather quaint old book: George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion.]

Theoretically we ought to choose the most expert on each subject.But the choice of the expert, though a good deal easier than the choice of truth, is still too difficult and often impracticable.The experts themselves are not in the least certain who among them is the most expert.And at that, the expert, even when we can identify him, is, likely as not, too busy to be consulted, or impossible to get at.But there are people whom we can identify easily enough because they are the people who are at the head of affairs.Parents, teachers, and masterful friends are the first people of this sort we encounter.Into the difficult question of why children trust one parent rather than another, the history teacher rather than the Sunday school teacher, we need not try to enter.Nor how trust gradually spreads through a newspaper or an acquaintance who is interested in public affairs to public personages.The literature of psychoanalysis is rich in suggestive hypothesis.

At any rate we do find ourselves trusting certain people, who constitute our means of junction with pretty nearly the whole realm of unknown things.Strangely enough, this fact is sometimes regarded as inherently undignified, as evidence of our sheep-like, ape-like nature.But complete independence in the universe is simply unthinkable.If we could not take practically everything for granted, we should spend our lives in utter triviality.The nearest thing to a wholly independent adult is a hermit, and the range of a hermit's action is very short.Acting entirely for himself, he can act only within a tiny radius and for simple ends.If he has time to think great thoughts we can be certain that he has accepted without question, before he went in for being a hermit, a whole repertory of painfully acquired information about how to keep warm and how to keep from being hungry, and also about what the great questions are.

On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing.As congenital amateurs our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction.In such a debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has brought into the argument.We shall see later how the democratic theory proceeds on the opposite assumption and assumes for the purposes of government an unlimited supply of self-sufficient individuals.

The people on whom we depend for contact with the outer world are those who seem to be running it. [Footnote: Cf. Bryce, Modern Democracies Vol. II, pp. 544-545.] They may be running only a very small part of the world. The nurse feeds the child, bathes it, and puts it to bed. That does not constitute the nurse an authority on physics, zoology, and the Higher Criticism. Mr. Smith runs, or at least hires, the man who runs the factory. That does not make him an authority on the Constitution of the United States, nor on the effects \of the Fordney tariff. Mr. Smoot runs the Republican party in the State of Utah. That in itself does not prove he is the best man to consult about taxation. But the nurse may nevertheless determine for a while what zoology the child shall learn, Mr. Smith will have much to say on what the Constitution shall mean to his wife, his secretary, and perhaps even to his parson, and who shall define the limits of Senator Smoot's authority?

The priest, the lord of the manor, the captains and the kings, the party leaders, the merchant, the boss, however these men are chosen, whether by birth, inheritance, conquest or election, they and their organized following administer human affairs. They are the officers, and although the same man may be field marshal at home, second lieutenant at the office, and scrub private in politics, although in many institutions the hierarchy of rank is vague or concealed, yet in every institution that requires the cooperation of many persons, some such hierarchy exists. [Footnote: Cf. M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, passim; R. Michels, Political Parties, passim; and Bryce, Modern Democracies, particularly Chap. LXXV; also Ross, Principles of Sociology, Chaps. XXII-XXIV. ] In American politics we call it a machine, or "the organization."

3

There are a number of important distinctions between the members of the machine and the rank and file.The leaders, the steering committee and the inner circle, are in direct contact with their environment.They may, to be sure, have a very limited notion of what they ought to define as the environment, but they are not dealing almost wholly with abstractions.There are particular men they hope to see elected, particular balance sheets they wish to see improved, concrete objectives that must be attained.I do not mean that they escape the human propensity to stereotyped vision.Their stereotypes often make them absurd routineers.But whatever their limitations, the chiefs are in actual contact with some crucial part of that larger environment.They decide.They give orders.They bargain.And something definite, perhaps not at all what they imagined, actually happens.

Their subordinates are not tied to them by a common conviction.That is to say the lesser members of a machine do not dispose their loyalty according to independent judgment about the wisdom of the leaders.In the hierarchy each is dependent upon a superior and is in turn superior to some class of his dependents.What holds the machine together is a system of privileges.These may vary according to the opportunities and the tastes of those who seek them, from nepotism and patronage in all their aspects to clannishness, hero-worship or a fixed idea.They vary from military rank in armies, through land and services in a feudal system, to jobs and publicity in a modern democracy.That is why you can breakup a particular machine by abolishing its privileges.But the machine in every coherent group is, I believe, certain to reappear.For privilege is entirely relative, and uniformity is impossible.Imagine the most absolute communism of which your mind is capable, where no one possessed any object that everyone else did not possess, and still, if the communist group had to take any action whatever, the mere pleasure of being the friend of the man who was going to make the speech that secured the most votes, would, I am convinced, be enough to crystallize an organization of insiders around him.

It is not necessary, then, to invent a collective intelligence in order to explain why the judgments of a group are usually more coherent, and often more true to form than the remarks of the man in the street.One mind, or a few can pursue a train of thought, but a group trying to think in concert can as a group do little more than assent or dissent.The members of a hierarchy can have a corporate tradition.As apprentices they learn the trade from the masters, who in turn learned it when they were apprentices, and in any enduring society, the change of personnel within the governing hierarchies is slow enough to permit the transmission of certain great stereotypes and patterns of behavior.From father to son, from prelate to novice, from veteran to cadet, certain ways of seeing and doing are taught.These ways become familiar, and are recognized as such by the mass of outsiders.

4

Distance alone lends enchantment to the view that masses of human beings ever coöperate in any complex affair without a central machine managed by a very few people. "No one," says Bryce, [Footnote: Op.cit., Vol.II, p.542.]"can have had some years' experience of the conduct of affairs in a legislature or an administration without observing how extremely small is the number of persons by whom the world is governed."He is referring, of course, to affairs of state.To be sure if you consider all the affairs of mankind the number of people who govern is considerable, but if you take any particular institution, be it a legislature, a party, a trade union, a nationalist movement, a factory, or a club, the number of those who govern is a very small percentage of those who are theoretically supposed to govern.

Landslides can turn one machine out and put another in; revolutions sometimes abolish a particular machine altogether.The democratic revolution set up two alternating machines, each of which in the course of a few years reaps the advantage from the mistakes of the other.But nowhere does the machine disappear.Nowhere is the idyllic theory of democracy realized.Certainly not in trades unions, nor in socialist parties, nor in communist governments.There is an inner circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into the disinterested or uninterested rank and file.

Democrats have never come to terms with this commonplace of group life.They have invariably regarded it as perverse.For there are two visions of democracy: one presupposes the self-sufficient individual; the other an Oversoul regulating everything.

Of the two the Oversoul has some advantage because it does at least recognize that the mass makes decisions that are not spontaneously born in the breast of every member.But the Oversoul as presiding genius in corporate behavior is a superfluous mystery if we fix our attention upon the machine.The machine is a quite prosaic reality.It consists of human beings who wear clothes and live in houses, who can be named and described.They perform all the duties usually assigned to the Oversoul.

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 organized hierarchy around which it can gather, may refuse to buy if the prices are too high, or refuse to work if wages are too low. A trade union can by mass action in a strike break an opposition so that the union officials can negotiate an agreement. It may win, for example, the right to joint control. But it cannot exercise the right except through an organization. A nation can clamor for war, but when it goes to war it must put itself under orders from a general staff.

The limit of direct action is for all practical purposes the power to say Yes or No on an issue presented to the mass. [Footnote: Cf. James, Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 227. "But for most of our emergencies, fractional solutions are impossible. Seldom can we act fractionally." Cf. Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government, pp.91, 92.]For only in the very simplest cases does an issue present itself in the same form spontaneously and approximately at the same time to all the members of a public.There are unorganized strikes and boycotts, not merely industrial ones, where the grievance is so plain that virtually without leadership the same reaction takes place in many people.But even in these rudimentary cases there are persons who know what they want to do more quickly than the rest, and who become impromptu ringleaders.Where they do not appear a crowd will mill about aimlessly beset by all its private aims, or stand by fatalistically, as did a crowd of fifty persons the other day, and watch a man commit suicide.

For what we make out of most of the impressions that come to us from the invisible world is a kind of pantomime played out in revery.The number of times is small that we consciously decide anything about events beyond our sight, and each man's opinion of what he could accomplish if he tried, is slight.There is rarely a practical issue, and therefore no great habit of decision.This would be more evident were it not that most information when it reaches us carries with it an aura of suggestion as to how we ought to feel about the news.That suggestion we need, and if we do not find it in the news we turn to the editorials or to a trusted adviser.The revery, if we feel ourselves implicated, is uncomfortable until we know where we stand, that is, until the facts have been formulated so that we can feel Yes or No in regard to them.

When a number of people all say Yes they may have all kinds of reasons for saying it. They generally do. For the pictures in their minds are, as we have already noted, varied in subtle and intimate ways. But this subtlety remains within their minds; it becomes represented publicly by a number of symbolic phrases which carry the individual emotion after evacuating most of the intention. The hierarchy, or, if it is a contest, then the two hierarchies, associate the symbols with a definite action, a vote of Yes or No, an attitude pro or con. Then Smith who was against the League and Jones who was against Article X, and Brown who was against Mr. Wilson and all his works, each for his own reason, all in the name of more or less the same symbolic phrase, register 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 choice.Everyone who wishes to accomplish anything that requires the cooperation of a large number of people follows their example.Sometimes it is done rather brutally as when the Peace Conference reduced itself to the Council of Ten, and the Council of Ten to the Big Three or Four; and wrote a treaty which the minor allies, their own constituents, and the enemy were permitted to take or leave.More consultation than that is generally possible and desirable.But the essential fact remains that a small number of heads present a choice to a large group.

6

The abuses of the steering committee have led to various proposals such as the initiative, referendum and direct primary. But these merely postponed or obscured the need for a machine by complicating the elections, or as H. G. Wells once said with scrupulous accuracy, the selections. For no amount of balloting can obviate the need of creating an issue, be it a measure or a candidate, on which the voters can say Yes, or No. There is, in fact, no such thing as "direct legislation." For what happens where it is supposed to exist? The citizen goes to the polls, receives a ballot on which a number of measures are printed, almost always in abbreviated form, and, if he says anything at all, he says Yes or No. The most brilliant amendment in the world may occur to him. He votes Yes or No on that bill and no other. You have to commit violence against the English language to call that legislation. I do not argue, of course, that there are no benefits, whatever you call the process. I think that for certain kinds of issues there are distinct benefits. But the necessary simplicity of any mass decision is a very important fact in view of the inevitable complexity of the world in which those decisions operate. The most complicated form of voting that anyone proposes is, I suppose, the preferential ballot. Among a number of candidates presented the voter under that system, instead of saying yes to one candidate and no to all the others, states the order of his choice. But even here, immensely more flexible though it is, the action of the mass depends upon the quality of the choices presented. [Footnote: Cf. H. J. Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty, p. 224. "… proportional representation… by leading, as it seems to lead, to the group system… may deprive the electors of their choice of leaders." The group system undoubtedly tends, as Mr. Laski says, to make the selection of the executive more indirect, but there is no doubt also that it tends to produce legislative assemblies in which currents of opinion are more fully represented. Whether that is good or bad cannot be determined a priori. But one can say that successful cooperation and responsibility in a more accurately representative assembly require a higher organization of political intelligence and political habit, than in a rigid two-party house. It is a more complex political form and may therefore work less well.] And those choices are presented by the energetic coteries who hustle about with petitions and round up the delegates. The Many can elect after the Few have nominated.

CHAPTER XV

LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE

I

BECAUSE of their transcendent practical importance, no successful leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols which organize his following. What privileges do within the hierarchy, symbols do for the rank and file. They conserve unity. From the totem pole to the national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham, symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged. The detached observer may scorn the "star-spangled" ritual which hedges the symbol, perhaps as much as the king who told himself that Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows by experience that only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates what he calls destructive criticism, sometimes called by free spirits the elimination of buncombe. "Above all things," says Bagehot, "our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it." [Footnote: The English Constitution, p. 127. D. Appleton & Company, 1914.] For poking about with clear definitions and candid statements serves all high purposes known to man, except the easy conservation of a common will. Poking about, as every responsible leader suspects, tends to break the transference of emotion from the individual mind to the institutional symbol. And the first result of that is, as he rightly says, a chaos of individualism and warring sects. The disintegration of a symbol, like Holy Russia, or the Iron Diaz, is always the beginning of a long upheaval.

These great symbols possess by transference all the minute and detailed loyalties of an ancient and stereotyped society.They evoke the feeling that each individual has for the landscape, the furniture, the faces, the memories that are his first, and in a static society, his only reality.That core of images and devotions without which he is unthinkable to himself, is nationality.The great symbols take up these devotions, and can arouse them without calling forth the primitive images.The lesser symbols of public debate, the more casual chatter of politics, are always referred back to these proto-symbols, and if possible associated with them.The question of a proper fare on a municipal subway is symbolized as an issue between the People and the Interests, and then the People is inserted in the symbol American, so that finally in the heat of a campaign, an eight cent fare becomes unAmerican.The Revolutionary fathers died to prevent it.Lincoln suffered that it might not come to pass, resistance to it was implied in the death of those who sleep in France.

Because of its power to siphon emotion out of distinct ideas, the symbol is both a mechanism of solidarity, and a mechanism of exploitation.It enables people to work for a common end, but just because the few who are strategically placed must choose the concrete objectives, the symbol is also an instrument by which a few can fatten on many, deflect criticism, and seduce men into facing agony for objects they do not understand.

Many aspects of our subjection to symbols are not flattering if we choose to think of ourselves as realistic, self-sufficient, and self-governing personalities. Yet it is impossible to conclude that symbols are altogether instruments of the devil. In the realm of science and contemplation they are undoubtedly the tempter himself. But in the world of action they may be beneficent, and are sometimes a necessity. The necessity is often imagined, the peril manufactured. But when quick results are imperative, the manipulation of masses through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing done. It is often more important to act than to understand. It is sometimes true that the action would fail if everyone understood it. There are many affairs which cannot wait for a referendum or endure publicity, and there are times, during war for example, when a nation, an army, and even its commanders must trust strategy to a very few minds; when two conflicting opinions, though one happens to be right, are more perilous than one opinion which is wrong. The wrong opinion may have bad results, but the two opinions may entail disaster by dissolving unity. [Footnote: Captain Peter S. Wright, Assistant Secretary of the Supreme War Council, At the Supreme War Council, is well worth careful reading on secrecy and unity of command, even though in respect to the allied leaders he wages a passionate polemic.]

Thus Foch and Sir Henry Wilson, who foresaw the impending disaster to Cough's army, as a consequence of the divided and scattered reserves, nevertheless kept their opinions well within a small circle, knowing that even the risk of a smashing defeat was less certainly destructive, than would have been an excited debate in the newspapers.For what matters most under the kind of tension which prevailed in March, 1918, is less the rightness of a particular move than the unbroken expectation as to the source of command.Had Foch "gone to the people" he might have won the debate, but long before he could have won it, the armies which he was to command would have dissolved.For the spectacle of a row on Olympus is diverting and destructive.

But so also is a conspiracy of silence. Says Captain Wright: "It is in the High Command and not in the line, that the art of camouflage is most practiced, and reaches to highest flights. All chiefs everywhere are now kept painted, by the busy work of numberless publicists, so as to be mistaken for Napoleons—at a distance…. It becomes almost impossible to displace these Napoleons, whatever their incompetence, because of the enormous public support created by hiding or glossing failure, and exaggerating or inventing success…. But the most insidious and worst effect of this so highly organized falsity is on the generals themselves: modest and patriotic as they mostly are, and as most men must be to take up and follow the noble profession of arms, they themselves are ultimately affected by these universal illusions, and reading it every morning in the paper, they also grow persuaded they are thunderbolts of war and infallible, however much they fail, and that their maintenance in command is an end so sacred that it justifies the use of any means…. These various conditions, of which this great deceit is the greatest, at last emancipate all General Staffs from all control. They no longer live for the nation: the nation lives, or rather dies, for them. Victory or defeat ceases to be the prime interest. What matters to these semi-sovereign corporations is whether dear old Willie or poor old Harry is going to be at their head, or the Chantilly party prevail over the Boulevard des Invalides party." [Footnote: Op.cit., pp.98, 101-105.]

Yet Captain Wright who can be so eloquent and so discerning about the dangers of silence is forced nevertheless to approve the silence of Foch in not publicly destroying the illusions.There is here a complicated paradox, arising as we shall see more fully later on, because the traditional democratic view of life is conceived, not for emergencies and dangers, but for tranquillity and harmony.And so where masses of people must coöperate in an uncertain and eruptive environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility without real consent.The symbol does that.It obscures personal intention, neutralizes discrimination, and obfuscates individual purpose.It immobilizes personality, yet at the same time it enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group, as nothing else in a crisis can weld it, to purposeful action.It renders the mass mobile though it immobilizes personality.The symbol is the instrument by which in the short run the mass escapes from its own inertia, the inertia of indecision, or the inertia of headlong movement, and is rendered capable of being led along the zigzag of a complex situation.

2

But in the longer run, the give and take increases between the leaders and the led.The word most often used to describe the state of mind in the rank and file about its leaders is morale.That is said to be good when the individuals do the part allotted to them with all their energy; when each man's whole strength is evoked by the command from above.It follows that every leader must plan his policy with this in mind.He must consider his decision not only on "the merits," but also in its effect on any part of his following whose continued support he requires.If he is a general planning an attack, he knows that his organized military units will scatter into mobs if the percentage of casualties rises too high.

In the Great War previous calculations were upset to an extraordinary degree, for "out of every nine men who went to France five became casualties." [Footnote: Op.cit. , p. 37. Figures taken by Captain Wright from the statistical abstract of the war in the Archives of the War Office. The figures refer apparently to the English losses alone, possibly to the English and French.] The limit of endurance was far greater than anyone had supposed. But there was a limit somewhere. And so, partly because of its effect on the enemy, but also in great measure because of its effect on the troops and their families, no command in this war dared to publish a candid statement of its losses. In France the casualty lists were never published. In England, America, and Germany publication of the losses of a big battle were spread out over long periods so as to destroy a unified impression of the total. Only the insiders knew until long afterwards what the Somme had cost, or the Flanders battles; [Footnote: Op cit., p. 34, the Somme cost nearly 500,000 casualties; the Arras and Flanders offensives of 1917 cost 650,000 British casualties.] and Ludendorff undoubtedly had a very much more accurate idea of these casualties than any private person in London, Paris or Chicago. All the leaders in every camp did their best to limit the amount of actual war which any one soldier or civilian could vividly conceive. But, of course, among old veterans like the French troops of 1917, a great deal more is known about war than ever reaches the public. Such an army begins to judge its commanders in terms of its own suffering. And then, when another extravagant promise of victory turns out to be the customary bloody defeat, you may find that a mutiny breaks out over some comparatively minor blunder, [Footnote: The Allies suffered many bloodier defeats than that on the Chemin des Dames.] like Nivelle's offensive of 1917, because it is a cumulative blunder. Revolutions and mutinies generally follow a small sample of a big series of evils. [Footnote: Cf. Pierrefeu's account, op.cit., on the causes of the Soissons mutinies, and the method adopted by Pétain to deal with them. Vol. I, Part III, et seq.]

The incidence of policy determines the relation between leader and following.If those whom he needs in his plan are remote from the place where the action takes place, if the results are hidden or postponed, if the individual obligations are indirect or not yet due, above all if assent is an exercise of some pleasurable emotion, the leader is likely to have a free hand.Those programs are immediately most popular, like prohibition among teetotalers, which do not at once impinge upon the private habits of the followers.That is one great reason why governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs.Most of the frictions between two states involve a series of obscure and long-winded contentions, occasionally on the frontier, but far more often in regions about which school geographies have supplied no precise ideas.In Czechoslovakia America is regarded as the Liberator; in American newspaper paragraphs and musical comedy, in American conversation by and large, it has never been finally settled whether the country we liberated is Czechoslavia or Jugoslovakia.

In foreign affairs the incidence of policy is for a very long time confined to an unseen environment.Nothing that happens out there is felt to be wholly real.And so, because in the ante-bellum period, nobody has to fight and nobody has to pay, governments go along according to their lights without much reference to their people.In local affairs the cost of a policy is more easily visible.And therefore, all but the most exceptional leaders prefer policies in which the costs are as far as possible indirect.

They do not like direct taxation.They do not like to pay as they go.They like long term debts.They like to have the voters believe that the foreigner will pay.They have always been compelled to calculate prosperity in terms of the producer rather than in terms of the consumer, because the incidence on the consumer is distributed over so many trivial items. Labor leaders have always preferred an increase of money wages to a decrease in prices.There has always been more popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but comparatively unimportant, than in the wastes of the industrial system, which are huge but elusive.A legislature dealing with a shortage of houses, such as exists when this is written, illustrates this rule, first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses, second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by investigating the profiteering builders and working men.For a constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while a greedy landlord, or a profiteering plumber is visible and immediate.

But while people will readily believe that in an unimagined future and in unseen places a certain policy will benefit them, the actual working out of policy follows a different logic from their opinions.A nation may be induced to believe that jacking up the freight rates will make the railroads prosperous.But that belief will not make the roads prosperous, if the impact of those rates on farmers and shippers is such as to produce a commodity price beyond what the consumer can pay.Whether the consumer will pay the price depends not upon whether he nodded his head nine months previously at the proposal to raise rates and save business, but on whether he now wants a new hat or a new automobile enough to pay for them.

3

Leaders often pretend that they have merely uncovered a program which existed in the minds of their public.When they believe it, they are usually deceiving themselves.Programs do not invent themselves synchronously in a multitude of minds.That is not because a multitude of minds is necessarily inferior to that of the leaders, but because thought is the function of an organism, and a mass is not an organism.

This fact is obscured because the mass is constantly exposed to suggestion.It reads not the news, but the news with an aura of suggestion about it, indicating the line of action to be taken.It hears reports, not objective as the facts are, but already stereotyped to a certain pattern of behavior.Thus the ostensible leader often finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor.But if, as in a laboratory, one could remove all suggestion and leading from the experience of a multitude, one would, I think, find something like this: A mass exposed to the same stimuli would develop responses that could theoretically be charted in a polygon of error.There would be a certain group that felt sufficiently alike to be classified together.There would be variants of feeling at both ends.These classifications would tend to harden as individuals in each of the classifications made their reactions vocal.That is to say, when the vague feelings of those who felt vaguely had been put into words, they would know more definitely what they felt, and would then feel it more definitely.

Leaders in touch with popular feeling are quickly conscious of these reactions.They know that high prices are pressing upon the mass, or that certain classes of individuals are becoming unpopular, or that feeling towards another nation is friendly or hostile.But, always barring the effect of suggestion which is merely the assumption of leadership by the reporter, there would be nothing in the feeling of the mass that fatally determined the choice of any particular policy.All that the feeling of the mass demands is that policy as it is developed and exposed shall be, if not logically, then by analogy and association, connected with the original feeling.

So when a new policy is to be launched, there is a preliminary bid for community of feeling, as in Mark Antony's speech to the followers of Brutus. [Footnote: Excellently analyzed in Martin, The Behavior of Crowds, pp. 130-132,] In the first phase, the leader vocalizes the prevalent opinion of the mass. He identifies himself with the familiar attitudes of his audience, sometimes by telling a good story, sometimes by brandishing his patriotism, often by pinching a grievance. Finding that he is trustworthy, the multitude milling hither and thither may turn in towards him. He will then be expected to set forth a plan of campaign. But he will not find that plan in the slogans which convey the feelings of the mass. It will not even always be indicated by them. Where the incidence of policy is remote, all that is essential is that the program shall be verbally and emotionally connected at the start with what has become vocal in the multitude. Trusted men in a familiar role subscribing to the accepted symbols can go a very long way on their own initiative without explaining the substance of their programs.

But wise leaders are not content to do that.Provided they think publicity will not strengthen opposition too much, and that debate will not delay action too long, they seek a certain measure of consent.They take, if not the whole mass, then the subordinates of the hierarchy sufficiently into their confidence to prepare them for what might happen, and to make them feel that they have freely willed the result.But however sincere the leader may be, there is always, when the facts are very complicated, a certain amount of illusion in these consultations.For it is impossible that all the contingencies shall be as vivid to the whole public as they are to the more experienced and the more imaginative.A fairly large percentage are bound to agree without having taken the time, or without possessing the background, for appreciating the choices which the leader presents to them.No one, however, can ask for more.And only theorists do.If we have had our day in court, if what we had to say was heard, and then if what is done comes out well, most of us do not stop to consider how much our opinion affected the business in hand.

And therefore, if the established powers are sensitive and well-informed, if they are visibly trying to meet popular feeling, and actually removing some of the causes of dissatisfaction, no matter how slowly they proceed, provided they are seen to be proceeding, they have little to fear.It takes stupendous and persistent blundering, plus almost infinite tactlessness, to start a revolution from below.Palace revolutions, interdepartmental revolutions, are a different matter.So, too, is demagogy.That stops at relieving the tension by expressing the feeling.But the statesman knows that such relief is temporary, and if indulged too often, unsanitary.He, therefore, sees to it that he arouses no feeling which he cannot sluice into a program that deals with the facts to which the feelings refer.

But all leaders are not statesmen, all leaders hate to resign, and most leaders find it hard to believe that bad as things are, the other fellow would not make them worse.They do not passively wait for the public to feel the incidence of policy, because the incidence of that discovery is generally upon their own heads.They are, therefore, intermittently engaged in mending their fences and consolidating their position.

The mending of fences consists in offering an occasional scapegoat, in redressing a minor grievance affecting a powerful individual or faction, rearranging certain jobs, placating a group of people who want an arsenal in their home town, or a law to stop somebody's vices.Study the daily activity of any public official who depends on election and you can enlarge this list.There are Congressmen elected year after year who never think of dissipating their energy on public affairs.They prefer to do a little service for a lot of people on a lot of little subjects, rather than to engage in trying to do a big service out there in the void.But the number of people to whom any organization can be a successful valet is limited, and shrewd politicians take care to attend either the influential, or somebody so blatantly uninfluential that to pay any attention to him is a mark of sensational magnanimity.The far greater number who cannot be held by favors, the anonymous multitude, receive propaganda.

The established leaders of any organization have great natural advantages.They are believed to have better sources of information.The books and papers are in their offices.They took part in the important conferences.They met the important people.They have responsibility.It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention and to speak in a convincing tone.But also they have a very great deal of control over the access to the facts.Every official is in some degree a censor.And since no one can suppress information, either by concealing it or forgetting to mention it, without some notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some degree a propagandist.Strategically placed, and compelled often to choose even at the best between the equally cogent though conflicting ideals of safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts, in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know.

4

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies.The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art.It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy.But it has not died out.It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb.And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner.A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government.None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise.Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables.It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart.Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

PART VI

THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY

"I confess that in America I saw more than America;
I sought the image of democracy itself."

Alexis de Tocqueville.

CHAPTER 16.THE SELF-CENTERED MAN " 17.THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY " 18.THE ROLE OF FORCE, PATRONAGE AND PRIVILEGE " 19.THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM: GUILD SOCIALISM " 20.A NEW IMAGE

CHAPTER XVI

THE SELF-CENTERED MAN

I

SINCE Public Opinion is supposed to be the prime mover in democracies, one might reasonably expect to find a vast literature. One does not find it. There are excellent books on government and parties, that is, on the machinery which in theory registers public opinions after they are formed. But on the sources from which these public opinions arise, on the processes by which they are derived, there is relatively little. The existence of a force called Public Opinion is in the main taken for granted, and American political writers have been most interested either in finding out how to make government express the common will, or in how to prevent the common will from subverting the purposes for which they believe the government exists. According to their traditions they have wished either to tame opinion or to obey it. Thus the editor of a notable series of text-books writes that "the most difficult and the most momentous question of government (is) how to transmit the force of individual opinion into public action." [Footnote: Albert Bushnell Hart in the Introductory note to A. Lawrence Lowell's Public Opinion and Popular Government. ]

But surely there is a still more momentous question, the question of how to validate our private versions of the political scene.There is, as I shall try to indicate further on, the prospect of radical improvement by the development of principles already in operation.But this development will depend on how well we learn to use knowledge of the way opinions are put together to watch over our own opinions when they are being put together.For casual opinion, being the product of partial contact, of tradition, and personal interests, cannot in the nature of things take kindly to a method of political thought which is based on exact record, measurement, analysis and comparison.Just those qualities of the mind which determine what shall seem interesting, important, familiar, personal, and dramatic, are the qualities which in the first instance realistic opinion frustrates.Therefore, unless there is in the community at large a growing conviction that prejudice and intuition are not enough, the working out of realistic opinion, which takes time, money, labor, conscious effort, patience, and equanimity, will not find enough support.That conviction grows as self-criticism increases, and makes us conscious of buncombe, contemptuous of ourselves when we employ it, and on guard to detect it.Without an ingrained habit of analyzing opinion when we read, talk, and decide, most of us would hardly suspect the need of better ideas, nor be interested in them when they appear, nor be able to prevent the new technic of political intelligence from being manipulated.

Yet democracies, if we are to judge by the oldest and most powerful of them, have made a mystery out of public opinion.There have been skilled organizers of opinion who understood the mystery well enough to create majorities on election day.But these organizers have been regarded by political science as low fellows or as "problems," not as possessors of the most effective knowledge there was on how to create and operate public opinion.The tendency of the people who have voiced the ideas of democracy, even when they have not managed its action, the tendency of students, orators, editors, has been to look upon Public Opinion as men in other societies looked upon the uncanny forces to which they ascribed the last word in the direction of events.

For in almost every political theory there is an inscrutable element which in the heyday of that theory goes unexamined.Behind the appearances there is a Fate, there are Guardian Spirits, or Mandates to a Chosen People, a Divine Monarchy, a Vice-Regent of Heaven, or a Class of the Better Born.The more obvious angels, demons, and kings are gone out of democratic thinking, but the need for believing that there are reserve powers of guidance persists.It persisted for those thinkers of the Eighteenth Century who designed the matrix of democracy.They had a pale god, but warm hearts, and in the doctrine of popular sovereignty they found the answer to their need of an infallible origin for the new social order.There was the mystery, and only enemies of the people touched it with profane and curious hands.

2

They did not remove the veil because they were practical politicians in a bitter and uncertain struggle.They had themselves felt the aspiration of democracy, which is ever so much deeper, more intimate and more important than any theory of government.They were engaged, as against the prejudice of ages, in the assertion of human dignity.What possessed them was not whether John Smith had sound views on any public question, but that John Smith, scion of a stock that had always been considered inferior, would now bend his knee to no other man.It was this spectacle that made it bliss "in that dawn to be alive."But every analyst seems to degrade that dignity, to deny that all men are reasonable all the time, or educated, or informed, to note that people are fooled, that they do not always know their own interests, and that all men are not equally fitted to govern.

The critics were about as welcome as a small boy with a drum.Every one of these observations on the fallibility of man was being exploited ad nauseam.Had democrats admitted there was truth in any of the aristocratic arguments they would have opened a breach in the defenses.And so just as Aristotle had to insist that the slave was a slave by nature, the democrats had to insist that the free man was a legislator and administrator by nature.They could not stop to explain that a human soul might not yet have, or indeed might never have, this technical equipment, and that nevertheless it had an inalienable right not to be used as the unwilling instrument of other men.The superior people were still too strong and too unscrupulous to have refrained from capitalizing so candid a statement.

So the early democrats insisted that a reasoned righteousness welled up spontaneously out of the mass of men. All of them hoped that it would, many of them believed that it did, although the cleverest, like Thomas Jefferson, had all sorts of private reservations. But one thing was certain: if public opinion did not come forth spontaneously, nobody in that age believed it would come forth at all. For in one fundamental respect the political science on which democracy was based was the same science that Aristotle formulated. It was the same science for democrat and aristocrat, royalist and republican, in that its major premise assumed the art of government to be a natural endowment. Men differed radically when they tried to name the men so endowed; but they agreed in thinking that the greatest question of all was to find those in whom political wisdom was innate. Royalists were sure that kings were born to govern. Alexander Hamilton thought that while "there are strong minds in every walk of life… the representative body, with too few exceptions to have any influence on the spirit of the government, will be composed of landholders, merchants, and men of the learned professions." [Footnote: The Federalist, Nos. 35, 36. Cf. comment by Henry Jones Ford in his Rise and Growth of American PoliticsCh.V.]Jefferson thought the political faculties were deposited by God in farmers and planters, and sometimes spoke as if they were found in all the people.[Footnote: See below p.268.]The main premise was the same: to govern was an instinct that appeared, according to your social preferences, in one man or a chosen few, in all males, or only in males who were white and twenty-one, perhaps even in all men and all women.

In deciding who was most fit to govern, knowledge of the world was taken for granted.The aristocrat believed that those who dealt with large affairs possessed the instinct, the democrats asserted that all men possessed the instinct and could therefore deal with large affairs.It was no part of political science in either case to think out how knowledge of the world could be brought to the ruler.If you were for the people you did not try to work out the question of how to keep the voter informed.By the age of twenty-one he had his political faculties.What counted was a good heart, a reasoning mind, a balanced judgment.These would ripen with age, but it was not necessary to consider how to inform the heart and feed the reason.Men took in their facts as they took in their breath.

3

But the facts men could come to possess in this effortless way were limited. They could know the customs and more obvious character of the place where they lived and worked. But the outer world they had to conceive, and they did not conceive it instinctively, nor absorb trustworthy knowledge of it just by living. Therefore, the only environment in which spontaneous politics were possible was one confined within the range of the ruler's direct and certain knowledge. There is no escaping this conclusion, wherever you found government on the natural range of men's faculties. "If," as Aristotle said, [Footnote: Politics, Bk.VII, Ch.4.]"the citizens of a state are to judge and distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other's characters; where they do not possess this knowledge, both the election to offices and the decision of law suits will go wrong."

Obviously this maxim was binding upon every school of political thought.But it presented peculiar difficulties to the democrats.Those who believed in class government could fairly claim that in the court of the king, or in the country houses of the gentry, men did know each other's characters, and as long as the rest of mankind was passive, the only characters one needed to know were the characters of men in the ruling class.But the democrats, who wanted to raise the dignity of all men, were immediately involved by the immense size and confusion of their ruling class—the male electorate.Their science told them that politics was an instinct, and that the instinct worked in a limited environment.Their hopes bade them insist that all men in a very large environment could govern.In this deadly conflict between their ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of God.

The paradox was too great, the stakes too big, their ideal too precious for critical examination.They could not show how a citizen of Boston was to stay in Boston and conceive the views of a Virginian, how a Virginian in Virginia could have real opinions about the government at Washington, how Congressmen in Washington could have opinions about China or Mexico.For in that day it was not possible for many men to have an unseen environment brought into the field of their judgment.There had been some advances, to be sure, since Aristotle.There were a few newspapers, and there were books, better roads perhaps, and better ships.But there was no great advance, and the political assumptions of the Eighteenth Century had essentially to be those that had prevailed in political science for two thousand years.The pioneer democrats did not possess the material for resolving the conflict between the known range of man's attention and their illimitable faith in his dignity.

Their assumptions antedated not only the modern newspaper, the world-wide press services, photography and moving pictures, but, what is really more significant, they antedated measurement and record, quantitative and comparative analysis, the canons of evidence, and the ability of psychological analysis to correct and discount the prejudices of the witness.I do not mean to say that our records are satisfactory, our analysis unbiased, our measurements sound.I do mean to say that the key inventions have been made for bringing the unseen world into the field of judgment.They had not been made in the time of Aristotle, and they were not yet important enough to be visible for political theory in the age of Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Thomas Jefferson.In a later chapter I think we shall see that even in the latest theory of human reconstruction, that of the English Guild Socialists, all the deeper premises have been taken over from this older system of political thought.

That system, whenever it was competent and honest, had to assume that no man could have more than a very partial experience of public affairs.In the sense that he can give only a little time to them, that assumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence.But ancient theory was compelled to assume, not only that men could give little attention to public questions, but that the attention available would have to be confined to matters close at hand.It would have been visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and complicated events could conceivably be reported, analyzed, and presented in such a form that a really valuable choice could be made by an amateur.That time is now in sight.There is no longer any doubt that the continuous reporting of an unseen environment is feasible.It is often done badly, but the fact that it is done at all shows that it can be done, and the fact that we begin to know how badly it is often done, shows that it can be done better.With varying degrees of skill and honesty distant complexities are reported every day by engineers and accountants for business men, by secretaries and civil servants for officials, by intelligence officers for the General Staff, by some journalists for some readers.These are crude beginnings but radical, far more radical in the literal meaning of that word than the repetition of wars, revolutions, abdications and restorations; as radical as the change in the scale of human life which has made it possible for Mr. Lloyd George to discuss Welsh coal mining after breakfast in London, and the fate of the Arabs before dinner in Paris.

For the possibility of bringing any aspect of human affairs within the range of judgment breaks the spell which has lain upon political ideas.There have, of course, been plenty of men who did not realize that the range of attention was the main premise of political science.They have built on sand.They have demonstrated in their own persons the effects of a very limited and self-centered knowledge of the world.But for the political thinkers who have counted, from Plato and Aristotle through Machiavelli and Hobbes to the democratic theorists, speculation has revolved around the self-centered man who had to see the whole world by means of a few pictures in his head.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SELF-CONTAINED COMMUNITY

1

THAT groups of self-centered people would engage in a struggle for existence if they rubbed against each other has always been evident. This much truth there is at any rate in that famous passage in the Leviathan where Hobbes says that "though there had never been any time wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another, yet at all times kings and persons of sovereign authority because of their independency, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another…" [Footnote: Leviathan, Ch.XIII.Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity and Misery.]

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To circumvent this conclusion one great branch of human thought, which had and has many schools, proceeded in this fashion: it conceived an ideally just pattern of human relations in which each person had well defined functions and rights.If he conscientiously filled the role allotted to him, it did not matter whether his opinions were right or wrong.He did his duty, the next man did his, and all the dutiful people together made a harmonious world.Every caste system illustrates this principle; you find it in Plato's Republic and in Aristotle, in the feudal ideal, in the circles of Dante's Paradise, in the bureaucratic type of socialism, and in laissez-faire, to an amazing degree in syndicalism, guild socialism, anarchism, and in the system of international law idealized by Mr. Robert Lansing.All of them assume a pre-established harmony, inspired, imposed, or innate, by which the self-opinionated person, class, or community is orchestrated with the rest of mankind.The more authoritarian imagine a conductor for the symphony who sees to it that each man plays his part; the anarchistic are inclined to think that a more divine concord would be heard if each player improvised as he went along.

But there have also been philosophers who were bored by these schemes of rights and duties, took conflict for granted, and tried to see how their side might come out on top. They have always seemed more realistic, even when they seemed alarming, because all they had to do was to generalize the experience that nobody could escape. Machiavelli is the classic of this school, a man most mercilessly maligned, because he happened to be the first naturalist who used plain language in a field hitherto preempted by supernaturalists. [Footnote: F. S. Oliver in his Alexander Hamilton, says of Machiavelli (p.174): "Assuming the conditions which exist—the nature of man and of things—to be unchangeable, he proceeds in a calm, unmoral way, like a lecturer on frogs, to show how a valiant and sagacious ruler can best turn events to his own advantage and the security of his dynasty."] He has a worse name and more disciples than any political thinker who ever lived.He truly described the technic of existence for the self-contained state.That is why he has the disciples.He has the bad name chiefly because he cocked his eye at the Medici family, dreamed in his study at night where he wore his "noble court dress" that Machiavelli was himself the Prince, and turned a pungent description of the way things are done into an eulogy on that way of doing them.

In his most infamous chapter [Footnote: The Prince, Ch.XVIII."Concerning the way in which Princes should keep faith."Translation by W.K.Marriott.]he wrote that "a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who hears and sees him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious.There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you.Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result….One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and kingdom many a time."

That is cynical.But it is the cynicism of a man who saw truly without knowing quite why he saw what he saw.Machiavelli is thinking of the run of men and princes "who judge generally more by the eye than by the hand," which is his way of saying that their judgments are subjective.He was too close to earth to pretend that the Italians of his day saw the world steadily and saw it whole.He would not indulge in fantasies, and he had not the materials for imagining a race of men that had learned how to correct their vision.

The world, as he found it, was composed of people whose vision could rarely be corrected, and Machiavelli knew that such people, since they see all public relations in a private way, are involved in perpetual strife.What they see is their own personal, class, dynastic, or municipal version of affairs that in reality extend far beyond the boundaries of their vision.They see their aspect.They see it as right.But they cross other people who are similarly self-centered.Then their very existence is endangered, or at least what they, for unsuspected private reasons, regard as their existence and take to be a danger.The end, which is impregnably based on a real though private experience justifies the means.They will sacrifice any one of these ideals to save all of them,…"one judges by the result…"

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These elemental truths confronted the democratic philosophers.Consciously or otherwise, they knew that the range of political knowledge was limited, that the area of self-government would have to be limited, and that self-contained states when they rubbed against each other were in the posture of gladiators.But they knew just as certainly, that there was in men a will to decide their own fate, and to find a peace that was not imposed by force.How could they reconcile the wish and the fact?

They looked about them. In the city states of Greece and Italy they found a chronicle of corruption, intrigue and war. [Footnote: "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention… and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." Madison, Federalist, No.10.]In their own cities they saw faction, artificiality, fever.This was no environment in which the democratic ideal could prosper, no place where a group of independent and equally competent people managed their own affairs spontaneously.They looked further, guided somewhat perhaps by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to remote, unspoiled country villages.They saw enough to convince themselves that there the ideal was at home.Jefferson in particular felt this, and Jefferson more than any other man formulated the American image of democracy.From the townships had come the power that had carried the American Revolution to victory.From the townships were to come the votes that carried Jefferson's party to power.Out there in the farming communities of Massachusetts and Virginia, if you wore glasses that obliterated the slaves, you could see with your mind's eye the image of what democracy was to be.

"The American Revolution broke out," says de Tocqueville, [Footnote: Democracy in America, Vol. I, p. 51. Third Edition] "and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in the townships, took possession of the state." It certainly took possession of the minds of those men who formulated and popularized the stereotypes of democracy. "The cherishment of the people was our principle," wrote Jefferson. [Footnote: Cited in Charles Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. Ch. XIV. ] But the people he cherished almost exclusively were the small landowning farmers: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example."

However much of the romantic return to nature may have entered into this exclamation, there was also an element of solid sense. Jefferson was right in thinking that a group of independent farmers comes nearer to fulfilling the requirements of spontaneous democracy than any other human society. But if you are to preserve the ideal, you must fence off these ideal communities from the abominations of the world. If the farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine affairs to those they are accustomed to managing. Jefferson drew all these logical conclusions. He disapproved of manufacture, of foreign commerce, and a navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory of any form of government that was not centered in the small self-governing group. He had critics in his day: one of them remarked that "wrapt up in the fullness of self-consequence and strong enough, in reality, to defend ourselves against every invader, we might enjoy an eternal rusticity and live, forever, thus apathized and vulgar under the shelter of a selfish, satisfied indifference." [Footnote: Op.cit, p.426.]

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The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisting of an ideal environment and a selected class, did not conflict with the political science of his time.It did conflict with the realities.And when the ideal was stated in absolute terms, partly through exuberance and partly for campaign purposes, it was soon forgotten that the theory was originally devised for very special conditions.It became the political gospel, and supplied the stereotypes through which Americans of all parties have looked at politics.

That gospel was fixed by the necessity that in Jefferson's time no one could have conceived public opinions that were not spontaneous and subjective.The democratic tradition is therefore always trying to see a world where people are exclusively concerned with affairs of which the causes and effects all operate within the region they inhabit.Never has democratic theory been able to conceive itself in the context of a wide and unpredictable environment.The mirror is concave.And although democrats recognize that they are in contact with external affairs, they see quite surely that every contact outside that self-contained group is a threat to democracy as originally conceived.That is a wise fear.If democracy is to be spontaneous, the interests of democracy must remain simple, intelligible, and easily managed.Conditions must approximate those of the isolated rural township if the supply of information is to be left to casual experience.The environment must be confined within the range of every man's direct and certain knowledge.

The democrat has understood what an analysis of public opinion seems to demonstrate: that in dealing with an unseen environment decisions "are manifestly settled at haphazard, which clearly they ought not to be." [Footnote: Aristotle, Politics, Bk.VII, Ch.IV.]So he has always tried in one way or another to minimize the importance of that unseen environment.He feared foreign trade because trade involves foreign connections; he distrusted manufactures because they produced big cities and collected crowds; if he had nevertheless to have manufactures, he wanted protection in the interest of self-sufficiency.When he could not find these conditions in the real world, he went passionately into the wilderness, and founded Utopian communities far from foreign contacts.His slogans reveal his prejudice.He is for Self-Government, Self-Determination, Independence.Not one of these ideas carries with it any notion of consent or community beyond the frontiers of the self-governing groups.The field of democratic action is a circumscribed area.Within protected boundaries the aim has been to achieve self-sufficiency and avoid entanglement.This rule is not confined to foreign policy, but it is plainly evident there, because life outside the national boundaries is more distinctly alien than any life within.And as history shows, democracies in their foreign policy have had generally to choose between splendid isolation and a diplomacy that violated their ideals.The most successful democracies, in fact, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and America until recently, have had no foreign policy in the European sense of that phrase.Even a rule like the Monroe Doctrine arose from the desire to supplement the two oceans by a glacis of states that were sufficiently republican to have no foreign policy.

Whereas danger is a great, perhaps an indispensable condition of autocracy, [Footnote: Fisher Ames, frightened by the democratic revolution of 1800, wrote to Rufus King in 1802: "We need, as all nations do, the compression on the outside of our circle of a formidable neighbor, whose presence shall at all times excite stronger fears than demagogues can inspire the people with towards their government." Cited by Ford, Rise and Growth of American Politics, p. 69.] security was seen to be a necessity if democracy was to work. There must be as little disturbance as possible of the premise of a self-contained community. Insecurity involves surprises. It means that there are people acting upon your life, over whom you have no control, with whom you cannot consult. It means that forces are at large which disturb the familiar routine, and present novel problems about which quick and unusual decisions are required. Every democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are incompatible with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of masses is such that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow rather blindly. This has not made non-resistants out of democrats, but it has resulted in all democratic wars being fought for pacifist aims. Even when the wars are in fact wars of conquest, they are sincerely believed to be wars in defense of civilization.

These various attempts to enclose a part of the earth's surface were not inspired by cowardice, apathy, or, what one of Jefferson's critics called a willingness to live under monkish discipline.The democrats had caught sight of a dazzling possibility, that every human being should rise to his full stature, freed from man-made limitations.With what they knew of the art of government, they could, no more than Aristotle before them, conceive a society of autonomous individuals, except an enclosed and simple one.They could, then, select no other premise if they were to reach the conclusion that all the people could spontaneously manage their public affairs.

5

Having adopted the premise because it was necessary to their keenest hope, they drew other conclusions as well.Since in order to have spontaneous self-government, you had to have a simple self-contained community, they took it for granted that one man was as competent as the next to manage these simple and self-contained affairs.Where the wish is father to the thought such logic is convincing.Moreover, the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen is for most practical purposes true in the rural township.Everybody in a village sooner or later tries his hand at everything the village does.There is rotation in office by men who are jacks of all trades.There was no serious trouble with the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen until the democratic stereotype was universally applied, so that men looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.

Not only was the individual citizen fitted to deal with all public affairs, but he was consistently public-spirited and endowed with unflagging interest.He was public-spirited enough in the township, where he knew everybody and was interested in everybody's business.The idea of enough for the township turned easily into the idea of enough for any purpose, for as we have noted, quantitative thinking does not suit a stereotype.But there was another turn to the circle.Since everybody was assumed to be interested enough in important affairs, only those affairs came to seem important in which everybody was interested.

This meant that men formed their picture of the world outside from the unchallenged pictures in their heads.These pictures came to them well stereotyped by their parents and teachers, and were little corrected by their own experience.Only a few men had affairs that took them across state lines.Even fewer had reason to go abroad.Most voters lived their whole lives in one environment, and with nothing but a few feeble newspapers, some pamphlets, political speeches, their religious training, and rumor to go on, they had to conceive that larger environment of commerce and finance, of war and peace.The number of public opinions based on any objective report was very small in proportion to those based on casual fancy.

And so for many different reasons, self-sufficiency was a spiritual ideal in the formative period.The physical isolation of the township, the loneliness of the pioneer, the theory of democracy, the Protestant tradition, and the limitations of political science all converged to make men believe that out of their own consciences they must extricate political wisdom.It is not strange that the deduction of laws from absolute principles should have usurped so much of their free energy.The American political mind had to live on its capital.In legalism it found a tested body of rules from which new rules could be spun without the labor of earning new truths from experience.The formulae became so curiously sacred that every good foreign observer has been amazed at the contrast between the dynamic practical energy of the American people and the static theorism of their public life.That steadfast love of fixed principles was simply the only way known of achieving self-sufficiency.But it meant that the public opinions of any one community about the outer world consisted chiefly of a few stereotyped images arranged in a pattern deduced from their legal and their moral codes, and animated by the feeling aroused by local experiences.

Thus democratic theory, starting from its fine vision of ultimate human dignity, was forced by lack of the instruments of knowledge for reporting its environment, to fall back upon the wisdom and experience which happened to have accumulated in the voter.God had, in the words of Jefferson, made men's breasts "His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."These chosen people in their self-contained environment had all the facts before them.The environment was so familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking about substantially the same things.The only real disagreements, therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts.There was no need to guarantee the sources of information.They were obvious, and equally accessible to all men.Nor was there need to trouble about the ultimate criteria.In the self-contained community one could assume, or at least did assume, a homogeneous code of morals.The only place, therefore, for differences of opinion was in the logical application of accepted standards to accepted facts.And since the reasoning faculty was also well standardized, an error in reasoning would be quickly exposed in a free discussion.It followed that truth could be obtained by liberty within these limits.The community could take its supply of information for granted; its codes it passed on through school, church, and family, and the power to draw deductions from a premise, rather than the ability to find the premise, was regarded as the chief end of intellectual training.