Public Opinion quotes

We can see, too, that while they governed and fought, traded and reformed in the world as they imagined it to be, they produced results, or failed to produce any, in the world as it was.

They started for the Indies and found America. They diagnosed evil and hanged old women.

They thought they could grow rich by always selling and never buying. A caliph, obeying what he conceived to be the Will of Allah, burned the library at Alexandria.

"Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! I took thee for thy better; take thy fortune."

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.

Hence the modicum of truth in the old saying that no man is a hero to his valet. There is only a modicum of truth, for the valet, and the private secretary, are often immersed in the fiction themselves.

But since according to popular ideas it is not possible to think of a general without maps, a few were placed in position for the picture, and removed soon afterwards." [Footnote: Op. cit., p. 99.]

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.

That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts.

For certainly, at the level of social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.

By fictions I do not mean lies.

I mean a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself.

We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.

To traverse the world men must have maps of the world.

Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else's need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.

Yet this extraordinary assumption is in a debate over a resolution to investigate the truth of the assumption. It reveals how difficult it is, even for trained lawyers, to suspend response until the returns are in. The response is instantaneous.

The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.

A few days later an official report showed that the marines were not landed by order of the British Government or of the Supreme Council. They had not been fighting the Italians.

… full allowance has been made for deliberate fraud, political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that it is acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it speaks for the common interest.

They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.

It is to these special worlds, it is to these private or group, or class, or provincial, or occupational, or national, or sectarian artifacts, that the political adjustment of mankind in the Great Society takes place. Their variety and complication are impossible to describe.

Both ideas are merely public opinions, and while the psychoanalyst as physician may perhaps assume them, the sociologist may not take the products of existing public opinion as criteria by which to study public opinion.

The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.

It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance.

An army is an unwieldy thing. And that is why the naval and diplomatic censorship is almost always much more complete. Fewer people know what is going on, and their acts are more easily supervised.

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible.

In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable.

How was he able to watch it? Where was he when he watched it? What Frenchmen was he permitted to talk to, what newspapers did he read, and where did they learn what they say?

You can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them.

They will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is itself a protection.

They cannot really be said to suffer from censorship, or secrecy, the high cost or the difficulty of communication.

They suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene.

Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter.

There it is finally decided in each phase of a discussion which authorities and which sources of information are admissible, and which not.

Our social set consists of those who figure as people in the phrase "people are saying"; they are the people whose approval matters most intimately to us.

In big cities among men and women of wide interests and with the means for moving about, the social set is not so rigidly defined. But even in big cities, there are quarters and nests of villages containing self-sufficing social sets.

… and contact play so big a part in determining what can be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought.

Yet in truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted.

Man's history being what it is, political opinion on the scale of the Great Society requires an amount of selfless equanimity rarely attainable by any one for any length of time. We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

Man's history being what it is, political opinion on the scale of the Great Society requires an amount of selfless equanimity rarely attainable by any one for any length of time.

We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

The time and attention are limited that we can spare for the labor of not taking opinions for granted, and we are subject to constant interruption.

For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings.

Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow.

There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's.

In the exact sciences there is an approach to this ideal, and that is part of the reason why of all forms of world-wide cooperation, scientific inquiry is the most effective.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

[Footnote: Cited by White, Mechanisms of Character Formation.]

Many individuals, parties, and even nations, rarely appear to transcend the magical organization of experience. But in the more advanced sections of the most advanced peoples, trial and error after repeated failure has led to the invention of a new principle.

The moon, they learn, is not moved by baying at it.

Crops are not raised from the soil by spring festivals or Republican majorities, but by sunlight, moisture, seeds, fertilizer, and cultivation. [Footnote:

The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult. "The intolerable burden of thought" is a burden when the conditions make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable.

It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

The life of the city dweller lacks solitude, silence, ease. The nights are noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms, but endless and remorseless.

Under modern industrialism thought goes on in a bath of noise.

If its discriminations are often flat and foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult.

"The intolerable burden of thought" is a burden when the conditions make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable. It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions.

For experience seems to show that he himself brings something to the scene which later he takes away from it, that oftener than not what he imagines to be the account of an event is really a transfiguration of it.

Few facts in consciousness seem to be merely given. Most facts in consciousness seem to be partly made.

A report is the joint product of the knower and known, in which the role of the observer is always selective and usually creative. The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.

But the chemist would likely as not ignore these esthetic and utilitarian qualities, and define a metal as "any chemical element that enters into combination with oxygen so as to form a base."

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.

In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

In a circle of friends, and in relation to close associates or competitors, there is no shortcut through, and no substitute for, an individualized understanding.

Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit.

For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own;

The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences ere those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes.

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them.

And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.

A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more.

It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights.

The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy.

The stereotype is like the lavender window-panes on Beacon Street, like the door-keeper at a costume ball who judges whether the guest has an appropriate masquerade.

There is nothing so obdurate to education or to criticism as the stereotype.

It stamps itself upon the evidence in the very act of securing the evidence. That is why the accounts of returning travellers are often an interesting tale of what the traveller carried abroad with him on his trip.

For what operates in history is not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting imitations, replicas, counterfeits, analogies, and distortions in individual minds.

Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful.

From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America.

And mechanical it has remained, on the whole, to this day. In America more than anywhere else, the spectacle of mechanical progress has made so deep an impression, that it has suffused the whole moral code.

An American will endure almost any insult except the charge that he is not progressive.

Be he of long native ancestry, or a recent immigrant, the aspect that has always struck his eye is the immense physical growth of American civilization. That constitutes a fundamental stereotype through which he views the world:

Therefore, aims were ignored, or regarded as automatic, and victory was conceived, because the stereotype demanded it, as nothing but an annihilating victory in the field.

In peace time you did not ask what the fastest motor car was for, and in war you did not ask what the completest victory was for.

Yet in Paris the pattern did not fit the facts. In peace you can go on endlessly supplanting small things with big ones, and big ones with bigger ones;

a page of Kant will start a different train of thought in a Kantian and in a radical empiricist; the Tahitian belle is a better looking person to her Tahitian suitor than to the readers of the National Geographic Magazine.

Expertness in any subject is, in fact, a multiplication of the number of aspects we are prepared to discover, plus the habit of discounting our expectations.

Where to the ignoramus all things look alike, and life is just one thing after another, to the specialist things are highly individual.

What is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes.

We do not see what our eyes are not accustomed to take into account.

Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.

… conception is known to be an hypothesis, whereas in the codes that come unexamined from the past or bubble up from the caverns of the mind, the conception is not taken as an hypothesis demanding proof or contradiction, but as a fiction accepted without question.

In the one case, man is humble about his beliefs, because he knows they are tentative and incomplete; in the other he is dogmatic, because his belief is a completed myth.

The moralist who submits to the scientific discipline knows that though he does not know everything, he is in the way of knowing something;

It may happen to be partly true. If it has affected human conduct a long time, it is almost certain to contain much that is profoundly and importantly true. What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truths from its errors.

For that power comes only by realizing that no human opinion, whatever its supposed origin, is too exalted for the test of evidence, that every opinion is only somebody's opinion.

And if you ask why the test of evidence is preferable to any other, there is no answer unless you are willing to use the test in order to test it.

And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him?

The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts.

Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.

Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition.

For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a "question," they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a "fact."

And they never do believe it until after long critical education, they are fully conscious of how second-hand and subjective is their apprehension of their social data.

While this sort of thing is, I believe, less prevalent in America than in Europe, yet rare is the American official about whom somebody is not repeating a scandal.

Out of the opposition we make villains and conspiracies.

If prices go up unmercifully the profiteers have conspired; if the newspapers misrepresent the news, there is a capitalist plot; if the rich are too rich, they have been stealing; if a closely fought election is lost, the electorate was corrupted;

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.

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 …

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.]

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

Until it releases or resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains one of the objects which do not matter.

Pictures have always been the surest way of 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.

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.

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.

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.

And so, in spite of the critics, a verdict is rendered in the old controversy about realism and romanticism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Into the making of a man's characters there enters a variety of influences not easily separated. [Footnote:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.]

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.

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.

From father to son, from prelate to novice, from veteran to cadet, certain ways of seeing and doing are taught. These ways become familiar, and are recognized as such by the mass of outsiders.

Distance alone lends enchantment to the view that masses of human beings ever coöperate in any complex affair without a central machine managed by a very few people.

"No one," says Bryce, [Footnote: Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 542.] "can have had some years' experience of the conduct of affairs in a legislature or an administration without observing how extremely small is the number of persons by whom the world is governed."

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.]

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 …

… 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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

… 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.

By the age of twenty-one he had his political faculties. What counted was a good heart, a reasoning mind, a balanced judgment. These would ripen with age, but it was not necessary to consider how to inform the heart and feed the reason.

Men took in their facts as they took in their breath.

But the facts men could come to possess in this effortless way were limited. They could know the customs and more obvious character of the place where they lived and worked.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

The American people came to believe that their Constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such.

They owe that fiction to the victory of Thomas Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction it has been.

It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible.

Thus, rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in practice the offices oscillated between the henchmen.

Tenure might not be a permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was permanent.

Government might be, as President Harding once said, a simple thing, but winning elections was a sophisticated performance.

Thus, rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in practice the offices oscillated between the henchmen. Tenure might not be a permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was permanent.

Government might be, as President Harding once said, a simple thing, but winning elections was a sophisticated performance.

The salaries in office might be as ostentatiously frugal as Jefferson's home-spun, but the expenses of party organization and the fruits of victory were in the grand manner. The stereotype of democracy controlled the visible government;

The individualist said that self-enlightened self-interest would bring internal and external peace. The socialist is sure that the motives to aggression will disappear. The new pluralist hopes they will. [Footnote: See G. D. H. Cole, Social Theory, p. 142.]

Coercion is the surd in almost all social theory, except the Machiavellian.

The temptation to ignore it, because it is absurd, inexpressible, and unmanageable, becomes overwhelming in any man who is trying to rationalize human life.

He must vote on questions coming up from other shops, and on matters coming from beyond the frontiers of the whole industry. The primary interest of the shop does not even cover the function of a whole industrial vocation.

The function of a vocation, a great industry, a district, a nation is a concept, not an experience, and has to be imagined, invented, taught and believed.

And even though you define function as carefully as possible, once you admit that the view of each shop on that function will not necessarily coincide with the view of other shops, you are saying that the representative of one interest is concerned in the …

If we could allow Mr. Cole his scheme of functions we could allow him almost everything.

Unfortunately he has inserted in his premise what he wishes a guild society to deduce.

[Footnote: I have dealt with Mr. Cole's theory rather than with the experience of Soviet Russia because, while the testimony is fragmentary, all competent observers seem to agree that Russia in 1921 does not illustrate a communist state in working order.

In so far as spontaneous democracy does not satisfy their other interests, it seems to most men most of the time to be an empty thing.

Because the art of successful self-government is not instinctive, men do not long desire self-government for its own sake. They desire it for the sake of the results.

That is why the impulse to self-government is always strongest as a protest against bad conditions.

Because the art of successful self-government is not instinctive, men do not long desire self-government for its own sake. They desire it for the sake of the results.

That is why the impulse to self-government is always strongest as a protest against bad conditions.

The democratic fallacy has been its preoccupation with the origin of government rather than with the processes and results. The democrat has always assumed that if political power could be derived in the right way, it would be beneficent.

Cole says, "get the mechanism right, and adjust it as far as possible to men's social wills." But while the democratic theorist was busy at this, he was far away from the actual interests of human nature. He was absorbed by one interest: self-government.

Mankind was interested in all kinds of other things, in order, in its rights, in prosperity, in sights and sounds and in not being bored.

In so far as spontaneous democracy does not satisfy their other interests, it seems to most men most of the time to be an empty thing. Because the art of successful self-government is not instinctive, men do not long desire self-government for its own sake.

For no matter how power originates, the crucial interest is in how power is exercised.

What determines the quality of civilization is the use made of power.

And that use cannot be controlled at the source.

[Footnote: Milton, Areopagitica, cited at the opening of Mr. Chafee's book. For comment on this classic doctrine of liberty as stated by Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Mr. Bertrand Russel, see my Liberty and the News, Ch. II.]

Supposing that no one has ever seen it put to the worse, are we to believe then that the truth is generated by the encounter, like fire by rubbing two sticks?

Behind this classic doctrine of liberty, which American democrats embodied in their Bill of Rights, there are, in fact, several different theories of the origin of truth.

For it always assumes, either that truth is spontaneous, or that the means of securing truth exist when there is no external interference. But when you are dealing with an invisible environment, the assumption is false.

The truth about distant or complex matters is not self-evident, and the machinery for assembling information is technical and expensive.

Yet political science, and especially democratic political science, has never freed itself from the original assumption of Aristotle's politics sufficiently to restate the premises, so that political thought might come to grips with the problem of how to make the invisible world visible to the …

He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him.

Somebody has said quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.

This casual and one-sided relationship between readers and press is an anomaly of our civilization. There is nothing else quite like it, and it is, therefore, hard to compare the press with any other business or institution.

You cannot compare journalism with law, medicine or engineering, for in every one of these professions the consumer pays for the service.

A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away.

Yet the critics of the press are merely voicing the moral standards of the community, when they expect such an institution to live on the same plane as that on which the school, the church, and the disinterested professions are supposed to live.

It would be regarded as an outrage to have to pay openly the price of a good ice cream soda for all the news of the world, though the public will pay that and more when it buys the advertised commodities.

The public pays for the press, but only when the payment is concealed.

Circulation is, therefore, the means to an end. It becomes an asset only when it can be sold to the advertiser, who buys it with revenues secured through indirect taxation of the reader. [Footnote:

But if the news is not local, the corrective diminishes as the subject matter recedes into the distance.

The only people who can correct what they think is a false picture of themselves printed in another city are members of groups well enough organized to hire publicity men.

Now it is interesting to note that the general reader of a newspaper has no standing in law if he thinks he is being misled by the news.

Mr. Hearst's unflagging interest in high society caters to people who never hope to be in high society, and yet manage to derive some enhancement out of the vague feeling that they are part of the life that they read about.

In the great cities "the printed diary of the home town" tends to be the printed diary of a smart set.

And it is, as we have already noted, the dailies of the cities which carry the burden of bringing distant news to the private citizen. But it is not primarily their political and social news which holds the circulation.

There are not a great many reporters. And none of them has the power to be in more than one place at a time.

Reporters are not clairvoyant, they do not gaze into a crystal ball and see the world at will, they are not assisted by thought-transference.

Yet the range of subjects these comparatively few men manage to cover would be a miracle indeed, if it were not a standardized routine.

In the first instance, therefore, the news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.

The news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground, but it may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface.

It may even tell you what somebody says is happening to the seed under ground. It may tell you that the sprout did not come up at the time it was expected.

But it follows that the picture which the publicity man makes for the reporter is the one he wishes the public to see.

He is censor and propagandist, responsible only to his employers, and to the whole truth responsible only as it accords with the employers' conception of his own interests.

The development of the publicity man is a clear sign that the facts of modern life do not spontaneously take a shape in which they can be known.

Every bulletin requires a swift but complicated judgment. It must be understood, put in relation to other bulletins also understood, and played up or played down according to its probable interest for the public, as the editor conceives it.

Without standardization, without stereotypes, without routine judgments, without a fairly ruthless disregard of subtlety, the editor would soon die of excitement.

The final page is of a definite size, must be ready at a precise moment; there can be only a certain number of captions on the items, and in each caption there must be a definite number of letters.

Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what emphasis each shall have.

There are no objective standards here. There are conventions.

Take two newspapers published in the same city on the same morning. The headline of one reads: "Britain pledges aid to Berlin against French aggression; France openly backs Poles." The headline of the second is "Mrs. Stillman's Other Love."

If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance.

It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.

As we begin to make more and more exact studies of the press, much will depend upon the hypothesis we hold. If we assume with Mr.

We shall prove that on this point the newspaper lied. We shall prove that on that point Mr. Sinclair's account lied. We shall demonstrate that Mr. Sinclair lied when he said that somebody lied, and that somebody lied when he said Mr. Sinclair lied.

We shall vent our feelings, but we shall vent them into air.

The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. [Footnote: When I wrote Liberty and the News, I did not understand this distinction clearly enough to state it, but cf.

[Footnote: When I wrote Liberty and the News, I did not understand this distinction clearly enough to state it, but cf. p. 89 ff.]

The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.

Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide. That is a comparatively small part of the whole field of human interest.

He knows that he is seeing the world through subjective lenses.

He cannot deny that he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.

And by this knowledge his assurance is tempered. He may have all kinds of moral courage, and sometimes has, but he lacks that sustaining conviction of a certain technic which finally freed the physical sciences from theological control.

If the press is not so universally wicked, nor so deeply conspiring, as Mr. Sinclair would have us believe, it is very much more frail than the democratic theory has as yet admitted.

It is too frail to carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the truth which democrats hoped was inborn.

And when we expect it to supply such a body of truth we employ a misleading standard of judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the illimitable complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance, public spirit, and all-round competence.

The press, in other words, has come to be regarded as an organ of direct democracy, charged on a much wider scale, and from day to day, with the function often attributed to the initiative, referendum, and recall.

The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay down the law for everything all the time. It is not workable.

And when you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable. For the news, as we have seen, is precise in proportion to the precision with which the event is recorded.

The better the institutions, the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced, the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news.

At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends.

In the degree to which institutions fail to function, the unscrupulous journalist can fish in troubled waters, and the conscientious one must gamble with uncertainties.

At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends.

In the degree to which institutions fail to function, the unscrupulous journalist can fish in troubled waters, and the conscientious one must gamble with uncertainties.

The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone.

at its worst it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends. In the degree to which institutions fail to function, the unscrupulous journalist can fish in troubled waters, and the conscientious one must gamble with uncertainties.

The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.

Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions.

The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone.

They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions.

It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision. The trouble lies deeper than the press, and so does the remedy.

He embraced the man who made colored pictures of them. He found that he really did not know one machine from another. He hired engineers to pick them, and tell him how much they cost and what they could do.

He peeled off one burden after another, as a man will take off first his hat, then his coat, then his collar, when he is struggling to move an unwieldy load.

Yet curiously enough, though he knew that he needed help, he was slow to call in the social scientist. The chemist, the physicist, the geologist, had a much earlier and more friendly reception.

But the social scientist cannot begin to offer the assurance of a laboratory test, and if his advice is followed, and he is wrong, the consequences may be incalculable.

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

But more than that. In the laboratory sciences the student has conquered the dilemma of thought and action. He brings a sample of the action to a quiet place, where it can be repeated at will, and examined at leisure.

For if he is really critical and saturated in the scientific spirit, he cannot be doctrinaire, and go to Armageddon against the trustees and the students and the Civic Federation and the conservative press for a theory of which he is not sure.

If you are going to Armageddon, you have to battle for the Lord, but the political scientist is always a little doubtful whether the Lord called him.

Consequently if so much of social science is apologetic rather than constructive, the explanation lies in the opportunities of social science, not in "capitalism."

He is there to represent the unseen. He represents people who are not voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and people.

He has a constituency of intangibles.

And intangibles cannot be used to form a political majority, because voting is in the last analysis a test of strength, a sublimated battle, and the expert represents no strength available in the immediate.

There are men who believe in intelligence work, and will adopt it; there are men who do not understand it, but cannot do their work without it; there are men who will resist.

But provided the principle has a foothold somewhere in every social agency it will make progress, and the way to begin is to begin.

In the federal government, for example, it is not necessary to straighten out the administrative tangle and the illogical duplications of a century's growth in order to find a neat place for the intelligence bureaus which Washington so badly needs.

For the value of competition is determined by the value of the standards used to measure it.

Instead, then, of asking ourselves whether we believe in competition, we should ask ourselves whether we believe in that for which the competitors compete.

No one in his senses expects to "abolish competition," for when the last vestige of emulation had disappeared, social effort would consist in mechanical obedience to a routine, tempered in a minority by native inspiration.

No electoral device, no manipulation of areas, no change in the system of property, goes to the root of the matter.

You cannot take more political wisdom out of human beings than there is in them.

And no reform, however sensational, is truly radical, which does not consciously provide a way of overcoming the subjectivism of human opinion based on the limitation of individual experience. There are systems of government, of voting, and representation which extract more than others.

There are systems of government, of voting, and representation which extract more than others. But in the end knowledge must come not from the conscience but from the environment with which that conscience deals.

When men act on the principle of intelligence they go out to find the facts and to make their wisdom. When they ignore it, they go inside themselves and find only what is there.

They elaborate their prejudice, instead of increasing their knowledge.

When men act on the principle of intelligence they go out to find the facts and to make their wisdom. When they ignore it, they go inside themselves and find only what is there.

They elaborate their prejudice, instead of increasing their knowledge.

IN real life no one acts on the theory that he can have a public opinion on every public question, though this fact is often concealed where a person thinks there is no public question because he has no public opinion.

According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from the conference room insisting that what he wants is some soulfilling idea like Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism.

On such issues the citizen outside can sometimes be provoked to fear or admiration, but to judgment never.

Before he can do anything with the argument, the fat has to be boiled out of it for him.

After a procedure of that sort, a public opinion in the eulogistic sense of the term [Footnote: As used by Mr. Lowell in his Public Opinion and Popular Government.] can exist.

The value of expert mediation is not that it sets up opinion to coerce the partisans, but that it disintegrates partisanship.

Judge Gary and Mr. Foster may remain as little convinced as when they started, though even they would have to talk in a different strain. But almost everyone else who was not personally entangled would save himself from being entangled.

emotions are displaced from the images to which they belong to names which resemble the names of these images. In the uncriticized parts of the mind there is a vast amount of association by mere clang, contact, and succession.

There are stray emotional attachments, there are words that were names and are masks.

In dreams, reveries, and panic, we uncover some of the disorder, enough to see how the naive mind is composed, and how it behaves when not disciplined by wakeful effort and external resistance.

It had been imbedded in the whole personality, had affiliations of some sort with the whole ego: a challenge would reverberate through the whole soul.

After it has been thoroughly criticized, the idea is no longer me but that.

It is objectified, it is at arm's length. Its fate is not bound up with my fate, but with the fate of the outer world upon which I am acting.

He can show the pupil how he identifies himself with these allegories, how he becomes interested, and how he selects the attitude, heroic, romantic, economic which he adopts while holding a particular opinion.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

As our minds become more deeply aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method that is not otherwise there. We see vividly, as normally we should not, the enormous mischief and casual cruelty of our prejudices.

As the current categories dissolve, a hard, simple version of the world breaks up. The scene turns vivid and full. There follows an emotional incentive to hearty appreciation of scientific method, which otherwise it is not easy to arouse, and is impossible to sustain.

Prejudices are so much easier and more interesting.

For if you teach the principles of science as if they had always been accepted, their chief virtue as a discipline, which is objectivity, will make them dull.