cannot fail to note how small a part of the view which the average man entertains when he goes to vote is really of his own making. His original impression was faint and perhaps shapeless: its present definiteness and strength are mainly due to what he has heard or read. He has been told what to think and why to think it. Arguments have been supplied to him from without, and controversy has imbedded them in his mind. Although he supposes his view to be his own, he holds it rather because his acquaintances, his newspapers, his party leaders all hold it. His acquaintances do the like. Each man believes and repeats certain phrases, because he thinks that everybody else on his own side believes them, and of what each believes only a small part is his own original impression, the far larger part being the result of the commingling and mutual action and reaction of the impressions of a multitude of individuals, in which the element of pure personal conviction, based on individual thinking, is but small.

Every one is of course predisposed to see things in some one particular light by his previous education, habits of mind, accepted dogmas, religious or social affinities, notions of his own personal interest. No event, no speech or article ever falls upon a perfectly virgin soil: the reader or listener is always more or less biased already. When some important event happens, which calls for the formation of a view, these preëxisting habits, dogmas, affinities, help to determine the impression which each man experiences, and so far are factors in the view he forms. But they operate chiefly in determining the first impression, and they operate over many minds at once. They do not produce variety and independence: they are soon overlaid by the influences which each man derives from his fellow, from his leaders, from the press.

To the great mass of mankind in all places, public questions come in the third or fourth rank among the interests of life, and obtain less than a third or a fourth of the leisure available for thinking. It is therefore rather sentiment than thought that the mass can contribute, a sentiment grounded on a few broad considerations and simple trains of reasoning; and the soundness and elevation of their sentiment will have more to do with their taking their stand on the side of justice, honor, and peace than any reasoning they can apply

to the sifting of the multifarious facts thrown before them, and to the drawing of the legitimate inferences therefrom.

...

It may be suggested that this analysis, if true of the half-educated, is not true of the educated classes. Ordinary education, even the sort of education which is represented by a university degree, does not fit a man to handle those questions, and it sometimes fills him with vain conceit of his own competence which closes his mind to argument and to the accumulated evidence of fact. Education ought, no doubt, to enlighten man; but the educated classes, generally speaking, are the property-holding classes, and the possession of property does more to make a man timid than education does to make him hopeful.

Towering over Presidents and State governors, over Congress and State legislatures, over conventions and the vast machinery of party, public opinion stands out, in the United States, as the great source of power, the master of servants who tremble before it. Those who invented this machinery of checks and balances were anxious not so much to develop public opinion as to resist it and build up breakwaters against it. No men were less revolutionary in spirit than the founders of the American Constitution. They had made a revolution in the name of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights: they were penetrated by a sense of the dangers incident to democracy. As an able American writer says, "The prevalent conception of popular opinion was that it was aggressive, revolutionary, unreasoning, passionate, futile, and a breeder of mob violence." Be it noted that the efforts made in 1787 to divide authority and, so to speak, force the current of the popular will into many small channels instead of permitting it to rush down one broad bed, have really tended to exalt public opinion above the regular legally appointed organs of government. Each of these organs is too small to form opinion, too narrow to express it, too weak to give effect to it. It grows up not in Congress, not in State legislatures, not in those great conventions which frame platforms and choose candidates, but at large among the people. It is expressed in voices everywhere. It rules as a pervading and impalpable power, like the ether which, as physicists say, passes through all things. It binds

all the parts of the complicated system together and gives them whatever unity of aim and action that they possess.

In the United States public opinion is the opinion of the whole nation, with little distinction of social classes. The politicians, including the members of Congress and of State legislatures, are perhaps not (as Americans sometimes insinuate) below, yet certainly not above the average level of their constituents. They find no difficulty in keeping touch with outside opinion. Washington or Albany may corrupt them, but not in the way of modifying their political ideas. They do not aspire to the function of forming opinion. They are like the Eastern slave who says, "I hear and obey." Nor is there any one class or set of men or any one "social layer" which more than another originates ideas and builds up political doctrine for the mass. The opinion of the nation is the resultant of the views, not of a number of classes, but of a multitude of individuals, diverse, no doubt, from one another, but for the purposes of politics far less diverse than if they were members of groups defined by social rank or by property. In America you cannot appeal from the classes to the masses. What the employer thinks the worker thinks. What the wholesale merchant feels, the retail storekeeper feels and the poorer customers feel. Divisions of opinion are vertical and not horizontal. Obviously this makes opinion more easily ascertained, while increasing its force as a governing power, and gives to the whole people that is to say, all classes in the community a clearer and stronger consciousness of being the rulers of their country, than European people have.

146. THE MIGHT OF PUBLIC OPINION 1

It is a subtle, powerful, and sometimes terrible force. Like the mountain stream which ripples softly in the sunlight, giving no sign of the foaming and destructive torrent into which a sudden cloudburst may transform it, so public opinion, patient and long-suffering, at times seeming even dead, is capable of being roused to fury and to resolute resistance by some flagrant abuse of power or by an un

1 From Nicholas Murray Butler, True and False Democracy. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York; 1915. Reprinted by special arrangement with the publishers.

principled violation of accepted standards of action. Sir Robert Peel hardly measured its breadth and depth when with cynical insight he described public opinion as "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs."

Public opinion is not very old. It is the child of the art of printing, of modern education, of modern means of communication, of modern democracy. Printing and education made it possible. Steam and electricity have developed it enormously. Democracy has raised it to grow through exercise. As democratic tendencies and habits have spread, as the circle of human information and human interest has widened, as the means of communication between man and man and between man and the world about him have expanded and multiplied, the complexity of public opinion has greatly increased; and while the difficulty of arousing it has diminished, the difficulty of directing it has increased many fold.

147. CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO THE SWAY OF PUBLIC OPINION1

One essential condition, then, of public opinion is that the people should be homogeneous to such a point that the minority is willing to accept the decision of the majority on all questions that are normally expected to arise. It is, indeed, largely a perception of the need of homogeneity, as a basis for popular government and the public opinion on which it rests, that justifies democracies in resisting the influx in great numbers of a widely different race.

Quite apart from any effect on the standard of life of laboring men, Americans and Australians feel that Asiatics cannot be assimilated so as to form an integral and indistinguishable part of the population. Mr. Bryce tells us that the excellence of popular government consists, not in its wisdom, but in its strength; this strength depends, however, on the fact that the people are so homogeneous that public opinion touches them all.

Differences of race do not always prevent a people from being

1 From A. Lawrence Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government, pages 28-40. Longmans, Green & Co., New York; 1921. Reprinted by special permission of the publishers.

politically homogeneous; a fact abundantly proved by the experience of Switzerland, where three races, professing two creeds, are carrying on a highly successful democracy in perfect harmony. Race is merely one of the many factors that tend to divide a people. The essential point is that all elements of the population should be capable of common aims and aspirations, should have a common stock of political traditions, should be open to a ready interchange of ideas, and should be free from inherited prejudices that prevent mutual understanding and sympathy. This is a matter which thoughtful Americans must ponder seriously. . . .

Another factor essential to the existence of a public opinion is the freedom of the minority to propagate their views by all fair and peaceable means. Without the right of persuasion the minority would not be satisfied that the policy of the government embodied the deliberate wishes of a majority, and therefore expressed a real public opinion to which they were bound to submit. In a modern popular government, where the whole people are never within reach of a man's voice, where the chief difficulty consists less in making them weigh argument than in making them listen to argument at all, the right of persuasion involves freedom of speech, of publication, and of organization. Hence we find these matters wholly free in countries that have enjoyed popular government for any considerable length of time. Within the limits of a possible public opinionthat is, within the sphere where it is conceivable that the majority might be convinced and the minority might willingly submit democracy does not suppress utterances repugnant to it, although it often ignores them.

DIFFICULTY OF FORETELLING WHETHER A PUBLIC OPINION

WILL BE FORMED

While we may indicate the limits of a possible public opinion in general terms, it is not always self-evident whether or not the conditions obtain in a particular case. We have seen that the public can form an opinion when a question has been so much discussed that familiarity with it is widely diffused; and that this is more likely to be true of a general principle than of a concrete application involving complex facts. But the shrewdest prophet cannot always