Therefore you do not reach the "deposit for virtue" by simply employing an intelligence unencumbered by mental processes. You must at least assure that intelligence against fear, a serious limitation upon the doctrine of an infallible public opinion.
Students of public opinion will for a long time go back to the period of the war for their materials. Opinion was then unmistakable. The methods by which it was formed were clear. In times of great peril men throw off their polite disguises and are frank; so too are institutions.
The making of opinion became an official function in which we all co-operated. We bound ourselves voluntarily not to publish and not to regard any information inconsistent with the state of mind which it was deemed expedient to create and maintain. We probably always in the forming of opinion tacitly impose voluntary censorships, but they are so habitual, so unconscious, so covered with traditional hypocrisy, that it is difficult to bring them into the light.
Conscious self-deception to the good end of keeping ourselves united and determined was during the war a great virtue. Playing upon prejudice, rousing the depths of the primitive mind in man, was a laudable act of patriotism.
What happened then was only an exaggeration of what happens all the time, for war makes no new contributions to the art of self-government. In war we merely throw off the restraints of peace and impose others which operate in the reverse direction. In peace we are shamefaced about direct killing; in war we brag of it. In peace we are shamefaced about manufacturing public opinion; in war it is our patriotic duty.
No, war has made us rather doubtful about Thérèse. After all Rousseau was a prejudiced witness. When you take to your bosom a lady who cannot learn to tell time by the clock, you have to make out a case for her—or for yourself. When like Jefferson and his successors you take to your bosom the public, you have to make out a case for it, for the deposit for substantial and genuine virtue that you rely upon.
The war revealed at once the immense power and the immense dangers of public opinion when its full force is aroused and one hundred million people come to think—thinking is not the word—to feel, as one man. Minorities, the great corrective in democracy, disappeared. They had their choice of going to jail or bowing to the general will.
Few realized this alternative, so irresistible was the mob impulse, awakened by the sense of common danger, even to individuals ordinarily capable of maintaining their detachment. The primitive instinct of self-preservation subdued all capacity for independent thinking, so that one who has ordinarily the habit of making up his own mind, a most difficult habit to maintain in modern society, can not look back on himself during the war without a sense of shame. Romain Rolland, in Clérambeault, pictures the devastating effect of public opinion at its mightiest upon the individual conscience.
The mechanism by which this state of mind was created was unconcealed. The government reserved to itself the right to suppress truth or to put out untruth for the common good. Private organizations of endless number co-operated to this laudable end. The press submitted itself to a voluntary censorship, passing the responsibility for what it printed over to society whose general end of maintaining unity for the real or imaginary necessities of self-defense it served. A lynch law of opinion was established by common consent.
What went on during the war goes on, though less openly and less formidably, all of the time. Everyone realizes the immense power of public opinion. Many seek to direct its formation. The government conducts all of the time a vast propaganda, always with a certain favor of the press.