It follows that, in a well organised nation, public opinion, which is formed and maintained so largely by the influence of leading personalities, will usually be more in conformity with the sentiments of the best men than of the average man, will be above rather than below private opinion. For, if the bad and the good men of exceptional powers were equal in numbers and capacity, the sum of their influences tending directly to exalt public opinion would be enormously greater than the sum of their influences tending to degrade it; and, as a matter of fact, the influence for good of a few altruistic leaders is able to outweigh the degrading influences of a much larger number of purely selfish men of equally great capacities, and is able to maintain a high standard of public opinion.
We have distinguished a formal and an informal organisation of the national deliberative processes, the latter expressing itself as public opinion. These two organisations co-exist and are, of course, not altogether independent of one another; yet they may be to a considerable extent independent; though the more intimate the functional relations and the greater the harmony between them, the healthier will be the national life.
We may note in passing an interesting difference in respect to organisation of the national mind between the English and the American peoples, a difference which illustrates this relative independence of the formal and informal organisations.
In England both the formal and informal organisations have achieved a pretty good level; in both cases the best minds are enabled to exert and have long exerted a dominant influence; and the interaction between the two organisations is very intimate. But in America, while the informal organisation expressed in public opinion seems to be very highly developed, the formal organisation is much inferior; it has not yet such traditions as give the greatest influence to the best minds and embody the effects of their influence. And the better Americans tend to value lightly the formal organisation, to take no part in the working of it, deliberately to ignore it, and to rely rather upon public opinion to repress any evils when they are in danger of reaching an intolerable development.
Both in the formal organisation of the national mind, which is the parliamentary or other national assembly, and in the informal organisation which is public opinion, we see, then, that (in the nation of higher civilisation at least) organisation results in a raising of the collective mental process above the level of the average minds, because it gives a predominant influence to the best minds who form and maintain the traditions, especially the moral traditions; and these press upon the minds of all members of the community from their earliest years, moulding them more or less into conformity with themselves, fostering the better, repressing the purely egoistic, tendencies.
And the ideal organisation after which we ought to strive, is that which would give the greatest possible influence of this sort to the best minds, an influence which consists not in merely organising and directing the energies of the people in the manner most effective for material or even scientific progress, as in modern Germany; but one which, by moulding the sentiments and guiding the reasoning of the people in all matters, public and private alike, secures their consent and agreement and the co-operation of their wills in all affairs of national importance.
When such organisation is in any degree attained and a more or less consistent system of national traditions is embodied in the political, religious, literary, and scientific culture, which moulds in some degree the minds of all men, the national mind clearly becomes, as we said in an earlier chapter, a system of interacting mental forces which are not merely tendencies of the living members of the nation, but are also, in an even greater degree, the ideas and tendencies of the dead; and we see also that in such a people the national consciousness is most truly embodied, not in the minds of the average men, but in the minds of the best men of the time.
The term ‘public opinion’ is sometimes, perhaps generally, used in a looser and wider sense than the meaning implied in the foregoing pages. It is used in the looser sense by President Lowell in his Public Opinion and Popular Government. By ‘public opinion’ he seems to mean simply the algebraic sum or balance of individual opinions; he writes “the opinion of the whole people is only the collected opinions of all the persons therein[103].” In accordance with this view, he regards representative institutions as merely one means by which this sum of opinions may be collected and recorded. And he seems to be prepared to regard the ‘referendum’ or the ‘initiative’ in any of their forms, or other methods of direct legislation, as equally good methods, if only all individuals would take the trouble to register their votes upon every question proposed to them. He is aware, of course, that this can hardly be expected of persons who have other interests and occupations than the purely political, and that the direct methods are therefore impracticable as general methods of legislation. If it were true that representative institutions do and should merely collect and record the individual opinions of all members of the public, then it is obvious that each representative should be merely a delegate sent to record the votes of the majority of his constituents. Whereas, if representative institutions should, and in various degrees do, constitute the formal deliberative organisation of the national mind, through which national deliberation and judgment are raised to a higher plane than that of a mere crowd, it follows that the representative should exert his own powers of reasoning and judgment, aided by his special knowledge and equipment, by the special sources of information that he enjoys, in the light of the discussions in which he takes part, and influenced by all those political traditions whose force he experiences in exceptional fulness by reason of his priviledged position. President Lowell, in discussing the functions of the representative, does not decide in favour of the former view, as consistency should perhaps lead him to do; thereby showing that he is not wholly committed to the individualist view. He discusses the question whether the member of Parliament or Congress should regard himself as representing the interests of his constituents alone, or as concerned primarily and chiefly with the interests of the whole people; and he rightly inclines to the latter view. This is not quite the same distinction as that which is insisted upon in these pages. Even if each representative were concerned only for the welfare of the nation as a whole, yet so long as he regarded it as his sole function to vote as he believes the majority of the citizens would vote in any process of direct legislation, he would fall short of the highest duty which is laid upon him by his position—namely, not merely that of recording the opinion of the majority, but that of taking part in the organised deliberative activities of the national mind by which it arrives at judgments and decisions of a higher order than any purely individual, or algebraic sum of individual, judgments and decisions[104].
Public opinion, in the sense in which I have used the words in this chapter (which seems to me the only proper use of them) is, then, not a mere sum of individual opinions upon any particular question; it is rather the expression of that tone or attitude of mind which prevails throughout the nation and owes its quality far more to the influence of the dead than of the living, being the expression of the moral sentiments that are firmly and traditionally established in the mind of the people, and established more effectively and in more refined forms in the minds of the leaders of public opinion than in the average citizen. This tone of the national mind enables it to arrive at just judgments on questions of right and wrong, of duty and honour and public desert; though it may have little bearing upon such practical questions as bimetallism, tariff reform, or railway legislation. The current use of the term, in this country at least, does, I think, recognise that public opinion properly applies only to the sphere of moral judgments and can and should have no bearing upon the practical details of legislation. Public opinion is, both in its development and in its operations, essentially collective; it is essentially the work of the group mind. Its accepted standards of value are slowly built up under the influence of the moral leaders of past ages; and, in the application of those standards to any particular question, the influence of the moral leaders of the time makes itself felt. I have kept in mind in the foregoing pages the public opinion of the nation; but every community, every association, every enduring group has its own public opinion, which, though it is influenced by, and indeed is, as it were, a branch of, the main stem of national public opinion and is therefore of the same fibre and texture, has nevertheless its own peculiar tone and quality, especially in regard to the moral questions with which each group is specially concerned.