CHAPTER VII
Our Moulders of Opinion
“There never was a time,” says Justice Brewer, in the concluding lecture of a series recently delivered by him at Yale University, “when public opinion was more potent.” Possibly the saying is true; but whatever force it may have lies in the application. Public opinion may make for a general passivity—an acquiescence in things as they are—quite as much as for a general strenuousness. Nowhere, for instance, among civilized peoples, is public opinion more powerful than in a quiet and isolated community, held fast to certain habitual modes of speech and action. Only a brave man, or a desperate woman, so environed, would dare defy the tribal customs.
Public opinion in these United States may be more potent than ever before, but the personal attitude which it supports and encourages becomes more and more one of acquiescence in the existing régime. A legislative reaction and a judicial reaction are manifested; and a growing irritation is expressed, as from time to time those rude disturbers of the public peace, the social reformers, come forward with plans for curing imputed evils. Social and political quietism becomes our everyday philosophy. An “air of contentment and enthusiastic cheerfulness ... characterizes our society,” writes Professor William G. Sumner, of Yale, in a recent number of the Independent; and though the judgment might be somewhat more accurately worded, he is not far wrong. A keen-eyed observer from Italy,—Professor Angelo Mosso, of Turin,—who visited us a few years ago, gives somewhat similar testimony. The fact astonishes him, as he confesses, since he saw much of political and industrial evil which he could not comprehend a democracy enduring; yet for all that the evidence was convincing.
I
Among the causes making for this acquiescence in existing social conditions, there are three which may be considered here. The first is the one which so strongly impressed Professor Mosso. It is the rage for individual exploitation. The imaginations of most men are fired by the spectacle of the few achieving great fortunes; each believes that a like fortune lies somewhere within his own reach, and with blind fatuity he tolerates conditions which he instinctively feels to be inequitable, simply because he expects himself to master them. “I believe,” writes Professor Mosso, “that the desire to become wealthy is so strong and powerful in every American that, in order to reserve the opportunity of realizing such desire, Americans willingly submit to the continuance of laws which allow such accumulations.” It is the petty gambler’s faith, the conviction that, though everything be against him, he will somehow “beat the game.” And just as the petty gambler’s faith is fostered by the runners and “cappers” for faro, policy, roulette, and keno, so the faith of the industrial underling is fostered by a tremendous trumpeting of the ways and means to worldly “success.” The preaching of “success” has become, in these last five years, a distinct profession, honored and well recompensed.
A second cause of the prevailing acquiescence in the present régime applies more particularly to social reformers, and to those who, while not actively enlisted as “come-outers,” do yet sympathize with the activities of their more aggressive brethren. It is a feeling, born of years of experience in promoting some collective good, of the hopelessness of achievement. Opposed at all points, frustrated at many, there comes a time, sooner or later, when all but the most resolute reformers are forced to admit that little or nothing can be done. Many thereupon fall back into the ranks of the do-nothings and the care-nothings; while others, in whom the fire of purpose is not entirely quenched, reluctantly exchange their radical and comprehensive plans of social changes for more narrow and immediate purposes,—the giving of small charities, the doing of near-at-hand services, and the occasional support of a particular public measure.
II
A third, and perhaps the most important, cause is the continual output from pulpit, sanctum, forum, and college chair, of our professional moulders of opinion. Now not all of this output, it is freely conceded, makes for acquiescence; but the overwhelming mass of it unquestionably does. From these instructors of the people we learn that conditions, while not perfect, either are reasonably near to perfection, or, if evil, are not to be corrected except by individual regeneration. We learn of the irrationality or the moral obliquity of discontent; the viciousness or fanaticism of impertinent persons who seek to change things; the virtues of obedience; the obligation of toil (specifically directed to those who are doing most of the world’s work, for the profit of others), and of the worth, benevolence, and indispensability of our magnates.
The denunciation of discontent becomes more common and more emphatic. A plentiful crop of instances is always forthcoming to any one who cares to look for them. The generation of Rousseau and the following generation of Jefferson set high hopes for mankind on the faculty of discontent. The past generation, compromising between theology and evolution, found in discontent a perpetual factor making for the creation of a better environment. But our present reaction takes us back to the days of the Stuarts. The magnificent invectives of Dryden, voiced in that—