This experiment in democracy is conducted in the faith that it will have one, that the mass of mankind may be lifted up so that there will be as much freedom of thinking in a democratic society as there once was in an aristocratic society. It is the bravest experiment in history but its success is afar off, Rousseau's belief in Thérèse to the contrary notwithstanding.
In the present state of undeveloped mind and overdeveloped machinery of communication public opinion is a great negative force. It does nothing constructive. It can only be thoroughly aroused by a suggestion of danger. Statesmen are both afraid of it and despise it, and between contempt and fear are reduced to temporary expedients.
So that when we speak of government by public opinion we speak of something that has been as badly shaken as government by business, or executive government or party government or any one of the various governments upon which we once relied. The war has made it almost as intolerable as it made autocracy, as practiced by Mr. Wilson.
Shall official Washington turn to public opinion as its guide? Official Washington is busy all the time with all the arts it used during the war shaping public opinion to its own ends. It must have been hard for a king's minister to believe in the divinity of the monarch he was gulling. And at any moment public opinion may belong to Mr. Hearst.
This new ruler by divine right is not going to be so easy to dethrone as his predecessors. No new Rousseau will discern a new Thérèse. Mr. Walter Lippmann would set up in its place the expert by divine right, but the expert is a palpable pretender.
The best hope for the present moment is perhaps to divide the public. Minorities based on interest will at least be constructive. Organized, they may offer an effective resistance. Out of them may come a development of the public mind.
If Jefferson were writing today he might say that the farm bloc contained the "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." At any rate it tills the soil.
If we break up the threatening mass which the war has taught us to fear, there might be organized a thinkers' bloc. Thinking in this country certainly needs a bloc.