Before war was declared in France there was anxiety, speculation. After mobilization began, discussion ceased. The national ideal was exalted. The individual ceased to exist. Men ceased even to think. They simply obeyed. This is what happened in all the belligerent countries except America. It did not quite happen here. Under such circumstances public opinion ceases to exist. This is quite as true in a democracy as it is in an autocracy.
The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is not that in one the will of the people finds expression and in the other it does not. It is simply that in a democracy a larger number of the citizens participate in the discussions which give rise to public opinion. At least they are supposed to do so. In a democracy everyone belongs, or is supposed to belong, to one great public. In an autocracy there are perhaps many little publics.
What rôle do the schools and colleges play in the formation of public opinion? The schools transmit the tradition. They standardize our national prejudices and transmit them. They do this necessarily.
A liberal or college education tends to modify and qualify all our inherited political, religious, and social prejudices. It does so by bringing into the field of discussion matters that would not otherwise get into the public consciousness. In this way a college education puts us in a way to control our prejudices instead of being controlled by them. This is the purpose of a liberal education.
The emancipation which history, literature, and a wider experience with life give us permits us to enter sympathetically into the lives and interests of others; it widens that area over which public opinion rather than force exercises control.
It makes it possible to extend the area of political control. It means the extension of democratic participation in the common life. The universities, by their special studies in the field of social science, are seeking to accumulate and bring into the view of public opinion a larger body of attested fact upon which the public may base its opinion.
It is probably not the business of the universities to agitate reforms nor to attempt directly to influence public opinion in regard to current issues. To do this is to relax its critical attitude, lessen its authority in matters of fact, and jeopardize its hard-won academic freedom. When a university takes over the function of a political party or a church it ceases to perform its function as a university.
6. News and Social Control[271]
Everywhere today men are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
I do not agree with those who think that the sole cause is corruption. There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs, petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the Paris Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example of their species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of modern journalism.