Public Opinion in War and Peace
by . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1923. 12mo. xii+303 pp. $2.50.
THIS volume again discusses public opinion, once before dealt with by President Lowell in Public Opinion and Popular Government (1913). In the earlier volume more stress was laid upon the election, with its returns and figures, as converting the choice of the individual into the recorded act of the group. In the new work, less emphasis is laid upon the steps through which the personal becomes the general decision, by means of party government, and more space is given to the working of the individual in reaching a choice and conclusion for all, as in the jury, which begins with various issues and ends with one of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty,’ bringing twelve minds to one verdict or a definite disagreement.
Modern psychology has its influence in unraveling the steps by which the individual reaches a conclusion. Similar steps are noted in the casual crowd, the group, the common-opinioned mass, and at length in the conscious tribe, race, or race-nation. As the individual is more likely to reach a choice, wise and definite, if various choices are centred upon one of two courses, so a village, a city, a country, is more likely to be clear in decision if two candidates, two parties, concentrate attention.
These vary in their workings in different countries. Historically, for a century an issue between two alternatives has grown more and more possible. As the mind churns itself to a decision more easily if it is shut in by civilized conventions and has education, so consciousness of past experience, the working of party machinery, brings a stream of various tendencies to a direct choice between alternatives made visible by parties, their principles, candidates, canvass, and elections, the character and action of which are the fruit of the past, ripened by the heat of conflict and at last garnered by a majority vote, not by right but of convenience. Opinion in war has its special, original, and clarifying exposition.
All this is lucid, logical, precisely suited to the still air of classroom and examination papers. The book represents, besides, the serious thought of an acute and high-minded thinker, and will be provocative of fruitful thought in others. The grave and limiting fact, however,—a fact for which President Lowell cannot be held responsible — is that the discussion of the working of our political institutions, and of our parties and campaigns, comes too much from lives safely anchored and detached from peril. It is a great misfortune, alike to the progress of these sciences and to the public of readers, that writers on these subjects are in a large proportion those whose lives and callings shut them apart from a competition as severe as that in law, medicine, and engineering, in business, in politics, in affairs, and in the newspaper and periodical field. Personal experience of the struggle of life greatly increases the consciousness of the share which passion, emotion, and risk play in choice and in action. Swelling tides of feeling and the deep tragedy of events decide national choices. Had Sumter not been fired upon, had the Maine not been blown up, had Germany not shut us off the free seas, national choice would have long waited, while the enginery of choice registered no decision. News and the newspapers link the machinery of national choice with the march of events. Especially for those who record and disseminate the news such an inquiry into the psychology of the public as President Lowell has made in this book should be an object of attentive study.
TALCOTT WILLIAMS.