narily perspicacious and instructive, but his distinction. between public and other kinds of opinion is inferior to Lowell's. It is not the nature of the action to which opinions may lead that makes them public; it is the extent to which they are shared by the members of a community or state. The fact that an opinion may be acted upon even by the rulers of the state does not determine its character as public opinion. It is rather the character of the opinions which are acted upon that determines whether the government is popular or not.

The obstacles in the way of the development of an How shall public enlightened public opinion constitute the greatest difficulty opinion be which popular government has to overcome. Lippmann, recognized? recognizing the impossibility that the people of a modern state should acquire under existing conditions a competent opinion about all public affairs, argues that representative government cannot be worked successfully, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts of the Great Society intelligible to those who have to decide public questions. Certainly the improvement of the supply of "news" and "statistics" would greatly improve the conduct of public affairs in democratic states. But it is not enough to establish the conditions under which intelligent public opinion may be formed. It is also necessary to ensure that real public opinion shall be recognized, when formed, and that, in default of real public opinion, the better considered opinions of the people shall be distinquished from the "gusts of passion" and the less deliberate opinions against which masses of men, like individuals, are not immune.

of the aver

age man

A recent writer has suggested a test for recognizing The opinion public opinion, when it exists, or for distinguishing the opinion which is most nearly public from those which are less. "Among a free people the rôle of the ruler is merely to interpret and so far as possible to secure the effective

The unreality of

man

realization of the drift of sentiment registered in the experience of the average man. A despotic government assures for itself stability by controlling the sentiments of the average man in the interest of a select group. A democracy secures political and national permanence by vesting the ultimate responsibility for national action in the average man.'

So public opinion is to be found in the opinion of the the average average man. If by "average" is meant what is technically meant by the word, this is an extraordinary doctrine. When we try to discover this average man, we find that there is no such animal. We can ascertain the average size of men, or their average length of life, their average amount of education, or income, or wealth, but we cannot find the average man himself. In the United States he would be about six-sevenths native born, and one-seventh alien. He would be about nine-tenths white, and less than one-tenth black, with traces of yellow and red. Such a specimen, if he were available, would be of no interest to the political scientist. Certainly the word, as used by the writer referred to, is not intended to be understood in this sense. It is doubtless employed in the sense which Bryce gives it in his lecture on The Hindrances to Good Citizenship. "Let us fix our eyes," he said, "on the Average Man, because in a popular government he is the man to whom everything is ultimately referred, upon whom everything ultimately turns. .. Strictly speaking, there is no Average Man. . . . If, taking any group of men, we strike off ten per cent as exceptionally intelligent and ten per cent as exceptionally dull, and then try to find a description. which is broadly or roughly true of the remaining eighty per cent in the particular aspect-here the civic aspectin which they are to be studied, that will be a description of the Average Man. It will not be precisely true of any 1 John M. Mecklin, Introduction to Social Ethics, p. 8.

one person in the eighty per cent, but it will be so far true that the range of variation between the extremes will be small; and it will, therefore, be true enough for most practical purposes." The average man thus becomes what has been elsewhere termed the normal man.

By thinking in terms of the average or normal man it is The opinions of possible perhaps to disregard the opinions of the upper and actual men lower tenths of the population and thereby to simplify somewhat the problem of public opinion. But that problem still involves an analysis of the opinions of four-fifths of the whole body of people, and among these four-fifths there remains the greatest diversity of interests. Moreover, individuals who share the same interests will attach very different degrees of importance to them. Of four men of identical color who belong to the same race, the same class, the same trade, and the same church, one may cherish his racial associations and interests above all others, another, the interests which he shares with the other members of his class, a third, the interests of his trade, and the fourth may put first his religion and the interests of his church. There is room among the people of a modern state for an unlimited variety of individuals, regarded in the light of their permutations and combinations of interests. It is impossible to visualize any particular one of them as the average or normal man, or to substitute his opinions for those of the whole body of people as a guide to the responsible statesman. Practical politicians do not much concern themselves with the opinions of theoretical men. Their business is with the actual men whose opinions will be supported by their influence and votes. The political scientist, like the politician, can not depend on abstractions, though he does well to know as much as he can about the normal man, and, more precisely, what the statisticians would call the median and modal man, in the several categories in 1 Bryce, op. cit., pp. 17-18.

The
"interests"

which men may be placed on the basis of their comparative wealth, income, knowledge, intelligence, morality, and other characteristics. Above all he needs to know about actual men, for it is the activities of actual men, both in and out of public office, which constitute the process of government.1 Public opinion is the opinion not merely of the average or normal man. It is the opinion action upon which is ungrudgingly acquiesced in by all men, or at least by all whom it concerns, and which they can check up, if necessary, by their own knowledge of a substantial part of the facts required for a rational decision.

The most cursory analysis of the whole mass of opinion which influences the rulers of a modern state indicates how little of it is truly public, and how much is the opinion of particular combinations or groups of men, of special interests, as people say. Groups of men, belonging to the same political community, are united more or less strongly by ties of race, color, social and economic condition, religion, occupation, trade or profession, locality, and so forth, and the members of such a group pool their resources, according to the felt importance of their common interests, in order to make their opinions most effective. The same man may and generally does belong to several such groups and consequently shares in the creation of several bodies of opinion, which compete for the attention of the political authorities and sometimes even conflict with one another. The special interests of different men always conflict with the special interests of others, and the activities arising out of these conflicts of interest unhappily absorb much of the energy of mankind. Amid this pressure of contending groups the rulers of men pursue their tasks. A state whose rulers can rely in a substantial measure on the support of a spirit of conscious devotion to the com

1 This idea is elaborated in an illuminating essay by Arthur F. Bentley, entitled, The Process of Government, A Study in Social Pressures.

mon good is built upon a firm foundation indeed; but whatever be the measure of that spirit among the people of a modern state, its rulers must also allow for the special interests of contending groups and the conflict of power with power. It is an indispensable condition of good government to establish an equilibrium of forces, assuring to each its due influence in the conduct of affairs and thereby preventing such an accumulation of stresses and strains at any point as would destroy the stability of the community.

government

Under a so-called popular government we may say that The nature the people rule, but only in the sense that a comparatively of popular few of them, temporarily vested with authority, are held to a course of conduct responsive not merely to the preponderant bodies of opinion in the community, but in due measure to all that are deliberately formed and substantial. Popular sovereignty, rightly understood, is a philosophical, not a juristic, concept. The governments of modern democracies are merely more or less popular according to the degree to which the preponderant opinion in the conduct of public affairs approximates true public opinion. How to bring about a closer approximation and how to infuse public opinion itself with the spirit of dispassionate reason and informed intelligence are among the foremost problems of popular government. But above all is the problem of the Its foremost problem foundations of the state itself. James Madison, the leading architect of "the more perfect Union" under the Constitution of the United States, understood as well as any modern statesman the true nature of this foremost problem of popular government. "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men," he wrote in the tenth number of The Federalist, "the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

In order to enable the government to control the governed, it is necessary first to understand the nature of the