YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
By WALTER LIPPMANN:
The Poems of Paul Mariett. Edited, with an Introduction
A Preface to Politics
Drift and Mastery
The Stakes of Diplomacy
The Political Scene: An Essay on the Victory of 1918
Liberty and the News
Public Opinion
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
BY
WALTER LIPPMANN
4 4 4
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACK AND COMPANY, INC.
\
Printed in the U. S. A.
TO
LEARNED HAND
Contents
PART I
Chapter Page
I. The Disenchanted Man 13
II. The Unattainable Ideal 22
III. Agents and Bystanders 40
IV. What the Public Does 54
V. The Neutralization of Arbitrary Force 63
PART II
VI. The Question Aristotle Asked 77
VII. The Nature of a Problem 81
VIII. Social Contracts 95
IX. The Two Questions Before the Public. 107
X. The Main Value of Public Debate., iio
XI. The Defective Rule 115
XII. The Criteria of Reform 125
XIII. The Principles of Public Opinion 143
PART III
XIV. Society in Its Place 155
XV. Absentee Rulers 173
XVI. The Realms of Disorder 187
Index 201
PART I
Chapter I
THE DISENCHANTED MAN
I
The private citizen today has come to feel
rather like a deaf spectator ;in the back
row, who ought to keep his mind on the mys¬
tery off there, but cannot quite manage to
keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected
by what is going on. Rules and regulations
continually, taxes annually and wars occa¬
sionally remind him that he is being swept
along by great drifts of circumstance.
Yet these public affairs are in no convincing
way his affairs. They are for the most part
invisible. They are managed, if they are
managed at all, at distant centers, from be¬
hind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a
private person he does not know for certain
what is going on, or who is doing it, or where
he is being carried. No newspaper reports his
13
i4 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
environment so that he can grasp it; no school
has taught him how to imagine it; his ideals,
often, do not fit with it; listening to speeches,
uttering opinions and voting do not, he
finds, enable him to govern it. He lives in
a world which he cannot see, does not under¬
stand and is unable to direct.
In the cold light of experience he knows
that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns
in theory, but in fact he does not govern.
Contemplating himself and his actual accom¬
plishments in public affairs, contrasting the
influence he exerts with the influence he is
supposed according to democratic theory to
exert, he must say of his sovereignty what
Bismarck said of Napoleon III.: "At a dis¬
tance it is something, but close to it is noth¬
ing at all."1 When, during an agitation of
some sort, say a political campaign, he hears
himself and some thirty million others de¬
scribed as the source of all wisdom and power
and righteousness, the prime mover and the
1 Cited Philip Guedalla, The Second Empire.
THE DISENCHANTED MAN 15
ultimate goal, the remnants of sanity in
him protest. He cannot all the time play
Chanticleer who was so dazzled and delighted
because he himself had caused the sun to
rise.
For when the private man has lived through
the romantic age in politics and is no longer
moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries,
when he is sober and unimpressed, his own
part in public affairs appears to him a preten¬
tious thing, a second rate, an inconsequential.
You cannot move him then with a good
straight talk about service and civic duty,
nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending
a boy scout after him to make him vote.
He is a man back home from a crusade to
make the world something or other it did not
become; he has been tantalized too often by
the foam of events, has seen the gas go out
of it, and, with sour derision for the stuff, he is
saying with the author of Trivia:2
Self-determination,' one of them insisted.
2 Logan Pearsall Smith, More Trivia, p. 41.
16 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
"'Arbitration,' cried another.
"'Cooperation,' suggested the mildest of
the party.
"'Confiscation,' answered an uncompro¬
mising female.
"I, too, became intoxicated with the sound
of these vocables. And were they rrt the
cure for all our ills?
"'Inoculation!' I chimed in. 'Transub-
stantiation, alliteration, inundation, flagella¬
tion, and afforestation!'"
2
It is well known that nothing like
the whole people takes part in public
affairs. Of the eligible voters in the
United States less than half go to the
polls even in a presidential year.3 Dur¬
ing the campaign of 1924 a special effort
3 Cf. Simon Michelet, Stay-at-Home Vote and Absentee Voters,
pamphlet of the National Get Out the Vote Club; also A. M. Schles-
inger and E. M. Erickson, "The Vanishing Voter," New Republic,
Oct. 1 s, 1924. The percentage of the popular to the eligible vote from
1865 to 1920 declined from 83.51 per cent to 52.36 per cent.
THE DISENCHANTED MAN 17
was made to bring out more voters. They
did not come out. The Constitution, the
nation, the party system, the presidential suc¬
cession, private property, all were supposed
to be in danger. One party prophesied red
ruin, another black corruption, a third tyranny
and inopcrialtsm if the voters did not go to
the polls in greater numbers. Half the citizen¬
ship was unmoved.
The students used to write books about
voting. They are now beginning to write
books about nonvoting. At the University
of Chicago Professor Merriam and Mr. Gosnell
have made an elaborate inquiry 4 into the
reason why, at the typical Chicago mayoral
election of 1923, there were, out of 1,400,000
eligible electors, only 900,000 who registered,
and out of those who registered there were
only 723,000 who finally managed to vote.
Thousands of persons were interviewed.
About 30 per cent of the abstainers had,
4 Charles Edward Merriam and Harvey Foote Gosnell, Non-Vot¬
ing: Causes and Methods of Control.
18 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
or at least claimed to have had, an insuperable
difficulty about going to the polls. They
were ill, they were absent from the city, they
were women detained at home by a child or
an invalid, they had had insufficient legal
residence. The other 70 per cent, represent¬
ing about half a million free and sovereign
citizens of this Republic, did not even pre¬
tend to have a reason for not voting, which,
in effect, was not an admission that they
did not care about voting. They were needed
at their work, the polls were crowded, the
polls were inconveniently located, they were
afraid to tell their age, they did not believe
in woman suffrage, the husband objected,
politics is rotten, elections are rotten, they
were afraid to vote, they did not know
there was an election. About a quarter
of those who were interviewed had the
honesty to say they were wholly uninter¬
ested.
Yet Bryce is authority for the statement
that "the will of the sovereign people is
THE DISENCHANTED MAN 19
expressed ... in the United States ... by
as large a proportion of the registered voters as
in any other country." 5 And certainly Mr.
Lowell's tables on the use of the initiative
and referendum in Switzerland in the main
support the view that the indifference of
the American voter is not unique.6 In fact,
realistic political thinkers in Europe long
ago abandoned the notion that the collective
mass of the people direct the course of publiq
affairs. Robert Michels, himself a Socialist,
says flatly that "the majority is permanently
incapable of self-government,"7 and quotes
approvingly the remark of a Swedish Social¬
ist Deputy, Gustaf F. Steffen, that "even
after the victory there will always remain
in political life the leaders and the led."
Michels, who is a political thinker of great
penetration, unburdens himself finally on the
subject by printing a remark of Hertzen's
6 James Bryce, Modern Democracies, Vol. II, p. 52.
6 A. Lawrence Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government.
Cf. Appendices.
7 Robert Michels, Political Parties, p. 390.
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
that the victory of an opposition party
amounts to "passing from the sphere of
envy to the sphere of avarice."
There is then nothing particularly new in
the disenchantment which the private citizen
expresses by not voting at all, by voting only
for the head of the ticket, by staying away
from the primaries, by not reading speeches
and documents, by the whole list of sins
of omission for which he is denounced.
I shall not denounce him further. My sym¬
pathies are with him, for I believe that he
has been saddled with an impossible task and
that he is asked to practice an unattainable
ideal. I find it so myself for, although
public business is my main interest and I
give most of my time to watching it, I cannot
find time to do what is expected of me in the
theory of democracy; that is, to know what is
going on and to have an opinion worth express¬
ing on every question which confronts a
self-governing community. And I have not
happened to meet anybody, from a President
THE DISENCHANTED MAN 21
of the United States to a professor of political
science, who came anywhere near to embody¬
ing the accepted ideal of the sovereign
and omnicompetent citizen.
Chapter II
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL
I have tried to imagine how the perfect
citizen could be produced. Some say he will
have to be born of the conjunction of the
right germ plasms, and, in the pages of books
written by Madison Grant, Lothrop Stod¬
dard and other revivalists, I have seen pre¬
scriptions as to just who ought to marry whom
to produce a great citizenry. Not being a
biologist I keep an open but hopeful mind on
this point, tempered, however, with the knowl¬
edge that certainty about how to breed
ability in human beings is on the whole in
inverse proportion to the writer's scientific
reputation.
It is then to education that logically one
turns next, for education has furnished the^
thesis of the last chapter of every optimistic
book on democracy written for one hundred
and fifty years. Even Robert Michels, stern
22
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 23
and unbending antisentimentalist that he is,
says in his "final considerations" that "it
is the great task of social education to raise
the intellectual level of the masses, so that
they may be enabled, within the limits of what
is possible, to counteract the oligarchical
tendencies" of all collective action.
So I have been reading some of the new
standard textbooks used to teach citizenship
in schools and colleges. After reading them
I do not see how any one can escape the con¬
clusion that man must have the appetite of
an encyclopaedist and infinite time ahead of
him. To be sure he no longer is expected to
remember the exact salary of the county clerk
and the length of the coroner's term. In the
new civics he studies the problems of govern¬
ment, and not the structural detail. He is
told, in one textbook of five hundred concise,
contentious pages, which I have been reading,
about city problems, state problems, national
problems, international problems, trust prob¬
lems, labor problems, transportation problems,
24 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
banking problems, rural problems, agricul¬
tural problems, and so on ad infinitum. In
the eleven pages devoted to problems of the
city there are described twelve sub-prob¬
lems.
But nowhere in this well-meant book is the
sovereign citizen of the future given a hint
as to how, while he is earning a living, rearing
children and enjoying his life, he is to keep
himself informed about the progress of this
swarming confusion of problems. He is
exhorted to conserve the natural resources of
the country because they are limited in quan¬
tity. He is advised to watch public expendi¬
tures because the taxpayers cannot pay out
indefinitely increasing amounts. But he, the
voter, the citizen, the sovereign, is apparently
expected to yield an unlimited quantity of
public spirit, interest, curiosity and effort.
The author of the textbook, touching on every¬
thing, as he thinks, from city sewers to Indian
opium, misses a decisive fact: the citizen gives
but a little of his time to public affairs, has
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 25
but a casual interest in facts and but a poor
appetite for theory.
It never occurs to this preceptor of civic
duty to provide the student with a rule by
which he can know whether on Thursday
it is his duty to consider subways in Brook¬
lyn or the Manchurian Railway, nor how,
if he determines on Thursday to express his
sovereign will on the subway question, he
is to repair those gaps in his knowledge of
that question which are due to his having
been preoccupied the day before in express¬
ing his sovereign will about rural credits in
Montana and the rights of Britain in the
Sudan. Yet he cannot know all about every¬
thing all the time, and while he is watch¬
ing one thing a thousand others undergo
great changes. Unless he can discover some
rational ground for fixing his attention where
it will do the most good, and in a way that
suits his inherently amateurish equipment,
he will be as bewildered as a puppy trying
to lick three bones at once.
26 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
I do not wish to say that it does the student
no good to be taken on a sightseeing tour of
the problems of the world. It may teach him
that the world is complicated, even if he
comes out of the adventure "laden with
germs, breathing creeds and convictions on
you whenever he opens his mouth." 1 He
may learn humility, but most certainly his
acquaintance with what a high-minded author
thought were American problems in 1925
will not equip him to master American prob¬
lems ten years later. Unless out of the study
of transient issues he acquires an intellectual
attitude no education has occurred.
> That is why the usual appeal to education
as the remedy for the incompetence of democ¬
racy is so barren. It is, in effect, a proposal
that school teachers shall by some magic of
their own fit men to govern after the makers
of laws and the preachers of civic ideals have
had a free hand in writing the specifications.
The reformers do not ask what men can be
1 Logan Pearsall Smith.
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 27
taught. They say they should be taught
whatever may be necessary to fit them to
govern the modern world.
The usual appeal to education can bring
only disappointment. For the problems of
the modern world appear and change faster
than any set of teachers can grasp them,
much faster than they can convey their sub¬
stance to a population of children. If the
schools attempt to teach children how to
solve the problems of the day, they are bound
always to be in arrears. The most they
can conceivably attempt is the teaching of a
pattern of thought and feeling which will en¬
able the citizen to approach a new problem in
some useful fashion. But that pattern cannot
be invented by the pedagogue. It is the
political theorist's business to trace out that
pattern. In that task he must not assume
that the mass has political genius, but that
men, even if they had genius, would give
only a little time and attention to public
affairs.
28 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
The moralist, I am afraid, will agree all too
readily with the idea that social education
must deal primarily not with the elements
and solutions of particular phases of transient
problems but with the principles that consti¬
tute an attitude toward all problems. I
warn him off. It will require more than a good
conscience to govern modern society, for
conscience is no guide in situations where
the essence of the difficulty is to find a guide
for the conscience.
When I am tempted to think that men can
be fitted out to deal with the modern world
simply by teaching morals, manners and
patriotism, I try to remember the fable of
the pensive professor walking in the woods
at twilight. He stumbled into a tree. This
experience compelled him to act. Being a
man of honor and breeding, he raised his
hat, bowed deeply to the tree, and exclaimed
with sincere regret: "Excuse me, sir, I thought
you were a tree."
Is it fair, I ask, as a matter of morality, to
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 29
chide him for his conduct? If he had encoun¬
tered a tree, can any one deny his right to
collide with it? If he had stumbled into a
man, was his apology not sufficient? Here
was a moral code in perfect working order,
and the only questionable aspect of his conduct
turned not on the goodness of his heart or
the firmness of his principles but on a point
of fact. You may retort that he had a moral
obligation to know the difference between a
man and a tree. Perhaps so. But suppose
that instead of walking in the woods he had
been casting a ballot; suppose that instead
of a tree he had encountered the Fordney-
McCumber tariff. How much more obligation
to know the truth would you have imposed
on him then? After all, this walker in the
woods at twilight with his mind on other
things was facing, as all of us think we are,
the facts he imagined were there, and was
doing his duty as he had learned it.
In some degree the whole animate world
seems to share the inexpertness of the thought-
30 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
ful professor. Pawlow showed by his experi¬
ments on dogs that an animal with a false
stomach can experience all the pleasures of
eating, and the number of mice and monkeys
known to have been deceived in laboratories is
surpassed only by the hopeful citizens of a
democracy. Man's reflexes are, as the psy¬
chologists say, conditioned. And, therefore,
he responds quite readily to a glass egg, a
decoy duck, a stuffed shirt or a political
platform. No moral code, as such, will enable
him to know whether he is exercising his moral
faculties on a real and an important event.
For effective virtue, as Socrates pointed out
long ago, is knowledge; and a code of the1
right and the wrong must wait upon a percep¬
tion of the true and the false.
But even the successful practice of a
moral code would not emancipate democracy.
There are too many moral codes. In our
immediate lives, within the boundaries of
our own society, there may be commonly
accepted standards. But a political theorist
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 31
who asks that a local standard be universally
applied is merely begging one of the questions
he ought to be trying to solve. For, while
possibly it may be an aim of political organiza¬
tion to arrive at a common standard of
judgment, one of the conditions which engen¬
ders politics and makes political organization
necessary is the conflict of standards.
Darwin's story of the cats and clover2 may
be recommended to any one who finds it
difficult to free his mind of the assumption
that his notions of good and bad are universal.
The purple clover is cross-fertilized by the
bumblebee, and, therefore, the more bumble¬
bees the better next year's crop of clover. But
the nests of bumblebees are rifled by field
mice which are fond of the white grubs.
Therefore, the more field mice the fewer
bumblebees and the poorer the crop. But in
the neighborhood of villages the cats hunt
down the field mice. And so the more cats
2 As told by J. Arthur Thomson, The Outline of Science, Vol. Ill,
p. 646.
32 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
the fewer mice, the more bumblebees the
better the crop. And the more kindly old
ladies there are in the village the more cats
there will be.
If you happen not to be a Hindu or a vege¬
tarian and are a beef-eating Occidental you
will commend the old ladies who keep the cats
who hunt the mice who destroy the bumblebees
who make the pasture of clover for the cattle.
If you are a cat you also will be in favor of
the old ladies. But if you are a field mouse,
how different the rights and wrongs of that
section of the universe! The old ladies who
keep cats will seem about as kindly as witches
with pet tigers, and the Old Lady Peril will
be debated hysterically by the Field Mouse
Security League. For what could a patriotic
mouse think of a world in which bumblebees
did not exist for the sole purpose of producing
white grubs for field mice? There would seem
to be no law and order in such a world; and
only a highly philosophical mouse wTould admit
with Bergson that "the idea of disorder
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 33
objectifies for the convenience of language,
the disappointment of a mind that finds
before it an order different from what it
wants."3 For the order which we recognize as
good is an order suited to our needs and hopes
and habits.
There is nothing universal or eternal or
unchangeable about our expectations. For
rhetorical effect we often say there is. But
in concrete cases it is not easy to explain
why the thing we desire is so righteous. If
the farmers are able to buy less than their
accustomed amount of manufactured foods
there is disorder and a problem. But what
absolute standard is there which determines
whether a bushel of wheat in 1925 should, as
compared with 1913, exchange for more, as
many, or less manufactures? Can any one
define a principle which shall say whether the
standard of living of the farmers or of any
other class should rise or fall, and how fast
and how much? There may be more jobs
3 Creative Evolution, Ch. III.
34 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
than workingmen at the wage offered: the
employers will complain and will call it a
problem, but who knows any rule which tells
how large a surplus of labor there ought to
be and at what price? There may be more
workingmen than jobs of the kind and at the
places and for the wages they will or can take.
But, although the problem will be acute,
there is no principle which determines how
many machinists, clerks, coal miners, bankers,
or salesmen it is the duty of society to provide
work for.
It requires intense partisanship and much
self-deception to argue that some sort of pecu¬
liar righteousness adheres to the farmers' claims
as against the manufacturers', the employ¬
ers' against the wage-earners', the creditors'
against the debtors', or the other way around.
These conflicts of interest are problems.
They require solution. But there is no moral
pattern available from which the precise
nature of the solution can be deduced.
If then eugenics cannot produce the ideal
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 35
democratic citizen, omnicompetent and sover¬
eign, because biology knows neither how to
breed political excellence nor what that excel¬
lence is; if education cannot equip the citizen,
because the school teacher cannot anticipate
the issues of the future; if morality cannot
direct him, first, because right or wrong in
specific cases depends upon the perception of
true or false, and, second, on the assumption
that there is a universal moral code, which,
inTact, does not exist, where else shall we look
for~The method of making the competent
citizen! Democratic theorists in the nine¬
teenth century had several other prescriptions
which still influence the thinking of many
hopeful persons.
One school based their reforms on the apho¬
rism that the cure for the evils of democracy
is more democracy. It was assumed that
the popular will was wise and good if only
you could get at it. They proposed extensions
of the suffrage, and as much voting as possible
by means of the initiative, referendum and
36 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
recall, direct election of Senators, direct
primaries, an elected judiciary, and the like.
They begged the question, for it has never
been proved that there exists the kind of
public opinion which they presupposed. Since
the Bryan campaign of 1896 this school of
thought has made great conquests in most
of the states, and has profoundly influenced
the federal government. The eligible vote
has trebled since 1896; the direct action of
the voter has been enormously extended. Yet
that same period has seen a decline in the
percentage of the popular vote cast at presi¬
dential elections from 80.75 Per cent 1896
to 52.36 per cent in 1920. Apparently there
is a fallacy in the first assumption of this
school that "the whole people" desires to
participate actively in government. Nor is
there any evidence to show that the persons
who do participate are in any real sense direct¬
ing the course of affairs. The party machines
have survived every attack. And why should
they not? If the voter cannot grasp the
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 37
details of the problems of the day because he
has not the time, the interest or the knowl¬
edge, he will not have a better public opinion
because he is asked to express his opinion
more often. He will simply be more bewil¬
dered, more bored and more ready to follow
along.
Another school, calling themselves revolu¬
tionary, have ascribed the disenchantment of
democracy to the capitalistic system. They
have argued that property is power, and that
until there is as wide a distribution of economic
power as there is of the right to vote the suf¬
frage cannot be more effective. No serious
student, I think, would dispute that socialist
premise which asserts that the weight of in¬
fluence on society exercised by an individual is
more nearly related to the character of his prop¬
erty than to his abstract legal citizenship. But
the socialist conclusion that economic power
can be distributed by concentrating the owner¬
ship of great utilities in the state, the con¬
clusion that the pervasion of industrial life
38 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
by voting and referenda will yield competent
popular decisions, seems to me again to beg
the question. For what reason is there to
think that subjecting, so many more affairs
to the method of the vote will reveal hitherto
undiscovered wisdom and technical competence
and reservoirs of public interest in men ? The
socialist scheme has at its root the niystical
fallacy of democracy, that the people, all of
them, are competent; at its top it suffers from
the homeopathic fallacy that adding new tasks
to a burden the people will not and cannot
carry now will make the burden of citizenship
easily borne. The socialist theory presup¬
poses an unceasing, untiring round of civic
duties, an enormous complication of the po¬
litical interests that are already much too
complicated.
These various remedies, eugenic, educa¬
tional, ethical, populist and socialist, all
assume that either the voters are inherently
competent to direct the course of affairs or
that they are making progress toward such an
THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL 39
ideal. I think it is a false ideal. I do not
mean an undesirable ideal. I mean an un¬
attainable ideal, bad only in the sense that
it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet
dancer. An ideal should express the true
possibilities of its subject. When it does not
it perverts the true possibilities. The ideal
of the omnicompetent, sovereign citizen is, in
my opinion, such a false ideal. It is unattain¬
able. The pursuit of it is misleading. The
failure to achieve it has produced the current
disenchantment.
The individual man does not have opinions
on all public affairs. He does not know how
to direct public affairs. He does not know
what is happening, why it is happening, what
ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he
could know, and there is not the least reason
for thinking, as mystical democrats have
thought, that the compounding of individual
ignorances in masses of people can produce a
continuous directing force in public affairs.
Chapter III
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS
I
When a citizen has qualified as a voter he
finds himself one of the theoretical rulers of a
great going concern. He has not made the
complicated machine with its five hundred
thousand federal officers and its uncounted
local offices. He has not seen much of it.
He is bound by contracts, by debts, by
treaties, by laws, made before he was aware
of them. He does not from day to day decide
who shall do what in the business of govern¬
ment. Only some small fraction of it comes
intermittently to his notice. And in those
episodic moments when he stands in the
polling booth he is a highly intelligent and
public-spirited voter indeed who can discover
two real alternatives and enlist his influence
40
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS 41
for a party which promises something he can
understand.
The actual governing is made up of a multi¬
tude of arrangements on specific questions
by particular individuals. These rarely be¬
come visible to the private citizen. Govern¬
ment, in the long intervals between elections,
is carried on by politicians, officeholders and
influential men who make settlements with
other politicians, officeholders and influential
men. The mass of people see these settle¬
ments, judge them, and affect them only
now and then. They are altogether too
numerous, too complicated, too obscure in
their effects to become the subject of any
continuing exercise of public opinion.
Nor in any exact and literal sense are those
who conduct the daily business of government
accountable after the fact to the great mass
of the voters. They are accountable only,
except in spectacular cases, to the other
politicians, officeholders and influential men
directly interested in the particular act.
42 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
Modern society is not visible to anybody, nor
intelligible continuously and as a whole. One
section is visible to another section, one
series of acts is intelligible to this group and
another to that.
Even this degree of responsible understand¬
ing is attainable only by the development of
fact-finding agencies of great scope and com¬
plexity.1 These agencies give only a remote
and incidental assistance to the general public.
Their findings are too intricate for the casual
reader. They are also almost always much
too uninteresting. Indeed the popular bore¬
dom and contempt for the expert and for
statistical measurement are such that the
organization of intelligence to administer
modern affairs would probably be entirely
neglected were it not that departments of
government, corporations, trade unions and.
trade associations are being compelled by their
own internal necessities of administration, and
by compulsion of other corporate groups, to
1 Cf. my Public Opinion, Chapters XXV and XXVI.
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS 43
record their own acts, measure them, publish
them and stand accountable for them.
The need in the Great Society not only fof1
publicity but for uninterrupted publicity is
indisputable. But we shall misunderstand
the need seriously if we imagine that the
purpose of the publication can possibly be
the informing of every voter. We live at
the mere beginnings of public accounting.
Yet the facts far exceed our curiosity. The
railroads, for example, make an accounting.
Do we read the results? Hardly. A few
executives here and there, some bankers,
some regulating officials, some representatives
of shippers and the like read them. The
rest of us ignore them for the good and suffi¬
cient reason that we have other things to do.
For the man does not live who can read all
the reports that drift across his doorstep or
all the dispatches in his newspaper. And if
by some development of the radio every man
could see and hear all that was happening
everywhere, if publicity, in other words, be-
44 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
came absolute, how much time could or would
he spend watching the Sinking Fund Commis¬
sion and the Geological Survey? He would
probably tune in on the Prince of Wales, or,
in desperation, throw off the switch and seek
peace in ignorance. It is bad enough today—
with morning newspapers published in the
evening and evening newspapers in the
morning, with October magazines in Septem¬
ber, with the movies and the radio—to be con¬
demned to live under a barrage of eclectic
information, to have one's mind made the
receptacle for a hullabaloo of speeches, argu¬
ments and unrelated episodes. General in¬
formation for the informing of public opinion is
altogether too general for intellectual decency.
And life is too short for the pursuit of om¬
niscience by the counting in a state of nervous
excitement of all the leaves on all the trees.
2
If all men had to conceive the whole process
of government all the time the world's work
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS 45
would obviously never be carried on. Men
make no attempt to consider society as a
whole. The farmer decides whether to plant
wheat or corn, the mechanic whether to take
the job offered at the Pennsylvania or the
Erie shops, whether to buy a Ford or a piano,
and, if a Ford, whether to buy it from the
garage on Elm Street or from the dealer who
sent him a circular. These decisions are
among fairly narrow choices offered to him;
he can no more choose among all the jobs in
the world than he can consider marrying any
woman in the world. These choices in detail
are in their cumulative mass the government
of society. They may rest on ignorant or
enlightened opinions, but, whether he comes
to them by accident or scientific instruction,
they are specific and particular among at best
a few concrete alternatives and they lead to a
definite, visible result.
But men are supposed also to hold public
opinions about the general conduct of society.
The mechanic is supposed not only to choose
46 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
between working for the Pennsylvania or the
Erie but to decide how in the interests of
the nation all the railroads of the country
shall be regulated. The two kinds of opinion
merge insensibly one into the other; men have
general notions which influence their individ¬
ual decisions and their direct experiences un¬
consciously govern their general notions. Yet
it is useful to distinguish between the two
kinds of opinion, the specific and direct, the
general and the indirect.
Specific opinions give rise to immediate
executive acts; to take a job, to do a particular
piece of work, to hire or fire, to buy or sell, to
stay here or go there, to accept or refuse, to
command or obey. General opinions give
rise to delegated, indirect, symbolic, intangible
results: to a vote, to a resolution, to ap¬
plause, to criticism, to praise or dispraise,
to audiences, circulations, followings, con¬
tentment or discontent. The specific opinion
may lead to a decision to act within the
area where a man has personal jurisdiction;
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS 47
that is, within the limits set by law and
custom, his personal power and his personal
desire. But general opinions lead only to
some sort of expression, such as voting, and
do not result in executive acts except in
cooperation with the general opinions of large
numbers of other persons.
Since the general opinions of large numbers
of persons are almost certain to be a vague and
confusing medley, action cannot be taken until
these opinions have been factored down,
canalized, compressed and made uniform.
The makingof one general will out of a multi¬
tude of general wishes is not an Hegelian
mystery," as so many social philosophers have
imagmedj but an art well known to leaders!
politicians "and steering committees.2" It con¬
sists essentially in the use of symbols, which
as"sembte~"emotions after they have been
detached from their ideas. Because feelings
are much less specific than ideas, and yet
more poignant, the leader is able to make a
* Cf. my Public Opinion, Chapters XIII and XIV.
48 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
homogeneous will out of a heterogeneous
mass of desires. The process, therefore, by
which general opinions are brought to co¬
operation consists of an intensification of
feeling and a degradation of significance.
Before a mass of general opinions can even¬
tuate in executive action, the choice is nar¬
rowed down to a few alternatives. The vic¬
torious alternative is executed not by the
mass but by individuals in control of its
energy.
A private opinion may be quite compli¬
cated, and may issue in quite complicated
actions, in a whole train of subsidiary opinions,
as when a man decides to build a house and
then makes a hundred judgments as to how
it shall be built. But a public opinion has no
such immediate responsibility or continuous
result. It leads in politics to the making of a
pencil mark on a piece of paper, and then to a
period of waiting and watching as to whether
one or two years hence the mark shall be
made in the same column or in the adjoining
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS 49
one. The decision to make the mark may be
for reasons a1, a2, a 3 . . . an: the result,
whether an idiot or genius has voted, is A.
For great masses of people, though each of
them may have more or less distinct views,
must when they act converge to an identical
result. And the more complex the collection
of men the more ambiguous must be the unity
and the simpler the common ideas.
3
In English-speaking countries during the
last century the contrast between the ac¬
tion of men individually and in the mass has
been much emphasized, and yet greatly mis¬
understood. Macaulay, for example, speaking
on the Reform Bill of 1832, drew the conven¬
tional distinction between private enterprise
and public action:
"In all those things which depend on the
intelligence, the knowledge, the industry, the
energy of individuals, this country stands
preeminent among all countries of the world
5o THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
ancient and modern. But in those things
which it belongs to the state to direct we have
no such claim to superiority . . . can there be
a stronger contrast than that which exists
between the beauty, the completeness, the
speed, the precision with which every process
is performed in our factories, and the awkward¬
ness, the crudeness, the slowness, the uncer¬
tainty of the apparatus by which offenses
are punished and rights vindicated? . . .
Surely we see the barbarism of the Thirteenth
Century and the highest civilization of the
Nineteenth Century side by side, and we see
that the barbarism belongs to the government,
and the civilization to the people."3
Macaulay was, of course, thinking of the
contrast between factory production and
government as it existed in England under
Queen Victoria's uncles and the hard-drink¬
ing, hard-riding squirearchy. But the Prus¬
sian bureaucracy amply demonstrated that
1 Speech on the Reform Bill of 1832, quoted in the Times (London),
July 12, 1923.
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS 51
there is no such necessary contrast between
governmental and private action. There is
a contrast between action by and through
great masses of people and action that moves
without them.
The fundamental contrast is not between
public and private enterprises, between
"crowd" psychology and individual, but
between men doing specific things and men
attempting to command general results. The
work of the world is carried on by men in their
executive capacity, by an infinite number of
concrete acts, plowing and planting and reap¬
ing, building and destroying, fitting this to
that, going from here to there, transforming
A into B and moving B from X to Y. The
relationships between the individuals doing
these specific things are balanced by a most
intricate mechanism of exchange, of contract,
of custom and of implied promises. Where
men are performing their work they must
learn to understand the process and the sub¬
stance of these obligations if they are to do
52 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
it at all. But in governing the work of other
men by votes or by the expression of opinion
they can only reward or punish a result, ac¬
cept or reject alternatives presented to them.
They can say yes or no to something which
has been done, yes or no to a proposal, but
they cannot create, administer and actually
perform the act they have in mind. Persons
uttering public opinions may now and then
be able to define the acts of men, but their
opinions do not execute these acts.
4
To the realm of executive acts, each of us,
as a member of the public, remains always
external. Our public opinions are always and
forever, by their very nature, an attempt
to control the actions of others from the
outside. If we can grasp the full significance
of that conclusion we shall, I think, have
found a way of fixing the role of public opinion
in its true perspective; we shall know how
to account for the disenchantment of democ-
AGENTS AND BYSTANDERS 53
racy, and we shall begin to see the outline of
an ideal of public opinion which, unlike that
accepted in the dogma of democracy, may be
really attainable.
Chapter IV
WHAT THE PUBLIC DOES
I
I do not mean to say that there is no other
attainable ideal of public opinion but that
severely practical one which this essay is
meant to disclose. One might aim to enrich
the minds of men with charming fantasies,
animate nature and society with spirits, set
up an Olympus in the skies and an Atlantis
at the end of the world. And one might then
assert that, so the quality of ideas be fine or
give peace, it does not matter how or whether
they eventuate in the government of affairs.
Utopia and Nirvana are by definition their
own sufficient reason, and it may be that to
contemplate them is well worth the abandon¬
ment of feeble attempts to control the action
of events. Renunciation, however, is a luxury
in which all men cannot indulge. They will
54
WHAT THE PUBLIC DOES 55
somehow seek to control the behavior of others,
if not by positive law then at least by persua¬
sion. When men are in that posture toward
events they are a public, as I am here defining
the term; their opinions as to how others ought
to behave are public opinions. The more
clearly it is understood what the public can
do and what it cannot, the m6re effectively
it will do what lies within its power to do well
and the less it will interfere with the liberties
of men.
The r61e of public opinion is determined by
the fact that its relation to a problem is exter¬
nal. The opinion affects an opinion, but does
not itself control the executive act. A public
opinion is expressed by a vote, a demonstra¬
tion of praise or blame, a following or a boy¬
cotting. But these manifestations are in
themselves nothing. They count only if they
influence the course of affairs. They influence
it, however, only if they influence an actor
in the affair. And it is, I believe, precisely
in this secondary, indirect relationship be-
56 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
tween public opinion and public affairs that we
have the clue to the limits and the possibili¬
ties of public opinion.
2
It may be objected at once that an elec¬
tion which turns one set of men out of office
and installs another is an expression of public
opinion which is neither secondary nor in¬
direct. But what in fact is an election? We
call it an expression of the popular will. But
is it? We go into a polling booth and mark a
cross on a piece of paper for one of two, or
perhaps three or four names. Have we ex¬
pressed our thoughts on the public policy of
the United States? Presumably we have a
number of thoughts on this and that with
many buts and ifs and ors. Surely the cross
on a piece of paper does not express them.
It would take us hours to express our thoughts,
and calling a vote the expression of our mind
is an empty fiction.
A vote is a promise of support. It is a
WHAT THE PUBLIC DOES 57
way of saying: I am lined up with these men,
on this side. I enlist with them. I will fol¬
low. I will buy. I will boycott. I will
strike. I applaud. I jeer. The force I can
exert is placed here, not there.
The public does not select the candidate,
write the platform, outline the policy any
more than it builds the automobile or acts
the play. It aligns itself for or against
somebody who has offered himself, has made
a promise, has produced a play, is selling an
automobile. The action of a group as a
group is the mobilization of the force it
possesses.
The attempt has been made to ascribe some
intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to ma¬
jority rule. It was said often in the nineteenth
century that there was a deep wisdom in
majorities which was the voice of God. Some¬
times this flattery was a sincere mysticism,
sometimes it was the self-deception which
always accompanies the idealization of power.
In substance it was nothing but a transfer to
58 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
the new sovereign of the divine attributes of
kings. Yet the inherent absurdity of making
virtue and wisdom dependent on 51 per cent
of any collection of men has always been
apparent. The practical realization that the
claim was absurd has resulted in a whole
code of civil rights to protect minorities and in
all sorts of elaborate methods of subsidizing
the arts and sciences and other human in¬
terests so they might be independent of the
operation of majority rule.
The justification of majority rule in poli¬
tics is not to be found in its ethical superior¬
ity. It is to be found in the sheer necessity
of finding a place in civilized society for the
force which resides in the weight of numbers.
I have called voting an act of enlistment, an
alignment for or against, a mobilization.
These are military metaphors, and rightly so,
I think, for an election based on the principle
of majority rule is historically and practically
a sublimated and denatured civil war, a paper
mobilisation without physical violence.
WHAT THE PUBLIC DOES 59
Constitutional democrats, in the intervals
when they were not idealizing the majority,
have acknowledged that a ballot was a civi¬
lized substitute for a bullet. "The French
Revolution," says Bernard Shaw, "overthrew
one set of rulers and substituted another with
different interests and different views. That
is what a general election enables the people
to do in England every seven years if they
choose. Revolution is therefore a national
institution in England; and its advocacy by
an Englishman needs no apology." 1 It makes
an enormous difference, of course, whether
the people fight or vote, but we shall under¬
stand the nature of voting better if we rec¬
ognize it to be a substitute for fighting.
"There grew up in the 17th and 18th Cen¬
turies in England," says Dwight Morrow in
his introduction to Professor Morse's book,
"and there has been carried from England to
almost every civilized government in the
world, a procedure through which party
1 Preface to The Revolutionist's Handbook, p. 179.
6o THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
government becomes in large measure a sub¬
stitute for revolution." 2 Hans Delbriick puts
the matter simply when he says that the
principle of majority rule is "a purely prac¬
tical principle. If one wants to avoid a civil
war, one lets those rule who in any case would
obtain the upper hand if there should be a
struggle; and they are the superior numbers."3
But, while an election is in essence subli- .
mated warfare, we must take care not to miss
the importance of the sublimation. There
have been pedantic theorists who wished to
disqualify all who could not bear arms, and
woman suffrage has been deplored as a falsi¬
fication of the value of an election in uncover¬
ing the alignment of martial force in the
community. One can safely ignore such
theorizing. For, while the institution of an
election is in its historical origins an alignment
of the physical force, it has come to be an align-
2 Parties and Party Leaders, p. xvi.
3 H. Delbriick, Government and the Will of the People, p. 15. Trans¬
lated by Roy S. MacElwee.
WHAT THE PUBLIC DOES 61
ment of all kinds of force. It remains an align¬
ment, though in advanced democracies it
has lost most of its primitive association with
military combat. It has not lost it in the
South where the Negro population is dis¬
franchised by force, and not permitted to
make its weight felt in an election. It has
not lost it in the unstable Latin American
republics where every election is in some
measure still an armed revolution. In fact,
the United States has officially recognized
this truth by proclaiming that the substitu¬
tion of election for revolution in Central
America is the test of political progress.
I do not wish to labor the argument any
further than may be necessary to establish
the theory that what the public does is not
to express its opinions but to align itself for
or against a proposal. If that theory is ac¬
cepted, we must abandon the notion that
democratic government can be the direct
expression of the will of the people. We must
abandon the notion that the people govern.
62 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
Instead we must adopt the theory that, by
their occasional mobilizations as a majority,
people support or oppose the individuals who
actually govern. We must say that the pop¬
ular will does not direct continuously but that
it intervenes occasionally.
Chapter V
THE NEUTRALIZATION OF ARBITRARY FORCE
I
If this is the nature of public action, what
ideal can be formulated which shall conform
to it?
We are bound, I think, to express the ideal
in its lowest terms, to state it not as an ideal
which might conceivably be realized by excep¬
tional groups now and then or in some distant
future but as an ideal which normally might
be taught and attained. In estimating the
burden which a public can carry, a sound
political theory must insist upon the largest
factor of safety. It must understate the
possibilities of public action.
The action of a public, we had concluded,
is principally confined to an occasional inter¬
vention in affairs by means of an alignment
63
64 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
of the force which a dominant section of that
public can wield. We must assume, then,
that the members of a public will not possess
an insider's knowledge of events or share his
point of view. They cannot, therefore, con¬
strue intent, or appraise the exact circum¬
stances, enter intimately into the minds of the
actors or into the details of the argument.
They can watch only for coarse signs indi¬
cating where their sympathies ought to turn.
We must assume that the members of a
public will not anticipate a problem much
before its crisis has become obvious, nor stay
with the problem long after its crisis is past.
They will not know the antecedent events,
will not have seen the issue as it developed,
will not have thought out or willed a program,
and will not be able to predict the conse¬
quences of acting on thaUprogram. We must
assume as a theoretically fixed premise of
popular government that normally men as
members of a public will not be well informed,
continuously interested, nonpartisan, creative
NEUTRALIZATION OF FORCE 65
or executive. We must assume that a public
is inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, that
it discerns only gross distinctions, is slow to
be aroused and quickly diverted; that, since
it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes what¬
ever it considers, and is interested only when
events have been melodramatized as a con¬
flict.
The public will arrive in the middle of the
third act and will leave before the last curtain,
having stayed just long enough perhaps to
decide who is the hero and who the villain
of the piece. Yet usually that judgment will
necessarily be made apart from the intrinsic
merits, on the basis of a sample of behavior,
an aspect of a situation, by very rough exter¬
nal evidence.
We cannot, then, think of public opinion
as a conserving or creating force directing
society to clearly conceived ends, making
deliberately toward socialism or away from
it, toward nationalism, an empire, a league of
nations or any other doctrinal goal. For
66 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
.men do not agree as to their aims, and it is
precisely the lack of agreement which creates
the problems that excite public attention.
It is idle, then, to argue that though men evi¬
dently have conflicting purposes, mankind
has some all-embracing purpose of which you
or I happen to be the authorized spokesman.
We merely should have moved in a circle were
we to conclude that the public is in some deep
way a messianic force.
2
i ^
The work of the world goes on continually
without conscious direction from public opin¬
ion. At certain junctures problems arise.
It is only with the crises of some of these
problems that public opinion is concerned.
And its object in dealing with a crisis is to
help allay that crisis.
I think this conclusion is unescapable. For
though we may prefer to believe that the
aim of popular action should be to do justice
or promote the true, the beautiful and the
NEUTRALIZATION OF FORCE 67
good, the belief will not maintain itself in the
face of plain experience. The public does not
know in most crises what specifically is the
truth or the justice of the case, and men are
not agreed on what is beautiful and good.
Nor does the public rouse itself normally
at the existence of evil. It is aroused at
evil made manifest by the interruption of a
habitual process of life. And finally, a problem
ceases to occupy attention not when justice,
as we happen to define it, has been done but
when a workable adjustment that overcomes
the crisis has been made. If all this were not
the necessary manner of public opinion, if it
had seriously to crusade for justice in every
issue it touches, the public would have to be
dealing with all situations all the time. That
is impossible. It is also undesirable. For
did justice, truth, goodness and beauty de¬
pend on the spasmodic and crude inter¬
ventions of public opinion there would be
little hope for them in this world.
Thus we strip public opinion of any implied
68 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
duty to deal with the substance of a problem,
to make technical decisions, to attempt justice
or impose a moral precept. And instead we
say that the ideal of public opinion is to align
men during the crisis of a problem in such a
way as to favor the action of those individuals
who may be able to compose the crisis. The
power to discern those individuals is the end
of the effort to educate public opinion. The
aim of research designed to facilitate public
action is the discovery of clear signs by which
these individuals may be discerned.
The signs are relevant when they reveal by
coarse, simple and objective tests which side
in a controversy upholds a workable social
rule, or which is attacking an unworkable
rule, or which proposes a promising new rule.
By following such signs the public might
know where to align itself. In such an align¬
ment it does not, let us remember, pass
judgment on the intrinsic merits. It merely
places its force at the disposal of the side
which, according to objective signs, seems to
NEUTRALIZATION OF FORCE 69
be standing for human adjustments according
to a clear rule of behavior and against the
side which appears to stand for settlement in
accordance with its own unaccountable will.
Public opinion, in this theory, is a reserve'
of force brought into action during a crisis
in public affairs. Though it is itself an irra¬
tional force, under favorable institutions,
sound leadership and decent training the power
of public opinion might be placed at the dis¬
posal of those who stood for workable law as
against brute assertion. In this theory, public
opinion does not make the law. But by can¬
celing lawless power it may establish the
condition under which law can be made. It
does not reason, investigate, invent, persuade,
bargain or settle. But, by holding the aggres¬
sive party in check, it may liberate intel¬
ligence. Public opinion in its highest ideal
will defend those who are prepared to act on
their reason against the interrupting force of
those who merely assert their will.
The action of public opinion at its best
70 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
would not, let it be noted, be a continual
crusade on behalf of reason. When power,
however absolute and unaccountable, reigns
without provoking a crisis, public opinion
does not challenge it. Somebody must chal¬
lenge arbitrary power first. The public
can only come to his assistance.
3
That, I think, is the utmost that public
opinion can effectively do. With the sub¬
stance of the problem it can do nothing
usually but meddle ignorantly or tyrannically.
It has no need to meddle with it. Men in
their active relation to affairs have to deal
with the substance, but in that indirect,
relationship when they can act only through
uttering praise or blame, making black crosses
on white paper, they have done enough, they
have done all they can do if they help to
make it possible for the reason of other men
to assert itself.
For when public opinion attempts to govern
NEUTRALIZATION OF FORCE 71
dircctly*1t is either a failure or a tyranny. It
is not able to master the problem intellec¬
tually, nor to deal with it except by wholesale
impact. The theory of democracy has not
recognized this truth because it has identified
the functioning of government with the will
of the people. This is a fiction. The intricate
business of framing laws and of administering
them through several hundred thousand public
officials is in no sense the act of the voters
nor a translation of their will.
But although the acts of government are
no1- a translation of public opinion, the princi¬
pal function ot government is to do specifi¬
cally, in greater detail, and more continually
what public opinion does crudely, by whole¬
sale, and spasmodically. It enforces some of
the working rules of society. It interprets
them. It detects and punishes certain kinds
of aggression. It presides over the framing of
new rules. It has organized force which is
used to counteract irregular force.
It is also subject to the same corruption as
72 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
public opinion. For when government at¬
tempts to impose the will of its officials,
instead of intervening so as to steady ad¬
justments by consent among the parties
directly interested, it becomes heavy-handed,
stupid, imperious, even predatory. For the
public official, though he is better placed
to understand the problem than a reader of
newspapers, and though he is much better
able to act, is still fundamentally external
to the real problems in which he intervenes.
Being external, his point of view is indirect,
and so his action is most appropriate when it
is confined to rendering indirect assistance to
those who are directly responsible.
Therefore, instead of describing government
as an expression of the people's will, it would
seem better to say that government consists
of a body of officials, some elected, some
appointed, who handle professionally, and
in the first instance, problems which come to
public opinion spasmodically and on appeal.
Where the parties directly responsible do not
NEUTRALIZATION OF FORCE 73
work out an adjustment, public officials
intervene. When the officials fail, public
opinion is brought to bear on the issue.
4
This, then, is the ideal of public action which
our inquiry suggests. Those who happen in
any question to constitute the public should
attempt only to create an equilibrium in
which settlements can be reached directly
and by consent. The burden of carrying on
the work of the world, of inventing, creating,
executing, of attempting justice, formulating
laws and moral codes, of dealing with the
technic and the substance, lies not upon public
opinion and not upon government but on those
who are responsibly concerned as agents in
the affair. Where problems arise, the ideal
is a settlement by the particular interests
involved. They alone know what the trouble
really is. No decision by public officials or
by commuters reading headlines in the train
can usually and in the long run be so good as
74 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
settlement by consent among the parties at
interest. No moral code, no political theory
can usually and in the long run be imposed
from the heights of public opinion, which
will lit a case so well as direct agreement
reached where arbitrary power has been dis¬
armed.
It is the function of public opinion to check
the use of force in a crisis, so that men, driven
to make terms, may live and let live.
PART II
Chapter VI
THE QUESTION ARISTOTLE ASKED
These conclusions are sharply at variance
with the accepted theory of popular govern¬
ment. That theory rests upon the belief that
there is a publw which directs the course of
events. I hold that this puoiic is a mere
phantom. It is an abstraction. The public
in respect to a railroad strike may be the
farmers whom the railroad serves; the public
in respect to an agricultural tariff may include
the very railroad men who were on strike.
The public is rot, as I see it, a fixed body of
individuals. It is merely those persons who
are interested in an affair and can affect it
only by supporting or opposing the actors.
Since these random publics cannot be ex¬
pected to deal with the merits of a contro¬
versy, the}^ can give their support with reason¬
able assurance that it will do good only if
77
78 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
there are easily recognizable and yet perti¬
nent signs which they can follow. Are there
such signs? Can they be discovered? Can
they be formulated so they might be learned
and used? The chapters of this second part
are an attempt to answer these questions.
The signs must be of such a character that
they can be recognized without any substantial
insight into the substance of a problem. Yet
they must be relevant to the solution of the
problem. They must be signs which will tell
the members of a public where they can best
align themselves so as to promote the solution.
In short, they must be guides to reasonable
action for the use of uninformed people.
The environment is complex. Man's polit¬
ical capacity is simple. Can a bridge be built
between them? The question has haunted
political science ever since Aristotle first
formulated it in the great seventh book of his
Politics. He answered it by saying that the
community must be kept simple and small
enough to suit the faculties of its citizens.
QUESTION ARISTOTLE ASKED 79
We who live in the Great Society are unable
to follow his advice. The orthodox democrats
answered Aristotle's question by assuming
that a limitless political capacity resides in
public opinion. A century of experience com- I
pels us to deny this assumption. For us,
then, the old question is unanswered; we can
neither reject the Great Society as Aristotle
did, nor exaggerate the political capacity of
the citizen as the democrats did. We are
forced to ask whether it is possible for men
to find a way of acting effectively upon highly
complex affairs by very simple means.
I venture to think that this problem may
be soluble, that principles can be elucidated
which might effect a successful junction
between the intricacies of the environment
and the simplicities of human faculty. It goes
without saying that what I shall present here
is no final statement of these principles. At
most and at best it may be a clue, with some
illustrations, that can be developed by re¬
search. But even that much assurance seems
8o
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
to me rash in the light of the difficulties which
the problem has always presented, and so,
following Descartes, I add that "after all, it
is possible I may be mistaken; and it is but a
little copper and glass I take for gold and
diamonds." 1
1 Discourse on Method, Part I.
Chapter VII
THE NATURE OF A PROBLEM
I
Somewhat in the spirit of Descartes, let
us begin by supposing that your whole experi¬
ence were confined to one glimpse of the world.
There would be, I think, no better or worse
in your sight, neither good men nor bad,
patriots nor profiteers, conservatives nor radi¬
cals. You would be a perfect neutral. From
such an impression of things, it would never
occur to you that the crest of a mountain
endured longer than the crest of a wave, that
people moved about and that trees did not,
or that the roar of an orator would pass sooner
than the roar of Niagara.
Lengthen your experience, and you would
begin to notice differences in the constancy
of things. You would know day and night,
81
82 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
perhaps, but not winter and summer, move¬
ment in space, but little of age in time. And
if you then formulated your social philosophy,
would you not almost certainly conclude that
the things you saw people doing then it was
ordained they should do always, and that
their characters as you had seen them that
day would be thus and so forever? And
would not the resulting treatise pass almost
unnoticed in any collection of contemporary
disquisitions on the nations, the races, the
classes or the sexes?
But the more you lengthened the span of
your impression, the more variability you
would note, until at last you would say with
Heraclitus that all things flow. For when the
very stars and the rocks were seen to have a
history, men and their institutions and cus¬
toms, habits and ideals, theories and policies
could seem only relatively permanent. And
you would have to conclude that what at
first glance you had called a constant turns
out after you had watched it longer merely
NATURE OF A PROBLEM 83
to be changing a little more slowly than
something else.
With sufficiently long experience you would
indeed be bound to conclude that while the
diverse elements that bear upon the life of
men, including the characters of men them¬
selves, were changing, yet they were not
changing at the same pace. Things multiply,
they grow, they learn, they age, they wear out
and they die at different rates. An individual,
his companions, his implements, his institu¬
tions, his creeds, his needs, his means of satis¬
faction, evolve unevenly, and endure un¬
evenly. Events do not concur harmoniously
in time. Some hurry, some straggle, some
push and some drag. The ranks have always
to be reformed.
Instead of that one grand system of evolu¬
tion and progress, which the nineteenth cen¬
tury found so reassuring, there would appear
to be innumerable systems of evolution,
variously affecting each other, some linked,
some in collision, but each in some funda-
84 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
mental aspect moving at its own pace and on
its own terms.
The disharmonies of this uneven evolution
are the problems of mankind.
2
Suppose a man who knew nothing of the
history of the nineteenth century were shown
the tables compiled in the Statistical Abstract
of the United States for the period from 1800
to 1918: He would note that the population
of the world had multiplied two and a half
times; its total commerce 42 times; its shipping
tonnage more than 7 times; its railways 3664
times; its telegraphs 317 times; its cotton
production 17 times; its coal 113 times; its
pig iron 77 times. Could he doubt that in
a century of such uneven changes men had
faced revolutionary social problems?
Could he not infer from these figures alone
that there had been great movements of popu¬
lation, vast changes in men's occupation, in the
character of their labor, their wants, their
NATURE OF A PROBLEM 85
standards of living, their ambitions? Would
he not fairly infer that the political system
which had existed in 1800 must have altered
vastly with these new relationships, that cus¬
toms, manners and morals appropriate to the
settled, small and more or less self-contained
communities of 1800 had been subjected to
new strains and had probably been thoroughly
revised? As he imagined the realities behind
the tables, would he not infer that as men
lived through the changes which these cold
figures summarize they had been in conflict
with their old habits and ideals, that the
process of making new habits and adjustments
must have gone on subject to trial and error
with hopefulness over material progress and
yet much disorder and confusion of soul?
3
For a more specific illustration of the nature
of a problem we may examine the problem of
population in its simplest form. When Mal-
thus first stated it he assumed, for the pur-
86 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
poses of argument, two elements evolving at
different rates. Population, he said, doubled
every twenty-five years; the produce of land
could be increased in the same time by an
amount "equal to what it at present pro¬
duces." 1 He was writing about the year
1800. The population of England he esti¬
mated at seven millions, and the food supply
as adequate to that number. There was then,
in 1800, no problem. By 1825 the population,
according to his estimate of its rate of in¬
crease, would have doubled, but the food
supply would also have doubled. There
would be no problem of population. But by
1850 the population would stand at twenty-
eight millions; the food supply would have
increased only by an amount to support an
additional seven millions. The problem of
excess population, or, if you like, of food
scarcity, would have appeared. For while
in 1800 and in 1825 the food available for
each person would be the same, in 1850,
1 T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapter II.
NATURE OF A PROBLEM 87
owing to the uneven rate of growth, there
would be only a three-quarter ration for each
person. And this altered relationship Mal-
thus rightly called a problem.
Suppose, now, we complicate Malthus's
argument a bit by assuming that in 1850
people had learned to eat less and felt more
fit on the three-quarter ration. There would
then be no problem in 1850, for the adjust¬
ment of the two variables—food and people—
would be satisfactory. Or, on the contrary,
suppose that soon after 1800 people had de¬
manded a higher standard of living and
expected more food, though the necessary
additional food was not produced. These
new demands would create a problem. Or
suppose, as was actually the case,2 the food
supply increased faster than Malthus had
assumed it could, though population did not.
The problem of population would not arise
at the date he predicted. Or suppose the
increase of population was reduced by birth
2 A. M. Carr-Saunders, The Population Problem, p. 28.
88 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
control. The problem, as Malthus first stated
it, would not arise.3 Or suppose the food
supply increased faster than the population
could consume it. There would then be a
problem not of population but of agricultural
surplus.
In an absolutely static society there would
be no problems. A problem is the result of
change. But not of the change in any self-
contained element. Change would be un-
noticeable unless we could measure it against
some other element which did not change at
the same pace. If everything in the universe
expanded at a mile a minute, or shrank at the
same rate, we should never know it. For all
we can tell we may be the size of a mosquito
one moment in the sight of God, and of an
elephant the next; we cannot tell if mosquitoes
and elephants and chairs and planets change
in proportion. Change is significant only in
relation to something else.
The change which constitutes a problem
3 Malthus himself recognized this in a later edition of his book.
NATURE OF A PROBLEM 89
is an altered relationship between two depend¬
ent variables.4 Thus the automobile is a
problem in the city not because there are so
many automobiles but because there are too
many for the width of the streets, too many
for the number of competent drivers, because
the too narrow streets are filled with too many
cars driven too recklessly for the present
ability of the police to control them. Because
the automobile is manufactured faster than
old city streets can be widened, because some
persons acquire cars faster than they acquire
prudence and good manners, because auto¬
mobiles collect in cities faster than policemen
can be recruited, trained or paid for by slow-
yielding taxpayers, there is an automobile
problem made evident by crowding, obnox¬
ious fumes and collisions.
But though these evils seem to arise from
the automobile, the fault lies not in the auto¬
mobile but in the relation between the auto-
4 Cf. in this connection W. F. Ogburn, Social Change, passim, but
particularly Part IV, i, on "The Hypothesis of Cultural Lag."
90 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
mobile and the city. This may sound like
splitting hairs, but unless we insist upon it
we never define a problem accurately nor lay
it open successfully to solution.
The problem of national defense, for ex¬
ample, can never be stated by a general staff
which draws upon its inner consciousness
for an estimate of the necessary force. The
necessary force can be estimated only in rela¬
tion to the probable enemy, and the military
problem whether of peace or of war lies always
in the ratio of forces. Military force is a
purely relative conception. The British Navy
is helpless as a child against the unarmed
mountaineers of Tibet. The French Army
has no force as against fishing smacks in the
Pacific Ocean. Force has to be measured
against its objective: the tiger and the shark
are incomparable one with the other.
Now a settled and accepted ratio of forces
that might collide is a state of military peace.
A competitive and, therefore, constantly un¬
balanced ratio is a prelude to war. The Ca-
NATURE OF A PROBLEM 91
nadian border presents no military problem,
not because Canada's forces and our own are
equal but because, happily, we do not com¬
pare them. They are independent variables,
having no relation one with the other, and a
change in the one does not affect the other.
In capital ships we are confronted now with
no naval problem in the Atlantic or in the
Pacific, because with Britain and Japan, the
only two comparable powers, we are agreed
on a ratio by treaty.5 But for all types of
ships not subject to the ratio there is a naval
problem in both oceans, and if the Washing¬
ton Treaty should lapse the problem which
it settled would recur. It would recur because
the synchronized progress of the three navies
would be replaced by a relatively uneven
progress of each as compared with the
others.
5 However, the controversy over gun elevation demonstrates how
difficult it is to maintain an equilibrium of force where so many factors
are variable.
92 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
4
The field of economic activity is the source
of many problems. For, as Cassel says,6 we
include within the meaning of the word eco¬
nomic those means of satisfying human wants
which are "usually available only in a limited
quantity." Since "the wants of civilized
human beings as a whole are," for all practical
purposes, "unlimited," there is in all economic
life the constant necessity of reaching "an
adjustment between the wants and the means
of supplying the wants." This disharmony
of supply and demand is the source of an
unending series of problems.
We may note at once that the economist
does not claim as his province the whole
range of adjustments between human wants
and the means of satisfying them. He usually
omits, for example, the human need to
breathe air. For since the air is unlimited in
quantity the human need of it is not frus-
6 Gustav Cassel, A Theory of Social Economy, Chapter I.
NATURE OF A PROBLEM 93
trated, and the surplus air not required by
men in no way impinges upon their lives. Yet
there may be a scarcity of air, as, for example,
in a congested tenement district. Then an
economic problem is engendered which has
to be met, let us say, by building laws requir¬
ing a certain number of cubic feet of air a
person. The economist, in other words, takes
as his field of interest the maladjustment
between human wants and those means of
satisfying them which are available, but only
in limited quantities. In a world where every
want was satisfied there would be no problems
for him; nor any in a world where men had
no wants; nor any in a world where the only
wants men had could be supplied by a change
on their part of their own states of conscious¬
ness. To create a problem there must be at
least two dependent but separated variables:
wants and the means of satisfaction; and these
two variables must have a disposition to alter
so that an antecedent equilibrium is disturbed.
In the measure, says Cassel, in which the
94 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
economic system succeeds in securing an
adjustment between the wants and the means
of supplying the wants we speak of it as a
sound economy. "This task may be ac¬
complished in three different ways: first, by
eliminating the less important wants and so
restricting the total wants; secondly, by
making the best possible use of the means
available for the purposes in question; and,
thirdly, by increased personal exertions." 7
Since the problem arises out of the dis¬
harmony of supply and demand, its solution
is to be found by increasing the supply or
restricting the demand. The choice of method
depends first of all on which it is possible in
specific cases to follow, and, second, granting
the possibility, on which is the easier or the
preferred. Either method will give what we
acknowledge as a solution. For when two
variables are in an adjustment which does not
frustrate the expectations of either there is
no problem, and none will be felt to exist.
7 Ibid., p. 7.
Chapter VIII
SOCIAL CONTRACTS
I
It is impossible to imagine in the universe
a harmony of all things, each with all the
others. The only harmonies we know or can
conceive, outside of what Mr. Santayana
calls the realm of essences, are partial adjust¬
ments which sacrifice to some one end all
purposes which conflict with it. That the
tree may bear fruit for us, we readily kill the
insects that eat the fruit. So the fruit will
ripen for us, we take no account of the dis¬
harmony we create for innumerable flies.
In the light of eternity it may be wholly
unimportant whether the harmonies on this
earth are suited to men or to insects. For in
the light of eternity and from the point of
view of the universe as a whole nothing can
be what we call good or bad, better or worse.
95
96 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
All ideas of value are measurements of some
part of this universe with some other part,
and it is no more possible to value the universe
as a whole than it is to weigh it as a whole.
For all scales of value and of weight are con¬
tained within it. To judge the whole uni¬
verse you must, like a god, be outside of it, a
point of view no mortal mind can adopt.
Unfortunately for the fly, therefore, we are
bound to judge him by human values. In so
far as we have power over him, he must submit
to the harmonies we seek to establish. We
may as a sporting matter admit his theoret¬
ical right to establish his own harmonies
against us if he can, and to call them better
if he likes, but for us that only is good which is
good for man. Our universe consists of all
that it contains, not as such, not as t^he fly
knows it, but in its relation to us. From any
other point of view but man's, his conception
of the universe is askew. It has an emphasis
and a perspective, it is shaped to a design
which is altogether human. The very forms,
SOCIAL CONTRACTS 97
colors, odors and sound of things are depend¬
ent for their quality upon our sense organs.
Their relations are seen and understood
against the background of our necessities.
In the realm of man's interests and purposes
and desires, the perspectives are even nar¬
rower. There is no human point of view here,
but only the points of view of men. None is
valid for all human beings, none for all of
human history, none for all corners of the
globe. An opinion of the right and the wrong,
the good and the bad, the pleasant and the
unpleasant, is dated, is localized, is relative.
It applies only to some men at some time in
some place under some circumstances.
2
Against this deep pluralism^ thinkers have
argued in vain. They have invented social
organisms and national souls, and oversouls,
and collective souls; they have gone for hope¬
ful analogies to the beehive and the anthill,
to the solar system, to the human body; they
98 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
have gone to Hegel for higher unities and to
Rousseau for a general will in an effort to
find some basis of union. For though men
do not think alike, nor want the same things,
though their private interests are so distinct
that they do not merge easily in any common
interest, yet men cannot live by themselves,
nor realize even their private purposes without
taking into account the behavior of other
people. We, however, no longer expect to find
a unity which absorbs diversity. For us the
conflicts and differences are so real that we
cannot deny them and instead of looking for
identity of purpose we look simply for an
accommodation of purposes.
When we speak, then, about the solution of
a problem in the Great Society, we may mean
little more than that two conflicting interests
have found a modus vivendi. It may be, of
course, that they have really removed all their
differences, that one interest has yielded to
the other, or both to a third. But the solu¬
tions of most social problems are not so neat
SOCIAL CONTRACTS 99
as this; everything does not fit perfectly as
in the solution of a puzzle. The conflicting
interests merely find a way of giving a little
and taking a little, and of existing together
without too much bad blood.
They still remain separate interests. The
men involved still think differently. They
have no union of mind or purpose. But they
travel their own ways without collision, and
even with some reliance at times upon the
others' help. They know their rights and
their duties, what to expect and what will be
expected. Their rights are usually less than
they claim, and their duties heavier than they
like, yet, because they are in some degree en¬
forced, conduct is rendered intelligible and
predictable, and cooperation exists in spite of
the conflicting interests of men.
The modus vivendi of any particular his¬
torical period, the system of rights and duties,
has generally acquired some high religious or
ideal sanction. The thinkers laureate of the
age will generally manage to show that the
ioo THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
institutions, the laws, the morality and the
custom of that age are divinely inspired.
These are tiresome illusions which have
been exploded a thousand times. The pre¬
vailing system of rights and duties at any
time is at bottom a slightly antiquated for¬
mulation of the balance of power among the
active interests in the community. There is
always a certain lag, as Mr. Ogburn calls it,
so that the system of rights and duties men
are taught is generally a little less contem¬
porary than the system they would find most
convenient. But, whether the system is ob¬
solete or not, in its naked origin, a right is
a claim somebody was able to assert, and a
duty is an obligation somebody was able to
impose.
3
The prevailing system of rights and duties
is designed to regulate the conflicting pur¬
poses of men. An established right is a
promise that a certain kind of behavior will
be backed by the organized force of the state
SOCIAL CONTRACTS 101
or at least by the sentiment of the community;
a duty is a promise that failure to respect the
rights of others in a certain way will be pun¬
ished. The punishment may be death, im¬
prisonment, loss of property, the nullification
of a right, the expression of disapproval. In
short, the system of rights and duties is the
whole system of promises which the courts
and public sentiment will Support. It is not
a fixed system. It varies from place to place,
and from time to time, and with the character
of the tribunals and the community. But
none the less it makes the conduct of men
somewhat rational, and establishes a kind
of union in diversity by limiting and defining
the freedom with which conflicting purposes
can be pursued.
Sometimes the promises are embodied in
coercive law: Thou shalt, on penalty of this,
do that; thou shalt not do so and so. Some¬
times the promise is based on a contract
between two parties: there is no obligation to
make the contract, but, once made, it must be
io2 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
executed or a certain penalty paid. Some¬
times the promise is based on an ecclesiastical
code: it must be followed or the wages of sin
will be visited either in fact or in anticipation
upon the sinner. Sometimes the promise is
based on custom: it must be respected or the
price of nonconformity, whatever it may
happen to be, must be paid. Sometimes the
promise is based on habit: it must be executed
or the disturbance faced which men feel when
they break with their habits.
The question of whether any particular
right or duty shall be enforced, the question
of how it shall be enforced, whether by the
police, by public criticism or private con¬
science, will not be answered by reasoning
a priori. It will be answered by the dominant
interests in society, each imposing to the
limit of its powers the system of rights and
duties which most nearly approximates the
kind of social harmony it finds convenient
and desirable. The system will be a reflection
of the power that each interest is able to exert.
SOCIAL CONTRACTS 103
The interests which find the rule good will
defend it; the interests which find it bad will
attack it. Their arguments will be weapons
of defense and offense; even the most objective
appeal to reason will turn out to be an appeal
to desert one cause and enlist in another.
4
In the controversies between interests the
question will be raised as to the merits of a
particular rule; the argument will turn on
whether the rule is good, on whether it should
be enforced with this penalty or that. And
out of those arguments, by persuasion or
coercion, the specific rules of society are made,
enforced and revised.
It is the thesis of this book that the members
of the public, who are the spectators of action,
cannot successfully intervene in a controversy
on the merits of the case. They must judge
externally, and they can act only by support¬
ing one of the interests directly involved. It
io4 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
follows that the public interest in a contro¬
versy cannot turn upon the specific issue. On
what, then, does it turn? In what phase of
the controversy can the public successfully
interest itself?
Only when somebody objects does the
public know there is a problem; when nobody
any longer objects there is a solution. For
the public, then, any rule is right which is
agreeable to all concerned. It follows that
the public interest in a problem is limited to
this: that there shall be rules, which means
that the rules which prevail shall be enforced,
and that the unenforceable rules shall be
changed according to a settled rule. The
public's opinion that John Smith should or
should not do this or that is immaterial; the
public does not know John Smith's motives
and needs, and is not concerned with them.
But that John Smith shall do what he has
promised to do is a matter of public concern,
for unless the social contracts of men are
made, enforced and revised according to a
SOCIAL CONTRACTS 105
settled rule, social organization is impossible.
Their conflicting purposes will engender un¬
ending problems unless they are regulated by
some system of rights and duties.
The interest of the public is not in the rules
and contracts and customs themselves but
in the maintenance of a regime of rule, con¬
tract and custom. The public is interested
in law, not in the laws; in the method of law,
not in the substance; in the sanctity of con¬
tract, not in a particular contract; in under¬
standing based on custom, not in this custom
or that. It is concerned in these things to the
end that men in their active affairs shall find
a modus vivendi; its interest is in the workable
rule which will define and predict the be¬
havior of men so that they can make their
adjustments. The pressure which the public
is able to apply through praise and blame,
through votes, strikes, boycotts or support
can yield results only if it reinforces the men
who enforce an old rule or sponsor a new one
that is needed.
io6 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
The public in this theory is not the dispenser
of law or morals, but, at best, a reserve force
that may be mobilized on behalf of the method
and spirit of law and morals. In denying that
the public can lay down the rules I have not
said that it should abandon any function
which the public now exercises. I have merely
said that it should abandon a pretense.
When the public attempts to deal with the
substance it merely becomes the dupe or
unconscious ally of a special interest. For
there is only one common interest: that all
special interests shall act according to set¬
tled rule. The moment you ask what rule
you invade the realm of competing interests
of special points of view, of personal, and
class, and sectional, and national bias. The
public should not ask what rule because it
cannot answer the question. It will con¬
tribute its part to the solution of social prob¬
lems if it recognizes that some system of
rights and duties is necessary, but that no
particular system is peculiarly sacred.
Chapter IX
THE TWO QUESTIONS BEFORE THE PUBLIC
The multitude of untroubled rules that men
live by are of no concern to the public. It
has to deal only with the failures. Customs
that are accepted by all who are expected to
follow them, contracts that are carried out
peaceably, promises that are kept, expecta¬
tions fulfilled, raise no issue. Even when there
has been a breach of the rule, there is no public
question if the breach is clearly established,
the aggression clearly identified, the penalty
determined and imposed. The aggressor
may be identified because he pleads guilty.
He may be identified by some due process
though he denies his guilt. The rule, a term
under which I mean to include the method
of detection, interpretation and enforcement,
as well as the precept, is in either case intact.
The force of the public can be aligned without
107
108 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
hesitation on behalf of the authorities who
administer the rule.
There is no question for the public unless
there is doubt as to the validity of the rule,—
doubt, that is to say, about its meaning, its
soundness or the method of its application.
When there is doubt the public requires simple,
objective tests to help it decide where it will
enlist. These tests must, therefore, answer
two questions:
First, Is the rule defective?
Second, How shall the agency be recognized
which is most likely to mend it?
These are, I should maintain, the only two
questions which the public needs to answer
in order to exert the greatest influence it is
capable of exerting toward the solution of
public problems. They are not, please note,
the only questions which anybody has to
answer to solve a problem. They are the only
questions which a member of the public can
usefully concern himself with if he wishes to
avoid ignorant meddling.
TWO QUESTIONS 109
How then shall he know the rule is defec¬
tive? How shall he recognize the reformer?
If he is to answer those questions at all, he
must be able to answer them quickly and
without real understanding of the problem.
Is it possible for him to do that? Can he act
intelligently but in ignorance?
I think this apparently paradoxical thing
can be done in some such way as the next
four chapters describe.
Chapter X
THE MAIN VALUE OF PUBLIC DEBATE
The individual whose action is governed
by a rule is interested in its substance. But
in those rules which do not control his own
action his chief interest is that there should
be workable rules.
It follows that the membership of the pub¬
lic is not fixed. It changes with the issue:
the actors in one affair are the spectators of
another, and men are continually passing
back and forth between the field where they
are executives and the field where they are
members of a public. The distinction between
the two is not, as I said in Chapter III, an
absolute one: there is a twilight zone where
it is hard to say whether a man is acting
executively on his opinions or merely acting
to influence the opinion of some one else who
is acting executively. There is often a mixture
110
PUBLIC DEBATE iii
of the two types of behavior. And it is this
mixture, as well as the lack of a clear line of
distinction in all cases, which permits a very
large confusion in affairs between a public
and a private attitude toward them. The
public point of view on a question is muddied
by the presence in the public of spurious mem¬
bers, persons who are really acting to bend the
rule in their favor while pretending or imagin¬
ing that they are moved only by the common
public need that there shall be an acceptable
rule.
At the outset it is important, therefore, to
detect and to discount the self-interested
group. In saying this I do not mean to cast
even the slightest reflection on a union of
men to promote their self-interest. It would
be futile to do so, because we may take it
as certain that men will act to benefit them¬
selves whenever they think they conveniently
can. A political theory based on the ex¬
pectation of self-denial and sacrifice by the
run of men in any community would not
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
be worth considering. Nor is it at all evi¬
dent that the work of the world could be done
unless men followed their private interest
and contributed to affairs that direct inner
knowledge which they thus obtain. More¬
over, the adjustments are likely to be much
more real if they are made from fully con¬
scious and thoroughly explored special points
of view.
Thus the genius of any illuminating public
discussion is not to obscure and censor private
interest but to help it to sail and to make it
sail under its own colors. The true public,
in my definition of that term, has to purge
itself of the self-interested groups who become
confused with it. It must purge itself not
because private interests are bad but because
private interests cannot successfully be ad¬
justed to each other if any one of them
acquires a counterfeit strength. If the true
public, concerned only in the fact of adjust¬
ment, becomes mobilized behind a private
interest seeking to prevail, the adjustment
PUBLIC DEBATE 113
is false; it does not represent the real balance
of forces in the affair and the solution will
break down. It will break down because the
true public will not stay mobilized very long
for anything, and when it demobilizes the
private interest which was falsely exalted
will find its privileges unmanageable. It will
be like a man placed on Jack Dempsey's chest
by six policemen, and then left there after the
policemen have gone home to dinner. It
will be like France placed by the Allies upon
a prostrate Germany and then left there
after the Allies have departed from Europe.
The separation of the public from the self-
interested group will not be assisted by the
self-interested group. We may be sure that
any body of farmers, business men, trade
unionists will always call themselves the
public if they can. How then is their self-
interest to be detected? No ordinary by¬
stander is equipped to analyze the propaganda
by which a private interest seeks to associate
itself with the disinterested public. It is a
ii4 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
perplexing matter, perhaps the most per¬
plexing in popular government, and the by¬
stander's only recourse is to insist upon de¬
bate. He will not be able, we may assume,
to judge the merits of the arguments. But
if he does insist upon full freedom of discussion,
the advocates are very likely to expose one
another. Open debate may lead to no con¬
clusion and throw no light whatever on the
problem or its answer, but it will tend to
betray the partisan and the advocate. And
if it has identified them for the true public,
debate will have served its main purpose.
The individual not directly concerned
may still choose to join the self-interested
group and support its cause. But at least
he will know that he has made himself a
partisan, and thus perhaps he may be some¬
what less likely to mistake a party's purpose
for the aim of mankind.
Chapter XI
THE DEFECTIVE RULE
I
A man violates a rule and then publicly jus¬
tifies his action. Here in the simplest form
is an attack upon the validity of the rule. It
is an appeal for a public judgment.
For he claims to have acted under a new
rule which is better than the old one. How
shall the public decide as between the two?
It cannot, we are assuming, enter into the
intrinsic merits of the question. It follows
that the public must ask the aggressor why
he did not first seek the assent of those con¬
cerned before he violated the rule. He may
say that he did not have time, that he acted
in a crisis. In that event, there is no serious
question for the public, and his associates will
either thank him or call him a fool. But since
the circumstances were admittedly excep¬
ts
n6 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
tional they do not really establish a new rule,
and the public may be satisfied if the parties
at interest peaceably make the best of the
result. But suppose there was no emergency.
Suppose the innovator had time to seek assent,
but did not on the ground that he knew what
was best. He may be fairly condemned; the
objections of the other parties may be fairly
sustained.
For the right of innovation by fiat cannot
be defended as a working principle; a new
rule, however excellent in intention, cannot
be expected to work unless in some degree it
has been first understood and approved by
all who must live according to it. The in¬
novator may reply, of course, that he is being
condemned by a dogma which is not wholly
proved. That may be admitted. Against
the principle that a new rule requires assent
historic experience can be cited. There have
been many instances where a regime has been
imposed on an unwilling people and admired
later by them for its results. The dogma that
THE DEFECTIVE RULE 117
assent is necessary is imperfect, as are most
principles. But, nevertheless, it is a necessary
assumption in society. For if no new rule
required assent every one could make his own
rule, and there would be no rules. The dogma
therefore must be maintained, softened by
the knowledge that exceptional times and
exceptional men of their own force will make
way with any dogma. Since the rules of
society., cannot be based on exceptions the
exceptions must justify themselves.
The test, therefore, of whether a rule has
been justifiably broken is the test of assent.
The question, then, is how in applying the
test of assent a member of the public is to
determine whether sufficient assent has been
given. How is he to know whether the
regime has been imposed by arbitrary force
or in substance agreed to?
2
We wish to know if assent is lacking. We
know it is lacking because there is open pro-
118 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
test. Or we know it because there is a wide¬
spread refusal to conform. A workable rule,
which has assent, will not evoke protest or
much disobedience. How shall we, as mem¬
bers of the public, measure the significance of
the protest or the extent of the disobedience?
3
Where very few persons are directly in¬
volved in the controversy the public does
best not to intervene at all. One party may
protest, but unless he protests against the
public tribunals set up to adjudicate such
disputes, his protest may be ignored. The
public cannot expect to take part in the
minutiae of human adjustments however
tragic or important they may be to the in¬
dividuals concerned. The protest of one
individual against another cannot be treated
as a public matter. Only if the public tri¬
bunal is impugned does it become a public
matter, and then only because the case may
require investigation by some other tribunal.
THE DEFECTIVE RULE 119
In such disputes the public must trust the
agencies of adjustment acting as checks upon
each other. When we remember that the
public consists of busy men reading news¬
papers for half an hour or so a day, it is not
heartless but merely prudent to deny that
it can do detailed justice.
But where many persons are involved in the
controversy there is necessarily a public mat¬
ter. For when many persons are embroiled
the effects not only are likely to be wide but
there may be need of all the force the public
can exert in order to compel a peaceable
adjustment.
The public must take account of a protest
voiced on behalf of a relatively large number
of persons. But how shall the public know
that such a protest has been made? It must
look to see whether the spokesman is author¬
ized. How shall it tell if he is authorized?
How can it tell, that is to say, whether the
representative is able to give assent by com¬
mitting his constituency to a course of action ?
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
Whether the apparent leader is the real leader
is a question which the members of a public
cannot usually answer directly on the merits.
Yet they must answer in some fashion and
with some assurance by some rule of thumb.
The rule of thumb is to throw the burden
of proof on those who deny that the apparent'
leader, vested with the external signs of office,
is the real leader. As between one nation
and another, no matter how obnoxious the
other's government may be, if there is no
open rebellion, public opinion cannot go
behind the returns. For, unless a people is to
engage in the hopeless task of playing politics
inside another's frontiers, there is no course
but to hold that a nation is committed by the
officials it fails to discharge. If there is open
rebellion, or that milder substitute, an im¬
pending election, it may be wise to postpone
long term settlements until a firm government
has been seated. But settlements, if they
are made at all, must be made with the govern¬
ment in office at the other nation's capital.
THE DEFECTIVE RULE 121
The same theory holds, with modifications,
for large bodies of men within a state. If the
officials of the miners' union, for instance, take
a position, it is perfectly idle for an employer
to deny that they speak for the union miners.
He should deny that they speak for the non¬
union miners, but if the question at issue re¬
quires the assent of the union, then, unless the
union itself impeaches the leaders, the public
must accept them as authorized.
But suppose the leaders are challenged
within the union. How shall the importance
of the challenge be estimated by the public?
Recall that the object is to find out not
whether the objectors are right but simply
whether the spokesmen can in fact commit
their constituents. In weighing the challenge
the public's concern is to know how far the
opposition can by virtue of its numbers, or
of its strategic importance, or its determina¬
tion, impair the value of an assent. But if we
expected the public to make judgments of
this sort we should be asking too much of it.
122 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
The importance of an opposition can be
weighed, if at all, only by rough, external
criteria. With an opposition that does not
challenge the credentials of the spokesmen,
which criticizes but is not in rebellion, the
public has no concern. That is an internal
affair. It is only an opposition which threat¬
ens not to conform that has to be considered.
In such a case, if the spokesmen are elected,
they can be held competent to give a reliable
assent only until a new election has been
held. If the spokesmen are not elective, and
a rebellious opposition is evident, their assent
can only be taken as tentative. These criteria
do not, to be sure, weigh the importance of an
opposition, but, by limiting the kind of settle¬
ment which can reasonably be made in face
of an opposition, they allow for its effect.
They introduce the necessary modifica¬
tion to make workable the general principle
that the test of assent by large bodies of
men is simply that their spokesmen have
agreed.
THE DEFECTIVE RULE
4
The test of conformity is closely related to
the test of assent. For it can be assumed that
open criticism of a rule, a custom, a law, an
institution, is already accompanied by or
will soon be followed by evasion of that rule.
It is a fairly safe hypothesis that the run of
men wish to conform; that any body of men
aroused to the point where they will pay the
price of open heresy probably has an arguable
case; more certainly that that body will
include a considerable number who have
passed over the line of criticism into the
practice of nonconformity. Their argument
may be wrong, the remedy may be foolish,
but the fact that they openly criticize at
some personal risk is a sign that the rule is not
working well. Widespread criticism, there¬
fore, has a significance beyond its intellectual
value. It is almost always a symptom on
the surface that the rule is unstable.
When a rule is broken not occasionally
124 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
but very often the rule is defective. It simply
does not define the conduct which normally
may be expected of men who live under it.
It may "sound noble. But it does not work.
It does not adjust relations. It does not
actually organize society.
In what way the rule is defective the public
cannot specifically determine. By the two
tests I have suggested, of assent and of con¬
formity, the public can determine the presence
of a defect in the rule. But whether that
defect is due to a false measure of the chang¬
ing balance of forces involved, or to neglect
of an important interest or some relevant
circumstance, or to a bad technic of adjust¬
ment, or to contradictions in the rule, or to
obscurity, or to lack of machinery for its inter¬
pretation or for the deduction of specific rules
from general ones, the public cannot judge.
It will have gone, I believe, to the limits of
its normal powers if it judges the rule to be
defective, and turns then to identify the
agency most likely to remedy it.
Chapter XII
THE CRITERIA OF REFORM
I
The random collections of bystanders who
constitute a public could not, even if they had
a mind to, intervene in all the problems of
the day. They can and must play a part
occasionally, I believe, but they cannot take
an interest in, they cannot make even the
coarsest judgments about, and they will not act
even in the most grossly partisan way on, all
the questions arising daily in a complex and
changing society. Normally they leave their
proxies to a kind of professional public con¬
sisting of more or less eminent persons. Most
issues are never carried beyond this ruling
group; the lay publics catch only echoes of
the debate.
If, by the push and pull of interested parties
and public personages, settlements are made
125
126 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
more or less continually the party in power
has the confidence of the country. In effect,
the outsiders are arrayed behind the dominant
insiders. But if the interested parties cannot
be made to agree, if, as a result, there is dis¬
turbance and chronic crisis, then the opposi¬
tion among the insiders may come to be con¬
sidered the hope of the country, and be able
to entice the bystanders to its side.
To support the Ins when things are going
well; to support the Outs when they seem
to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has
been said about tweedledum and tweedledee,
is the essence of popular government. Even
the most intelligent large public of which we
have any experience must determine finally
who shall wield the organized power of the
state, its army and its police, by a choice
between the Ins and Outs. A community
where there is no choice does not have popular
government. It is subject to some form
of dictatorship or it is ruled by the intrigues
of the politicians in the lobbies.
CRITERIA OF REFORM 127
Although it is the custom of partisans to
speak as if there were radical differences
between the Ins and the Outs, it could be
demonstrated, I believe, that in stable and
mature societies the differences are neces¬
sarily not profound. If they were profound,
the defeated minority would be constantly
on the verge of rebellion. An election would
be catastrophic, whereas the assumption in
every election is that the victors will do
nothing to make life intolerable to the van¬
quished and that the vanquished will endure
with good humor policies which they do not
approve.
In the United States, Great Britain, Can¬
ada, Australia and in certain of the Conti¬
nental countries an election rarely means
even a fraction of what the campaigners
said it would mean. It means some new faces
and perhaps a slightly different general ten¬
dency in the management of affairs. The
Ins may have had a bias toward collectivism;
the Outs will lean toward individualism.
128 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
The Ins may have been suspicious and non-
cooperative in foreign affairs; the Outs will
perhaps be more trusting or entertain another
set of suspicions. The Ins may have favored
certain manufacturing interests; the Outs
may favor agricultural interests. But even
these differing tendencies are very small as
compared with the immense area of agree¬
ment, established habit and unavoidable ne¬
cessity. In fact, one might say that a nation
is politically stable when nothing of radical
consequence is determined by its elections.
There is, therefore, a certain mock serious¬
ness about the campaigning for votes in well-
established communities. Much of the excite¬
ment is not about the fate of the nation but
simply about the outcome of the game.
Some of the excitement is sincere, like any
fervor of intoxication. And much of it is
deliberately stoked up by the expenditure of
money to overcome the inertia of the mass of
the voters. For the most part the real dif¬
ference between the Ins and the Outs is no
CRITERIA OF REFORM 129
more than this: the Ins, after a term of power,
become so committed to policies and so en¬
tangled with particular interests that they
lose their neutral freedom of decision. They
cannot then intervene to check the arbitrary
movement of the interests with which they
have become aligned. Then it is time for
the Outs to take power and restore a balance.
The virtue of the Outs in this transaction is
that they are not committed to those partic¬
ular policies and those particular interests
which have become overweighted.
The test of whether the Ins are handling
affairs effectively is the presence or absence
of disturbing problems. The need of reform
is recognizable, as I pointed out in the chapter
before this one, by the test of assent and the
test of conformity. But it is my opinion that
for the most part the general public cannot
back each reformer on each issue. It must
choose between the Ins and Outs on the basis
of a cumulative judgment as to whether prob¬
lems are being solved or aggravated. The
130 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
particular reformers must look for their sup¬
port normally to the ruling insiders.
If, however, there is to be any refinement
of public opinion it must come from the
breaking up of these wholesale judgments
into somewhat more retail judgments on the
major spectacular issues of the day. Not all
of the issues which interest the public are
within the scope of politics and reachable
through the party system. It seems worth
while, therefore, to see whether any canons
of judgment can be formulated which could
guide the bystanders in particular contro¬
versies.
The problem is to locate by clear and coarse
objective tests the actor in a controversy
who is most worthy of public support.
2
When the rule is plain, its validity un¬
challenged, the breach clear and the aggres¬
sor plainly located, the question does not
arise. The public supports the agents of the
CRITERIA OF REFORM 131
law, though when the law is working well the
support of the public is like the gold reserve
of a good bank: it is known to be there and
need not be drawn upon. But in many fields
of controversy the rule is not plain, or its
validity is challenged; each party calls the
other aggressor, each claims to be acting for
the highest ideals of mankind. In disputes
between nations, between sectional interests,
between classes, between town and country,
between churches, the rules of adjustment
are lacking and the argument about them is
lost in a fog of propaganda.
Yet it is controversies of this kind, the
hardest controversies to disentangle, that
the public is called in to judge. Where the
facts are most obscure, where precedents are
lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade
everything, the public in all its unfitness is
compelled to make its most important deci¬
sions. The hardest problems are those which
institutions cannot handle. They are the
public's problems.
13 2 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
The one test which the members of a
public can apply in these circumstances is
to note which party to the dispute is least
willing to submit its whole claim to inquiry
and to abide by the result. This does not
mean that experts are always expert or im¬
partial tribunals really impartial. It means
simply that where the public is forced to
intervene in a strange and complex affair,
the test of public inquiry is the surest clue
to the sincerity of the claimant, to his con¬
fidence in his ability to stand the ordeal of
examination, to his willingness to accept
risks for the sake of his faith in the possi¬
bility of rational human adjustments. He
may impugn a particular tribunal. But he
must at least propose another. The test
is whether, in the absence of an established
rule, he is willing to act according to the forms
of law and by a process through which law
may be made.
Of all the tests which public opinion can
employ, the test of inquiry is the most gener-
CRITERIA OF REFORM 133
ally useful. If the parties are willing to ac¬
cept it, there is at once an atmosphere of
reason. There is prospect of a settlement.
Failing that there is at least a delay of
summary action and an opportunity for the
clarification of issues. And failing that there
is a high probability that the most arbitrary
of the disputants will be isolated and clearly
identified. It is no wonder that this is the
principle invoked for the so-called nonjus¬
ticiable questions in all the recent experiments
under the covenant of the League of Na¬
tions 1 and the Protocol for the Pacific Settle¬
ment of International Disputes.2 For in
applying this test of inquiry, what we affirm
is this: That there is a dispute. That the
merits are not clear. That the policy which
ought to be applied is not established. That,
nevertheless, we of the public outside say
that those who are quarreling must act as
if there were law to cover the case. That,
1 Articles XIII, XV.
2 Articles 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10.
134 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
even if the material for a reasoned conclusion
is lacking, we demand the method and spirit
of reason. That we demand any sacrifice
that may be necessary, the postponment of
satisfaction of their just needs, the risk that
one of them will be defeated and that an in¬
justice will be done. These things we affirm
because we are maintaining a society based
on the principle that all controversies are
soluble by peaceable agreement.
They may not be. But on that dogma
our society is founded. And that dogma
we are compelled to defend. We can de¬
fend it, too, with a good enough conscience,
however disconcerting some of its immediate
consequences may be. For, by insisting in
all disputes upon the spirit of reason, we shall
tend in the long run to confirm the habit of
reason. And where that habit prevails no
point of view can seem absolute to him who
holds it, and no problem between men so
difficult that there is not at least a modus
vivendi.
CRITERIA OF REFORM 135
The test of inquiry is the master test by
which the public can use its force to extend
the frontiers of reason.
3
But while the test of inquiry may dis¬
tinguish the party which is entitled to initial
support, it is of value only where one party
refuses inquiry. If all submit to inquiry, it
reveals nothing. And in any event it reveals
nothing about the prospects of the solution
proposed. The party seeking publicity may
have less to conceal, and may mean well, but
sincerity unfortunately is no index of intel¬
ligence. By what criteria are the public then
to judge the new rule which is proposed as a
solution ?
The public cannot tell whether the new rule
will, in fact, work. It may assume, however,
that in a changing world no rule will always
work. A rule, therefore, should be organized
so that experience will clearly reveal its de¬
fects. The rule should be so clear that a
136 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
violation is apparent. But since no generality
can cover all cases, this means simply that
the rule must contain a settled procedure
by which it can be interpreted. Thus a
treaty which says that a certain territory
shall be evacuated when certain conditions
are fulfilled is quite defective, and should be
condemned, if it does not provide a way of
defining exactly what those conditions are
and when they have been fulfilled. A rule,
in other words, must include the means of
its own clarification, so that a breach shall be
undeniably overt. Then only does it take
account of experience which no human intel¬
ligence can foresee.
It follows from this that a rule must be
organized so that it can be amended without
revolution. Revision must be possible by
consent. But assent is not always given,
even when the arguments in favor of a change
are overwhelming. Men will stand on what
they call their rights. Therefore, in order
that deadlock should be dissoluble, a rule
CRITERIA OF REFORM 137
should provide that subject to a certain
formal procedure the controversy over re¬
vision shall be public. This will often break
up the obstruction. Where it does not, the
community is pretty certain to become en¬
gaged on behalf of one of the partisans. This
is likely to be inconvenient to all concerned,
and the inconvenience due to meddling in
the substance of a controversy by a crude,
violent and badly aimed public opinion at
least may teach those directly concerned not
to invoke interference the next time.
But although amendment should be pos¬
sible, it should not be continual or unfore¬
seen. There should be time for habit and
custom to form. The pot should not be made
to boil all the time, or be stirred up for some
comparatively insignificant reason, whenever
an orator sees a chance to make himself
important. Since the habits and expecta¬
tions of many different persons are involved
in an institution, some way must be found of
giving it stability without freezing it in
i38 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
statu quo. This can be done by requiring
that amendment shall be in order only after
due notice.
What due notice may be in each particular
case, the public cannot say. Only the parties
at interest are likely to know where the
rhythm of their affairs can be interrupted
most conveniently. Due notice will be one
period of time for men operating on long com¬
mitments and another for men operating on
short ones. But the public can watch to see
whether the principle of due notice is embodied
in the proposed settlement.
To judge a new rule, then, the tests pro¬
posed here are three: Does it provide for its
own clarification? for its own amendment
by consent? for due notice that amend¬
ment will be proposed? The tests are de¬
signed for use in judging the prospects of
a settlement not by its substance but by
its procedure. A reform which satisfies
these tests is normally entitled to public
support.
CRITERIA OF REFORM
4
This is as far as I know how at present to
work out an answer to the question which we
inherit from Aristotle: can simple criteria
be formulated which will show the by¬
stander where to align himself in complex
affairs ?
I have suggested that the main value of
debate is not that it reveals the truth about
the controversy to the audience but that it
may identify the partisans. I have suggested
further that a problem exists where a rule
of action is defective, and that its defective¬
ness can best be judged by the public through
the test of assent and the test of conformity.
For remedies I have assumed that normally
the public must turn to the Outs as against
the Ins, although these wholesale judgments
may be refined by more analytical tests for
specific issues. As samples of these more
analytical tests I have suggested the test of
inquiry for confused controversies, and for
i4o THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
reforms the test of interpretation, of amend¬
ment and of due notice.
These criteria are neither exhaustive nor
definitive. Yet, however much tests of this
character are improved by practice and re¬
flection, it seems to me there always must
remain many public affairs to which they
cannot be applied. I do not believe that the
public can intervene successfully in all public
questions. Many problems cannot be ad¬
vanced by that obtuse partisanship which
is fundamentally all that the public can
bring to bear upon them. There is no reason
to be surprised, therefore, if the tests I have
outlined, or any others that are a vast im¬
provement upon them, are not readily appli¬
cable to all questions that are raised in the
discussions of the day.
I should simply maintain that where the
members of a public cannot use tests of this
sort as a guide to action, the wisest course for
them is not to act at all. They had better
be neutral, if they can restrain themselves,
CRITERIA OF REFORM 141
than blindly partisan. For where events
are so confused or so subtly balanced or so
hard to understand that they do not yield to
judgments of the kind I have been outlining
here, the probabilities are very great that the
public can produce only muddle if it meddles.
For not all problems are soluble in the present
state of human knowledge. Many which
may be soluble are not soluble with any force
the public can exert. Some time alone will
cure, and some are the fate of man. It is not
essential, therefore, always to do something.
It follows that the proper limits of inter¬
vention by the public in affairs are deter¬
mined by its capacity to make judgments.
These limits may be extended as new and
better criteria are formulated, or as men
become more expert through practice. But
where there are no tests, where such tests as
these cannot be used, where, in other words,
only an opinion on the actual merits of the
dispute itself would be of any use, any
positive action the bystanders are likely to
142 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
take is almost certain to be more of a nuisance
than a benefit. Their duty is to keep an open
mind and wait to see. The existence of a
usable test is itself the test of whether the
public ought to intervene.
Chapter XIII
THE PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC OPINION
I
The tests outlined in the preceding chapters
have certain common characteristics. They
all select a few samples of behavior or a few
aspects of a proposal. They measure these
samples by rough but objective, by highly
generalized but definite standards. And they
yield a judgment which is to justify the public
in aligning itself for or against certain actors
in the matter at issue.
I do not, of course, set great store upon my
formulation of these tests. That is wholly
tentative, being put out merely as a basis of
discussion and to demonstrate that the for¬
mulation of tests suited to the nature of public
opinion is not impracticable. But I do at¬
tach great importance to the character of
these tests.
143
144 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
The principles underlying them are these:
1. Executive action is not for the public.
The public acts only by aligning itself as the
partisan of some one in a position to act
executively.
2. The intrinsic merits of a question are
not for the public. The public intervenes
from the outside upon the work of the in¬
siders.
3. The anticipation, the analysis and the
solution of a question are not for the public.
The public's judgment rests on a small sample
of the facts at issue.
4. The specific, technical, intimate criteria
required in the handling of a question are
not for the public. The public's criteria are
generalized for many problems; they turn
essentially on procedure and the overt, ex¬
ternal forms of behavior.
5. What is left for the public is a judgment
as to whether the actors in the controversy
are following a settled rule of behavior or
their own arbitrary desires. This judgment
PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC OPINION 145
must be made by sampling an external aspect
of the behavior of the insiders.
6. In order that this sampling shall be
pertinent, it is necessary to discover cri¬
teria, suitable to the nature of public
opinion, which can be relied upon to dis¬
tinguish between reasonable and arbitrary
behavior.
7. For the purposes of social action, reason¬
able behavior is conduct which follows a
settled course whether in making a rule, in
enforcing it or in amending it.
It is the task of the political scientist to
devise the methods of sampling and to define
the criteria of judgment. It is the task of
civic education in a democracy to train the
public in the use of these methods. It is
the task of those who build institutions to
take them into account.
146 the phantom public
2
These principles differ radically from those
on which democratic reformers have pro¬
ceeded. At the root of the effort to educate
a people for self-government there has, I be¬
lieve, always been the assumption that the
voter should aim to approximate as nearly
as he can the knowledge and the point of view
of the responsible man. He did not, of course,
in the mass, ever approximate it very nearly.
But he was supposed to. It was believed that
if only he could be taught more facts, if only
he would take more interest, if only he would
read more and better newspapers, if only he
would listen to more lectures and read more
reports, he would gradually be trained to
direct public affairs. The whole assumption
is false. It rests upon a false conception of
public opinion and a false conception of the
way the public acts. No sound scheme of
civic education can come of it. No progress
can be made toward this unattainable ideal.
PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC OPINION 147
This democratic conception is false because
it fails to note the radical difference between
the experience of the insider and the outsider;
it is fundamentally askew because it asks the
outsider to deal as successfully with the sub¬
stance of a question as the insider. He cannot
do it. No scheme of education can equip him
in advance for all the problems of mankind;
no device of publicity, no machinery of en¬
lightenment, can endow him during a crisis
with the antecedent detailed and technical
knowledge which is required for executive
action.
The democratic ideal has never defined the
function of the public. It has treated the
public as an immature, shadowy executive of
all things. The confusion is deep-seated in a
mystical notion of society. "The people"
were regarded as a person; their wills as a
will; their ideas as a mind; their mass as an
organism with an organic unity of which the
individual was a cell. Thus the voter identi¬
fied himself with the officials. He tried to
148 the phantom public
think that their thoughts were his thoughts,
that their deeds were his deeds, and even
that in some mysterious way they were a
part of him. All this confusion of identities
led naturally to the theory that everybody
was doing everything. It prevented democ¬
racy from arriving at a clear idea of its own
limits and attainable ends. It obscured for
the purposes of government and social educa¬
tion the separation of function and the
specialization in training which have grad¬
ually been established in most human activ¬
ities.
Democracy, therefore, has never developed
an education for the public. It has merely
given it a smattering of the kind of knowledge
which the responsible man requires. It has,
in fact, aimed not at making good citizens
but at making a mass of amateur executives.
It has not taught the child how to act as a
member of the public. It has merely given
him a hasty, incomplete taste of what he
might have to know if he meddled in every-
PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC OPINION 149
thing. The result is a bewildered public and
a mass of insufficiently trained officials. The
responsible men have obtained their training
not from the courses in "civics" but in the
law schools and law offices and in business.
The public at large, which includes everybody
outside the field of his own responsible knowl¬
edge, has had no coherent political training
of any kind. Our civic education does not
even begin to tell the voter how he can reduce
the maze of public affairs to some intelligible
form.
Critics have not been lacking, of course,
who pointed out what a hash democracy was
making of its pretensions to government.
These critics have seen that the important
decisions were taken by individuals, and
that public opinion was uninformed, irrelevant
and meddlesome. They have usually con¬
cluded that there was a congenital difference
between the masterful few and the ignorant
many. They are the victims of a superfi¬
cial analysis of the evils they see so clearly.
ISO THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
The fundamental difference which matters
is that between insiders and outsiders. Their
relations to a problem are radically different.
Only the insider can make decisions, not be¬
cause he is inherently a better man but because
he is so placed that he can understand and
can act. The outsider is necessarily ignorant,
usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, be¬
cause he is trying to navigate the ship from
dry land. That is why excellent automobile
manufacturers, literary critics and scientists
often talk such nonsense about politics. Their
congenital excellence, if it exists, reveals
itself only in their own activity. The aris¬
tocratic theorists work from the fallacy of
supposing that a sufficiently excellent square
'peg will also fit a round hole. In short, like
the democratic theorists, they miss the es¬
sence of the matter, which is, that competence
exists only in relation to function; that men
are not good, but good for something; that
men cannot be educated, but only educated
for something.
PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC OPINION 151
Education for citizenship, for membership
in the public, ought, therefore, to be distinct
from education for public office. Citizenship
involves a radically different relation to
affairs, requires different intellectual habits
and different methods of action. The force
of public opinion is partisan, spasmodic,
simple-minded and external. It needs for
its direction, as I have tried to show in these
chapters, a new intellectual method which
shall provide it with its own usable canons
of judgment.
PART III
Chapter XIV
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE
1
A false ideal of democracy can lead only to
disillusionment and to meddlesome tyranny.
If democracy cannot direct affairs, then a
philosophy which expects it to direct them
will encourage the people to attempt the im¬
possible; they will fail, but that will inter¬
fere outrageously with the productive lib¬
erties of the individual. The public must be
put in its place, so that it may exercise its
own powers, but no less and perhaps even
more, so that each of us may live free of the
trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.
2
The source of that bewilderment lies, I
think, in the attempt to ascribe organic
155
156 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
unity and purpose to society. We have been
taught to think of society as a body, with a
mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a collection
of men, women and children whose minds,
souls and purposes are variously related. In¬
stead of being allowed to think realistically
of a complex of social relations, we have had
foisted upon us by various great propagative
movements the notion of a mythical entity,
called Society, the Nation, the Community.
In the course of the nineteenth century
society was personified under the influence
largely of the nationalist and the socialist
movements. Each of these doctrinal influ¬
ences in its own way insisted upon treating
the public as the agent of an overmastering
social purpose. In point of fact, the real
agents were the nationalist leaders and their
lieutenants, the social reformers and their
lieutenants. But they moved behind a veil
of imagery. And the public was habituated
to think that any one conforming to the
sterotype of nationalism or of social welfare
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 157
was entitled to support. What the national¬
ist rulers thought and did was the nation's
purpose, and the touchstone for all patriots;
what the reformers proposed was the benev¬
olent consciousness of the human race moving
mysteriously but progressively toward per¬
fection.
The deception was so generally practised
that it was often practised sincerely. But to
maintain the fiction that their purposes were
the spirit of mankind, public men had to
accustom themselves to telling the public
only a part of what they told themselves.
And, incidentally, they confessed to them¬
selves only a part of the truth on which they
were acting. Candor in public life became
a question of policy and not a rule of life.
"He may judge rightly," Mr. Keynes
once said of Mr. Lloyd George,1 "that this
is the best of which a democracy is capable,—
to be jockeyed, humbugged, cajoled along
the right road. A prejudice for truth or for
1 John Maynard Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty, p. 4.
158 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
sincerity as a method may be a prejudice
based on some aesthetic or personal standard
inconsistent, in politics, with practical good.
We cannot yet tell."
We do know, as a matter of experience, that
all the cards are not laid face up upon the
table. For however deep the personal preju¬
dice of the statesman in favor of truth as
a method, he is almost certainly forced to
treat truth as an element of policy. The
evidence on this point is overwhelming. No
statesman risks the safety of an army out
of sheer devotion to truth. He does not
endanger a diplomatic negotiation in order
to enlighten everybody. He does not usually
forfeit his advantages in an election in order
to speak plainly. He does not admit his own
mistakes because confession is so good for
the soul. In so far as he has power to control
the publication of truth, he manipulates it
to what he considers the necessities of action,
of bargaining, morale and prestige. He may
misjudge the necessities. He may exaggerate
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 159
the goodness of his aims. But where there
is a purpose in public affairs there are also ap¬
parent necessities which weigh in the balance
against the indiscreet expression of belief. The
public man does not and cannot act on the
fiction that his mind is also the public mind.
You cannot account for this, as angry
democrats have done by dismissing all public
men as dishonest. It is not a question of
personal morals. The business man, the
trade-union leader, the college president, the
minister of religion, the editor, the critic and
the prophet, all feel as Jefferson did when he
wrote that "although we often wished to go
faster we slackened our pace that our less
ardent colleagues might keep pace with us
. . . [and] by this harmony of the bold with
the cautious, we advanced with our con¬
stituents in undivided mass." 2
The necessity for an "undivided mass"
makes men put truth in the second place.
2 In a letter to William Wirt, cited by John Sharp Williams, Thomas
Jefferson, p. 7.
160 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
I do not wish to argue that the necessity is
not often a real one. When a statesman tells
me that it is not safe for him to disclose all
the facts, I am content to trust him in this
if I trust him at all. There is nothing mis¬
leading in a frank refusal to tell. The mis¬
chief comes in the pretense that all is being
told, that the public is entirely in the confi¬
dence of the public man. And that mischief
has its source in the sophistry that the public
and all the individuals composing it are one
mind, one soul, one purpose. It is seen to be
an absurd sophistry, once we look it straight
in the face. It is an unnecessary sophistry.
For we do well enough with doctors, though
we are ignorant of medicine, and with engine
drivers, though we cannot drive a locomotive;
why not, then, with a Senator, though we
cannot pass an examination on the merits
of an agricultural bill?
Yet we are so deeply indoctrinated with
the notion of union based upon identity,
that we are most reluctant to admit that
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 161
there is room in the world for different and
more or less separate purposes. The monistic
theory has an air of great stability about
it; we are afraid if we do not hang together
we shall all hang separately. The pluralistic
theory, as its leading advocate, Mr. Laski,
has pointed out, seems to carry with it "a
hint of anarchy." 3 Yet the suggestion is
grossly exaggerated. There is least anarchy
precisely in those areas of society where
separate functions are most clearly defined
and brought into orderly adjustment; there
is most anarchy in those twilight zones be¬
tween nations, between employers and em¬
ployees, between sections and classes and
races, where nothing is clearly defined, where
separateness of purpose is covered up and
confused, where false unities are worshiped,
and each special interest is forever pro¬
claiming itself the voice of the people and
attempting to impose its purpose upon every¬
body as the purpose of all mankind.
'Harold J. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, p. 24.
i6z THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
3
To this confusion liberalism has with the
kindest intentions contributed greatly. Its
main insight was into the prejudices of the
individual; the liberal discovered a method
of proving that men are finite, that they
cannot escape from the flesh. From the so-
called age of enlightenment down to our
day the heavy guns of criticism have been
used to make men realize that they submit,
as Bacon said, the shadows of things to the
desires of the mind. Once the resistance was
broken by proof that man belonged to the
natural world, his pretensions to absolute
certainty were attacked from every quarter.
He was shown the history of his ideas and
of his customs, and he was driven to ac¬
knowledge that they were bounded by time
and space and circumstance. He was shown
that there is a bias in all opinion, even in
opinion purged of desire, for the man who
holds the opinion must stand at some point in
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 163
space and time and can see not the whole
world but only the world as seen from that
point. So men learned that they saw a
little through their own eyes, and much more
through reports of what other men thought
they had seen. They were made to under¬
stand that all human eyes have habits of
vision, which are often stereotyped, which
always throw facts into a perspective; and
that the whole of experience is more sophisti¬
cated than the na'ive mind suspects. For its
pictures of the world are drawn from things
half heard and of things half seen; they deal
with the shadows of things unsteadily, and
submit unconsciously to the desires of the
mind.
It was an amazing and unsettling revela¬
tion, and liberalism never quite knew what
to do with it. In a theater in Moscow a
certain M. Yevreynoff carried the revelation
to one of its logical conclusions. He produced
the monodrama.4 This is a play in which
4 Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow, pp. 249-50.
164 the phantom, public
the action, the setting and all the characters
are seen by the audience through the eyes
of one character only, as the hero sees them,
and they take on the quality which his mind
imagines they possess. Thus in the old
theater, if the hero drank too much, he
reeled in the midst of a sober environment.
But in M. Yevreynoff's supremely liberal
theater, if I understand Mr. Macgowan's
account of it correctly, the drunkard will
not reel about the lamppost; two lampposts
will reel about him, and he will be dressed,
because that is the way he feels, like Napoleon
Bonaparte.
M. Yevreynoff has troubled me a good deal,
for he seemed to have finished off the liberal
with a fool's cap, and left him sitting in a
world that does not exist, except as so many
crazy mirrors reflecting his own follies one
upon the other. But then I recalled that M.
Yevreynoff's logic was defective and make-
believe. He had all the time stood soberly
outside his own drunken hero, and so had his
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 165
audience; the universe had not after all gone
up in the smoke of one fantasy; the drunken
hero had his point of view, but, after all, there
were others, just as authentic, with which in
the course of his career he might collide.
There might be a policeman, for example,
with fantasies to be sure, but his own, who
would break in upon the monodrama and
remind the hero, and us, that when we submit
the shadows of things to the desires of the
mind we do not submit the things them¬
selves.
But while all this does vindicate the sanity
of the liberal criticism, it does not answer the
question: since every action has to be taken
by somebody, since everybody is in some
degree a drunken hero with two lampposts
teetering about him, how can any common
good be furthered by this creature who is
dominated by his special purposes? The
answer was that it could be furthered by
taming his purposes, enlightening them and
fitting them into each other as the violin and
166 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
the drum are fitted together into the orches¬
tra. The answer was not acceptable in the
nineteenth century, when men, in spite of
all their iconoclasm, were still haunted by
the phantom of identity. So liberals refused
to write harmonious but separate parts for
the violinist and the drummer. They made,
instead, a noble appeal to their highest in¬
stincts. They spoke over the heads of men
to man.
These general appeals were as vague as
they were broad. They gave particular men
no clue as to how to behave sincerely, but
they furnished them with an excellent mas¬
querade when they behaved arbitrarily. Thus
the trappings of liberalism came into the
service of commercial exploiters, of profiteers
and prohibitionists and jingoes, of charlatans
and the makers of buncombe.
For liberalism had burned down the barn
to roast the pig. The discovery of preju¬
dice in all particular men gave the liberal a
shock from which he never recovered. He
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 167
was so utterly disconcerted by his own dis¬
covery of a necessary but perfectly obvious
truth, that he took flight into generalities.
The appeal to everybody's conscience gave
nobody a clue how to act; the voter, the
politician, the laborer, the capitalist had to
construct their own codes ad hoc, accompanied
perhaps by an expansive liberal sentiment,
but without intellectual guidance from liberal
thought. In time, when liberalism had lost
its accidental association with free trade and
laissez faire, through their abandonment in
practice, it sadly justified itself as a necessary
and useful spirit, as a kind of genial spook
worth having around the place. For when
individual men, guided by no philosophy but
their own temporary rationalizations, got
themselves embroiled, the spook would appear
and in a peroration straighten out the more
arbitrary biases they displayed.
Yet even in this disembodied state liberal¬
ism is important. It tends to awaken a milder
spirit; it softens the hardness of action. But
168 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
it does not dominate action, because it has
eliminated the actor from its scheme of
things. It cannot say: You do this and you do
that, as all ruling philosophies must. It can
only say: That is n't fair, that's selfish, that's
tyrannical. Liberalism has been, therefore,
a defender of the under dog, and his liberator,
but not his guide, when he is free. Top dog
himself, he easily leaves his liberalism aside,
and to liberals the sour reflection that they
have forged a weapon of release but not a
way of life.
The liberals have misunderstood the nature
of the public to which they appealed. The
public in any situation is, in fact, merely
those persons, indirectly concerned, who might
align themselves in support of one of the
actors. But the liberal took no such unin-
flated view of the public. He assumed
that all mankind was within hearing, that
all mankind when it heard would respond
homogeneously because it had a single soul.
His appeal to this cosmopolitan, universal,
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 169
disinterested intuition in everybody was
equivalent to an appeal to nobody.
No such fallacy is to be found in the politi¬
cal philosophies which active men have lived
by. They have all assumed, as a matter
of course, that in the struggle against evil
it was necessary to call upon some specific
agent to do the work. Even when the thinker
was out of temper with the human race,
he had always hitherto made somebody the
hero of his campaign. It was the peculiarity
of liberalism among theories which have
played a great part in the world that it at¬
tempted to eliminate the hero entirely.
Plato would certainly have thought this
strange: his iRepublic is a tract on the proper
education of a ruling class. Dante, in the
turmoil of thirteenth century Florence, seek¬
ing order and stability, addressed himself
not to the conscience of Christendom but to
the Imperial Party. The great state builders
of modern times, Hamilton, Cavour, Bis¬
marck, Lenin, each had in mind somebody,
170 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
some group of real people, who were to realize
his program. The agents in the theory have
varied, of course; here they are the landlords,
then the peasants, or the unions, or the mili¬
tary class, or the manufacturers; there are
theories addressed to a church, to the ruling
classes in particular nations, to some nation
or race. The theories are always, except
in the liberal philosophy, addressed to some¬
body.
By comparison the liberal philosophy has
an air of vague unworldiness. Yet the re¬
gard of men for it has been persistent; some¬
how or other with all the lapses in its logic
and with all its practical weaknesses it touches
a human need. These appeals from men
to man: are they not a way of saying that
men desire peace, that there is a harmony
attainable in which all men can live and let
live? It seems so to me. The attempt to
escape from particular purposes into some
universal purpose, from personality into some¬
thing impersonal, is, to be sure, a flight from
SOCIETY IN ITS PLACE 171
the human problem, but it is at the same time
a demonstration of how we wish to see that
problem solved. We seek an adjustment, as
perfect as possible, as untroubled as it was
before we were born. Even if man were a
fighting animal, as some say he is, he would
wish for a world in which he could fight per¬
fectly, with enemies fleet enough to extend
him and not too fleet to elude him. All men
desire their own perfect adjustment, but they
desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
Because liberalism could not accommodate
the universal need of adjustment to the per¬
manence and the reality of individual pur¬
pose, it remained an incomplete, a disem¬
bodied philosophy. It was frustrated over
the ancient problem of the One and the Many.
Yet the problem is not so insoluble once we
cease to personify society. It is only when we
are compelled to personify society that we are
puzzled as to how many separate organic
individuals can be united in one homogeneous
organic individual. This logical underbrush
172 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
is cleared away if we think of society not as
the name of a thing but as the name of all
the adjustments between individuals and
their things. Then, we can say without
theoretical qualms what common sense plainly
tells us is so: it is the individuals who act, not
society; it is the individuals who think, not
the collective mind; it is the painters who
paint, not the artistic spirit of the age; it is
the soldiers who fight and are killed, not the
nation; it is the merchant who exports, not
the country. It is their relations with each
other that constitute a society. And it is
about the ordering of those relations that the
indjviduals not executively concerned in a
specific disorder may have public opinions
and may., intervene, as a public.
Chapter XV
ABSENTEE RULERS
I
The practical effect of the monistic theories
of society has been to rationalize that vast
concentrating of political and economic power
in the midst of which we live. Since society
was supposed to have organic purposes of its
own, it came to seem quite reasonable that
these purposes should be made manifest to
a people by laws and decisions from a central
point. Somebody had to have a purpose re¬
vealed to him which could be treated as the
common purpose; if it was to be accepted it
had to be enforced by command; if it was
really to look like the national purpose, it had
to be handed down as a rule binding upon all.
Thus men could say with Goethe:
"And then a mighty work completed stands,
One mind suffices for a thousand hands." 1
1 Faust, Part II, Act v, scene 3.
173
174 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
In this fashion the eulogies of the Great
Society have been made. Two thousand years
ago it was possible for whole civilizations
as mature as the Chinese and the Greco-
Roman to coexist in total indifference to one
another. Today the food supplies, the raw
materials, the manufactures, the communica¬
tions and the peace of the world constitute
one great system which cannot be thrown
severely out of balance in any part without
disturbing the whole.
Looked at from the top, the system in its
far-flung and intricate adjustments has a
certain grandeur. It might, as some hopeful
persons think, even ultimately mean the broth¬
erhood of man since all men living in advanced
communities are now in quite obvious fashion
dependent upon one another. But the individ¬
ual man cannot look at the system steadily
from the top or see it in its ultimate specula¬
tive possibilities. For him it means in prac¬
tice, along with the rise in certain of his
material standards of life, a nerve-wracking
ABSENTEE RULERS 175
increase of the incalculable forces that bear
upon his fate. My neighbor in the country
who borrowed money to raise potatoes which
he cannot sell for cash looks at the bills from
the village store asking for immediate cash
payments, and does not share the philosophic
hopeful view of the interdependence of the
world. 'When unseen commission merchants
in New York City refuse his potatoes, the
calamity is as dumfounding as a drought or a
plague of locusts.
The harvest in September of the planting
in May is now determined not only by wind
and weather, which his religion has from
time immemorial justified, but by a tangle
of distant human arrangements of which only
loose threads are in his hands. He may live
more richly than his ancestors; he may be
wealthier and healthier and, for all he knows,
even happier. But he gambles with the
behavior of unseen men in a bewildering way.
His relations with invisibly managed markets
are decisively important for him; his own
176 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
foresight is not dependable. He is a link in a
chain that stretches beyond his horizon.
The role that salesmanship and speculation
play is a measure of the spread between the
work men do and the results. To market the
output of Lancashire, says Dibblee,2 "the
merchants and warehousemen of Manchester
and Liverpool, not to mention the marketing
•organizations in other Lancashire towns, have
a greater capital employed than that required
in all the manufacturing industries of the
cotton trade." And, according to Anderson's
calculations,3 the grain received at Chicago
in 1915 was sold sixty-two times in futures,
as well as an unknown number of times in
spot transactions. Where men produce for
invisible and uncertain markets "the initial
plans of enterprisers" 4 cannot be adequate.
The adjustments, often very crude and costly,
are effected by salesmanship and speculation.
2 Dibblee, The Laws of Supply and Demand, cited by B. M. Ander¬
son, Jr., The Value of Money, p. 259.
3 B. M. Anderson, Jr., The Value of Money, p. 251.
4 Ibid.
ABSENTEE RULERS 177'
Under these conditions neither the discipline
of the craftsman who controls his process from
beginning to end nor the virtues of thrift,
economy and work are a complete guide to a
successful career. Defoe in his Complete
English Tradesman 5 could say that "trade is
not a ball where people appear in masque and
act a part to make sport . . . but is a plain,
visible scene of honest life . . . supported by
prudence and frugality" . . . and so "pru¬
dent management and frugality will increase
any fortune to any degree." Benjamin Frank¬
lin might opine that "he that gets all he can
honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary ex¬
penses excepted) will certainly become rich,
if that Being who governs the world, to whom
all should look for a blessing on their honest
endeavors, doth not in His wise providence,
otherwise determine." Young men were until
quite recently exhorted in the very words of
Defoe and Franklin, though Franklin's rather
6 Cf. Werner Lombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, Chapter
VII.
178 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
canny allowance for the whims of the Al¬
mighty was not always included. But of
late the gospel of success contains less about
frugality and more about visions and the
message of business. This new gospel, be¬
neath all its highfalutin cant, points dimly
though excitedly to the truth that for business
success a man must project his mind over an
invisible environment.
This need has bred an imperious tendency
to organization on a large scale. To defend
themselves against the economic powers of
darkness, against great monopolies or a dev¬
astating competition, the farmers set up
great centralized selling agencies. Business
men form great trade associations. Every¬
body organizes, until the number of commit¬
tees and their paid secretaries cannot be com¬
puted. The tendency is pervasive. We have
had, if I remember correctly, National Smile
Week. At any rate we have had Nebraska
which discovered that if you wish to prohibit
liquor in Nebraska you must prohibit it
ABSENTEE RULERS 179
everywhere. Nebraska cannot live by itself
alone, being too weak to control an inter¬
national traffic. We have had the socialist
who was convinced that socialism can main¬
tain itself only on a socialist planet. We have
had Secretary Hughes who was convinced
that capitalism could exist only on a capitalist
planet. We have had all the imperialists who
could not live unless they advanced the back¬
ward races. And we have had the Ku Klux
Klansmen who were persuaded that if you or¬
ganized and sold hate on a country-wide scale
there would be lots more hate than there was
before. We have had the Germans before 1914
who were told they had to choose between
"world power or downfall," and the French for
some years after 1919 who could not be
"secure" in Europe unless every one else was
insecure. We have had all conceivable mani¬
festations of the impulse to seek stability in an
incalculable environment by standardizing for
one's own apparent convenience all those who
form the context of one's activity.
180 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
It has entailed perpetual effort to bring
more and more men under the same law
and custom, and then, of course, to assume
control of the lawmaking and law-enforcing
machinery in this larger area. The effect has
been to concentrate decision in central govern¬
ments, in distant executive offices, in caucuses
and in steering committees. Whether this
concentration of power is good or bad, per¬
manent or passing, this at least is certain.
The men who make the decisions at these
central points are remote from the men they
govern and the facts with which they deal.
Even if they conscientiously regard them¬
selves as agents or trustees, it is a pure fiction
to say that they are carrying out the will of
the people. They may govern the people
wisely. They are not governing with the
active consultation of the people. They can
at best lay down policy wholesale in response
to electorates which judge and act upon only
a detail of the result. For the governors see
a kind of whole which obscures the infinite
ABSENTEE RULERS 181
varieties of particular interests; their vices
are abstraction and generalization which
appear in politics as legalism and bureau¬
cracy. The governed, on the contrary, see
vivid aspects of a whole which they
can rarely imagine, and their prevailing vice
is to mistake a local prejudice for a universal
truth.
The widening distance between the centers
where decisions are taken and the places where
the main work of the world is done has under¬
mined the discipline of public opinion upon
which all the earlier theorists relied.6 A
century ago the model of popular government
was the self-sufficing township in which the
voters' opinions were formed and corrected
by talk with their neighbors. They might
entertain queer opinions about witches and
spirits and foreign peoples and other worlds.
But about the village itself the facts were not
radically in dispute, and nothing was likely
to happen that the elders could not with a
6 Cf. my Public Opinion, Chapters XVI and XVII.
182 the phantom public
little ingenuity bring under a well-known
precedent of their common law.
But under absentee government these
checks upon opinion are lacking. The con¬
sequences are often so remote and long de¬
layed that error is not promptly disclosed.
The conditioning factors are distant; they do
not count vividly in our judgments. The
reality is inaccessible; the bounds of sub¬
jective opinion are wide. In the interdepend¬
ent world, desire, rather than custom or ob¬
jective law, tends to become the criterion of
men's conduct. They formulate their de¬
mands at large for "security" at the expense
of every one else's safety, for "morality" at
the expense of other men's tastes and comfort,
for the fulfillment of a national destiny that
consists in taking what you want when you
want it. The lengthening of the interval
between conduct and experience, between
cause and effect, has nurtured a cult of self-
expression in which each thinker thinks about
his own thoughts and has subtle feelings about
ABSENTEE RULERS 183
his feelings. That he does not in consequence
deeply affect the course of affairs is not sur¬
prising.
2
The centralizing tendencies of the Great
Society have not been accepted without
protest, and the case against them has been
stated again and again.7 Without local
institutions, said de Tocqueville, a nation
may give itself a free government, but it does
not possess the spirit of liberty. To concen¬
trate power at one point is to facilitate the
seizure of power. "What are you going to
do?" Arthur Young asked some provincials
at the time of the French Revolution. "We
do not know," they replied; "we must see
what Paris is going to do." Local interests
handled from a distant central point are
roughly handled by busy and inattentive
men. And in the meantime the local training
7 In a convenient form by J. Charles Brun, Le Regionalisme, pp.
13 et seq. Cf. also Walter Thompson, Federal Centralization,
Chapter XIX.
i84 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
and the local winnowing of political talent are
neglected. The overburdened central author¬
ity expands into a vast hierarchy of bureau¬
crats and clerks manipulating immense stacks
of paper, always dealing with symbols on
paper, rarely with things or with people. The
genius of centralization reached its climax
in the famous boast of a French minister of
education, who said: It is three o'clock; all
the pupils in the third grade throughout
France are now composing a Latin verse.
There is no need to labor the point. The
more centralization the less can the people
concerned be consulted and give conscious
assent. The more extensive the rule laid
down the less account it can take of fact and
special circumstance. The more it conflicts
with local experience, the more distant its
source and wholesale its character, the less
easily enforceable it is. General rules will
tend to violate particular needs. Distantly
imposed rules usually lack the sanction of
consent. Being less suited to the needs of
ABSENTEE RULERS 185
men, and more external to their minds, they
rest on force rather than on custom and on
reason.
A centralized society dominated by the
fiction that the governors are the spokesmen
of a common will tends not only to degrade
initiative in the individual but to reduce to
insignificance the play of public opinion.
For when the action of a whole people is con¬
centrated, the public is so vast that even the
crude objective judgments it might make on
specific issues cease to be practicable. The
tests indicated in preceding chapters by
which a public might judge the workability
of a rule or the soundness of a new proposal
have little value when the public runs into
millions and the issues are hopelessly entangled
with each other. It is idle under such circum¬
stances to talk about democracy, or about the
refinement of public opinion. With such
monstrous complications the public can do
little more than at intervals to align itself
heavily for or against the regime in power,
186 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
and for the rest to bear with its works, obeying
meekly or evading, as seems most convenient.
For, in practice, the organic theory of society
means a concentration of power; that is, the
way the notion of one purpose is actually
embodied in affairs. And this in turn means
that men must either accept frustration of
their own purposes or contrive somehow to
frustrate that declared purpose of that central
■ power which pretends it is the purpose of all.
Chapter XVI
THE REALMS OF DISORDER
I
Yet the practice of centralization and the
philosophy which personifies society have
acquired a great hold upon men. The dan¬
gers are well known. If, nevertheless, the
practice and the theory persist, it cannot be
merely because men have been led astray
by false doctrine.
If you examine the difficulties enumerated
by the sponsors of great centralizing meas¬
ures, such as national prohibition, the na¬
tional child labor amendment, federal con¬
trol of education or the nationalization of
railroads, they are reducible, I think, to one
dominating idea: that it is necessary to ex¬
tend the area of control over all the factors
in a problem or the problem will be insoluble
anywhere.
187
188 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
It was to this idea that Mr. Lloyd George
appealed when he faced his critics at the end
of his administration. While his words are
the words of a skilful debater, the idea behind
them might almost be called the supreme
motive of all the imperial and centralizing
tendencies of the Great Society:
"Lord Grey sought to make peace in the
Balkans. He made peace. That peace did
not stand the jolting of the train that carried
it from London to the Balkans. It fell to
pieces before it ever reached Sofia. That
was not his fault. The plan was good. The
intentions were excellent. But there were
factors there which he could not control. He
tried to prevent the Turks from entering
the war against us, a most important matter.
German diplomacy was too strong for him.
He tried to prevent Bulgaria from entering
the war against us. There again German
diplomacy defeated us. Well, now I have
never taunted Lord Grey with that. I do
not taunt him now, but what I say is that
THE REALMS OF DISORDER 189
when you get into the realm of foreign affairs
there are things I will not say you cannot
visualize, because you do, but there are factors
you cannot influence." 1
Mr. Lloyd George might have said the same
of domestic affairs. There, too, factors abound
which you cannot influence. And as empires
expand to protect their frontiers, and then
expand further to protect the protections to
their frontiers, so central governments have <■
been led step by step to take one interest after
another under their control.
2
For the democracies are haunted by this
dilemma: they are frustrated unless in the
laying down of rules there is a large measure
of assent; yet they seem unable to find solu¬
tions of their greatest problems except through
centralized governing by means of extensive
rules which necessarily ignore the principle
of assent. The problems that vex democracy
i Speech at Manchester, October 14, 1922.
I90 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
seem to be unmanageable by democratic
methods.
In supreme crises the dilemma is presented
absolutely. Possibly a war can be fought
for democracy; it cannot be fought democrati¬
cally. Possibly a sudden revolution may be
made to advance democracy; but the revolu¬
tion itself will be conducted by a dictatorship.
Democracy may be defended against its
enemies but it will be defended by a com¬
mittee of safety. The history of the wars
and revolutions since 1914 is ample evidence
on this point. In the presence of danger,
where swift and concerted action is required,
the methods of democracy cannot be em¬
ployed.
That is understandable enough. But how
is it that the democratic method should be
abandoned so commonly in more leisurely
and less catastrophic times? Why in time of
peace should people provoke that centraliza¬
tion of power which deprives them of control
over the use of that power? Is it not a prob-
THE REALMS OF DISORDER 191
able answer to say that in the presence of
certain issues, even in time of peace, the
dangers have seemed sufficiently menacing
to cause people to seek remedies, regardless
of method, by the shortest and easiest way at
hand?
It could be demonstrated, I think, that
the issues which have seemed so overwhelm¬
ing were of two kinds: those which turned on
the national defense or the public safety and
those which turned on the power of modern
capitalism. Where the relations of a people
to armed enemies are in question or where
the relations of employee, customer or farmer
to large industry are in question the need
for solutions has outweighed all interest
in the democratic method.
In the issues engendered by the rise of the
national state and the development of large
scale industries are to be found the essentially
new problems of the modern world. For
the solution of these problems there are few
precedents. There is no established body of
192 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
custom and law. The field of international
affairs and the field of industrial relations
are the two great centers of anarchy in society.
It is a pervasive anarchy. Out of the national
state with its terrifying military force, and
out of great industry with all its elaborate
economic compulsion, the threat against
personal security always rises. To offset
it somehow, to check it and thwart it, seemed
more important than any finical regard for
the principle of assent.
And so to meet the menace of the national
state, its neighbors sought to form themselves
into more powerful national states; to tame
the power of capitalism they supported the
growth of vast bureaucracies. Against powers
that were dangerous and uncontrolled they
set up powers, nominally their own, which
were just as vast and just as uncontrolled.
3
But only for precarious intervals has secur¬
ity been attained by these vast balances of
THE REALMS OF DISORDER 193
power. From 1870 to 1914 the world was
held in equilibrium. It was upset, and the
world has not yet found a new order. The
balances of power within the nations are no
less unsteady. For neither in industry *
nor in international affairs has it yet been
possible to hold any balance long enough
to fix it by rule and give it an institutional
form. Power has been checked by power
here and there and now and then but
power has not been adjusted to power and
the terms of the adjustment settled and
accepted.
The attempt to bring power under control
by offsetting it with power was sound enough
in intention. The conflicting purposes of1
men cannot be held under pacific control
unless the tendency of all power to become
arbitrary is checked by other force. All the
machinery of conference, of peaceful negotia¬
tion, of law and the rule of reason is workable
in large affairs only where the power of the
negotiators is neutralized one against the
i94 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
other. It may be neutralized because the
parties are in fact equally powerful. It may
be neutralized because the weaker has in¬
visible allies among the other powers of the
world, or in domestic affairs among other
interests in society. But before there can
be law there must be order, and an order is
an arrangement of power.
The worst that can be said of the national¬
ists and collectivists is that they attempted to
establish balances of power which could not
endure. The pluralist at least would say
that the end they sought must be attained
differently, that in place of vast wholesale
balances of power it is necessary to create
many detailed balances of power. The people
as a whole supporting a centralized govern¬
ment cannot tame capitalism as a whole.
For the powers which are summed up in the
term capitalism are many. They bear sepa¬
rately upon different groups of people. The
nation as a unit does not encounter them all,
and cannot deal with them all. It is to the
THE REALMS OF DISORDER 195
different groups of people concerned that we
must look for the power which shall offset
the arbitrary power that bears upon them.
The reduction of capitalism to workable law
is no matter of striking at it wholesale by
general enactments. It is a matter of defeat¬
ing its arbitrary power in detail, in every
factory, in every office, in every market, and
of turning the whole network of relations
under which industry operates from the
dominion of arbitrary forces into those of
settled rules.
And so it is in the anarchy among nations.
If all the acts of a citizen are to be treated as
organically the actions of that nation, a stable
balance of power is impossible. Here also it
is necessary to break down the fiction of
identity, to insist that the quarrel of one
business man with another is their quarrel,
and not the nation's, a quarrel in which each
is entitled to a vindication of his right to
fair adjudication but not to patriotic advo¬
cacy of his cause. It is only by this dis-
196 the phantom public
sociation of private interests that the mass
of disputes across frontiers can gradually be
brought under an orderly process. For a
large part, perhaps the greatest part, of the
disputes between nations is an accumulated
mass of undetermined disputes between their
nationals. If these essentially private dis¬
putes could be handled, without patriotic
fervor and without confusing an oil pros¬
pector with the nation as a whole, with govern¬
ments acting as friends of the court and not
as advocates for a client, the balance of power
between governments would be easier to
maintain. It would not be subject to con¬
stant assault from within each nation by
an everlasting propaganda of suspicion by
private interests seeking national support.
And if only the balance of power between
governments could be stabilized long enough
to establish a line of precedents for inter¬
national conference, a longer peace might
result.
THE REALMS OF DISORDER 197
4
These in roughest outline are some of the
conclusions, as they appear to me, of the
attempt to bring the theory of democracy
into somewhat truer alignment with the
nature of public opinion. I have conceived
public_opinion to be, not the voice of God,
nor the voice of society, but the voice of the
interested spectators of action. I have, there¬
fore, supposed that the opinions of the specta¬
tors must be essentially different from those
of the actors, and that the kind of action they
were capable of taking was essentially differ¬
ent too. It has seemed to me that the public
had a function and must have methods of its
own in controversies, qualitatively different
from those of the executive men; that it was
a dangerous confusion to believe that private
purposes were a mere emanation of some
common purpose.
This conception of society seems to me
truer and more workable than that which
198 THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
endows public opinion with pantheistic
powers. It does not assume that men in
action have universal purposes; they are de¬
nied the fraudulent support of the fiction
that they are the agents of a common purpose.
They are regarded as the agents of special
purposes, without pretense and without em¬
barrassment. They must live in a world
with men who have other special purposes.
The adjustments which must be made are
society, and the best society is the one in
which men have purposes which they can
realize with the least frustration. When meS
take a position in respect to the purposes of
others they are acting as a public. And the
end of their acting in this role is to promote
the conditions under which special purposes
can be composed.
It is a theory which puts its trust chiefly
in the individuals directly concerned. They
initiate, they administer, they settle. It
would subject them to the least possible inter¬
ference from ignorant and meddlesome out-
THE REALMS OF DISORDER 199
siders, for in this theory the public intervenes
only when there is a crisis of maladjustment,
and then not to deal with the substance of
the problem but to neutralize the arbitrary
force which prevents adjustment. It is a
theory which economizes the attention of
men as members of the public, and asks them
to do as little as possible in matters where
they can do nothing very well. It confines
the effort of men, when they are a public, to a
part they might fulfill, to a part which corre¬
sponds to their own greatest interest in any
social disturbance; that is, to an intervention
which may help to allay the disturbance,
and thus allow them to return to their own
affairs.
For it is the pursuit of their special affairs
that they are most interested in. It is by the
private labors of individuals that life is en¬
hanced. I set no great store on what can *
be done by public opinion and the action of
masses.
THE PHANTOM PUBLIC
5
I have no legislative program to offer, no
new institutions to propose. There are, I
believe, immense confusions in the current
theory of democracy which frustrate and
pervert its action. I have attacked certain
of the confusions with no conviction except
that a false philosophy tends to stereotype
thought against the lessons of experience.
I do not know what the lessons will be when
we have learned to think of public opinion as
it is, and not as the fictitious power we have
assumed it to be. It is enough if with Ben-
tham we know that "the perplexity of am¬
biguous discourse . . . distracts and eludes
the apprehension, stimulates and inflames
the passions."
INDEX
Absentee rulers defined, 173—
186
Action, public, defined, 73-74
Agencies defined, 125-142; fact¬
finding, 45
Agent, public not, 169
Agents and bystanders defined,
40-53
Anarchy, 161
Anderson, Jr., B. M., 176
Arbitrary force, neutralization
of, 63-74
Aristotle, 77-80
Assent, defined, 117-123; 129,
189.
Bacon, Francis, 162
Balkans, 188
Behavior, 55, 68-69; reasonable,
defined, 145
Bentham, Jeremy, 200
Bergson, Henri, 32-33
Birth control, its relation to
food supply, 87-88
Bismarck, Prince von, 14, 169
Brun, J. Charles, 183
Bryan, William Jennings, 36
Bryce, James, 18-19
Bulgaria, 188
Business, new gospel of, 178
Bystanders and agents defined,
40-53
Capitalism, 37, 179, 191, 192,
194, 195
Carr-Saunders, A. M., 87
Cassel, Gustav, 92, 94
Cats, mice and clover, 31-32
Cavour, Count di, 169
Centralization of government.
See Government
Change, unnoticeable, 88
Chanticleer, 15
Chicago mayoral election, 17
Chinese and Greco-Roman civ¬
ilizations, 174
Citizen, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20,
21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 38, 39,
4p, 45, 46, 52, 148, 195
Citizenship, 151
Civic duty, derision for, 15, 146,
Civil rights, 58
Civilization, 174
Clover, cats and mice, 31-32
Competence, 150
Conduct, 182
Conformity, test of, defined,
123-124
Conscience, 28
Contracts, social, 40, 95-106;
defined, 101-102; 104-105
Control, 55
Controversy, 77
Cooperation, 99
Corruption, 71, 72
Criteria of reform defined, 125-
142
Criticism, 123
Crises, 67
Crisis, public opinion reserve
force in, 69
Dante, 169
Darwin, Charles, 31, 32
Debate, public value of, de¬
fined, 110-114
Defective rule defined, 115-124
201
202
INDEX
Defoe, Daniel, 177
Delbruck, Hans, 60
Democracy, 24, 35-37, 71, 146-
151, 155, 189, 190, 197-200
Democratic theory, 14, 61,
147
Democrats, 59
Derision of citizens, 15
Descartes, 81
Dibblee, G. B., 176
Dictatorship, 190
Disenchanted man defined, 20
"Disorder, idea of," 32-33;
realms of, defined, 187-200
Dogma of assent, 117
Duties and rights. See Rights
and duties.
Economic problem defined, 92-
94
Education, 22-23, 24> 27l pub¬
lic, defined, 146-147; 148-
I5B 169
Election, defined, 56, 60, 61
Elections, defined, 127-130
England, 59, 86
Enterprise, Macaulay on, 49-
5°
Enterprisers, 176
Environment, 14, 78, 79, 179
Erickson, E. M., 16
Eugenics, 34-35
Evasion of law, 123
Evils of democracy, 35-36, 37,
173-186
Evolution, 81-84
Executive action, 144
Expectations, 33
Exploiters, 166
Fable of professor, 28
Food supply, 86-87
Franklin, Benjamin, 177-178
French security, 179
French Revolution, 59, 183
Frugality, 177
Function, government, defined,
70-73; relation to compe¬
tency, 150
German diplomacy, 188
Germans, 179
Goethe, 173
Gosnell, Harvey Foote, 17
Government, vii, 14, 41, 50, 61,
62, 70, 71, 72» 73, 126, 173-
186, 194; defined, 77, 126;
function defined, 70-73
Grant, Madison, 22
Great Society, 43, 79, 98, 174,
183, 188-189
Greco-Roman and Chinese civ¬
ilizations, 174
Grey, Lord, vii, 188
Guedalla, Philip, 14
Gun elevation, 91
Hamilton, Alexander, vii, 169
Hegel, 98
Hegelian mystery, 47
Hertzen, Alexander, 20
Hughes, Charles Evans, 179
Human values defined, 95-97
"Idea of disorder," 32-33
Ideal, 20, 22, 39, 63, 68, 155
Idealization, 57
Ideals, 14
Ideas, 47, 48
Imperial Party, 169
Initiative and referendum, 19
Innovation 116
Inquiry, test of, defined, 130-
135
Intelligence, 69, 135
Jefferson, Thomas, 159
Justice, 67
Keynes, J. M., 157-158
Knowledge, 30
Ku Klux Klan, 179
INDEX
203
Lancashire goods, 176
Laski, Harold J., 161
Latin America, 61
Latin verse, 184
Law, 69, 100, 108, 115, 116, 123,
124, 191-192, 193
Laws, 69, 71; assent to, defined,
117-122; 123, 124; defective,
defined, 125-142; 136; test of,
defined, 138
Leaders, 19
League of Nations, 133
Lenin, 169
Liberal defined, 162
Liberalism defined, 162-172
Liberals, 162, 166
Liberties of men defined, 55
Liberty, spirit of, 187
Lloyd George, David, 157-158,
188-189
Lombart, Werner, 177
Lowell, Lawrence A., 19
Macaulay, Lord, 49-50
Macgowan, Kenneth, 163
Majority, 19; rule defined, 57-
58; 60
Malthus, T. R., 85-87
Man, disenchanted, 13-21
Manchester, Lloyd George at,
188-189
Mayoral election in Chicago,
*7.
Merriam, Charles Edward, 17-
18
Methods of public men, 159
Mice, cats and clover, 31-32
Michelet, Simon, 16
Michels, Robert, 19, 22-23
Minorities, 58
Monistic theory, 161, 173
Monodrama, 163-165
Moral code, 29-30, 35, 74
Moral codes, 30
Moralists, 28
Morality, 100
Morrow, Dwight, 59-60
Morse, Prof., 59-60
Napoleon III., 14
National defense, problem de¬
fined, 90-91
Nationals, 196
Nationalism, 65
Neutralization of arbitrary
force, 67-74
Neutralized power, 193
Newspapers, 13
Nonvoting, 17-18
Officials, government, 72
Ogburn, W. F., 89, 100
Omnicompetency of citizens, 21,
39
One and Many problem, 171
Opinion, 48, 52, 56, 61
Opinion, public. See Public
opinion
Opinions defined, 44-49, 162,
*97
Opposition parties, 20
Party government, 59-60
Party in power, 126
Party system, 130
Parties, political, 127
Partisanship, 34
Pawlow, Ivan Petrovich, 30
People, 19, 36, 41; Macaulay on,
50; 61, 62, 68, 69, 71, 180, 181,
I9I, 194
People's will defined, 72
Physical force in South, 61
Plato, 169
Pluralistic theory defined, 151,
161, 194
Political capacity, 78
Political evils, agents against,
169
Political leaders, 19, 22
Political system changes, 84-85
Political talent neglected, 184
204
INDEX
Political theories defined, 22-39
Politicians, 41
Politics, truth in, 157-158
Policy, public, 57
Population, problem of, defined,
85-87
Power, arbitrary, 74; balance of,
defined, 192-196; of public
opinion, 70
Principles of public opinion, 143
Problem, nature of, 81-94; T3°>
of One and Many, 171
Problems of citizen defined, 13-
16; 25, 26, 34, 64, 72, 81-94,
125, 129, 131, 140, 141, 187
Professor, fable of, 28
Protocol for the Pacific Settle¬
ment of International Dis¬
putes, 133
Public, 42; powers defined, 49-
52, 54-62; relation to public
affairs defined, 63-66; 67, 68,
77, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108;
debate, value of, defined, 110-
114; 115, 118, 119, 120, 121,
122, 124, 125, 129, 131, 133,
134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145;
education defined, 146-151;
I5S, 156, 157, 1595 in any sit¬
uation defined, 168, 169;
dangers to, defined, 189-191;
193, 197,. 198
Public affairs, 13-21, 24, 25, 27,
28, 36, 38, 39, 4i, 44, 55, 56,
64, 69, 189
Public judgment, 115
Public life, candor in, 157
Public men, methods of, 159
Public office, education for, 151
Public opinion, 44, 48, 52, 53,
55; and public affairs, 55-56;
65; defined 65-70; 71, 72, 73,
74; function of, defined, 74;
79; principles of, 143; tests of,
defined, 144-145; *47, 151,
181, 197-200
Publicity, 43
Publics, random, 79
Question Aristotle asked, 77-80
Questions, two, 107
Realms of disorder, 187-200
Reason, 69
Reform Bill, 50
Reform, criteria of, 125-142
Reform, 129; test of, defined,
135-138
Reformer, 129, 130
Registered voters, 19
Revivalists, 22
Revolution, 59, 61, 136, 190
Revolution, French, 59, 183
Rights, 100
Rights and duties defined, 100-
107
Rousseau, J. J., 98
Rule, 68-69; defective, defined,
115-124
Rules. See Laws
Rules of society, 117
Rulers, absentee, defined, 173—
186
Santayana, George, 95
Schlesinger, A. M., 16
School, 14
Self-government, 19
Settlements, 120
Shaw, G. Bernard, 59
Smith, Logan Pearsall, 15-16,
26
Social contracts defined, 95-
106
Socialism, theory of, defined,
37-38, 39, 65
Socialists, 156
Society, 28, 30, 31, 32, 42, 45,
7L 73, 79,. 88, 98, 103, 106,
134; functions defined, 155-
161; defined, 155-172; 176,
183
INDEX
205
Socrates, 30
Sovereign people, 18-19
Sovereignty, 14
Standards, 30, 143
Statesmanship defined, 155-161
Steffen, Gustaf F., 19
Stoddard, Lothrop, 22
Submission, 162
Supply and demand, 92
System, economic, 94; prevail¬
ing, 100; of rights and duties,
100
Teachers, 27
Theory, citizen reigns in, 14
Thomson, J. Arthur, 31
Times (London), 50
Tocqueville, de, 183
Trade, 177
Truth, 67
Turks, 188
Tyranny, 70-71
Unattainable ideal, 22-39
United States government, 61
Validity of laws, 108
Value is measurement, 96
Value of public debate defined
110-114
Values, human, defined, 95-
97
Virtue, 30, 57_
Voice of public opinion defined,
197
Vote, 36, 55, 56
Voter, 19, 36, 146
Voters, 16-17, 18-19, 41
Voting, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59
War, 90, 190
Williams, John Sharp, 159
Wirt, William, 159
Woman suffrage, 60
Work, 173
World, 29
"World power or downfall,"
179
Yevreynoff, 163-164
Young, Arthur, 183