PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

same reaction takes place in many people. But even in these
rudimentary cases there are persons who know what they want to do more
quickly than the rest, and who become impromptu ringleaders. Where
they do not appear a crowd will mill about aimlessly beset by all its
private aims, or stand by fatalistically, as did a crowd of fifty
persons the other day, and watch a man commit suicide.
For what we make out of most of the impressions that come to us from
the invisible world is a kind of pantomime played out in revery. The
number of times is small that we consciously decide anything about
events beyond our sight, and each man's opinion of what he could
accomplish if he tried, is slight. There is rarely a practical issue,
and therefore no great habit of decision. This would be more evident
were it not that most information when it reaches us carries with it
an aura of suggestion as to how we ought to feel about the news. That
suggestion we need, and if we do not find it in the news we turn to
the editorials or to a trusted adviser. The revery, if we feel
ourselves implicated, is uncomfortable until we know where we stand,
that is, until the facts have been formulated so that we can feel Yes
or No in regard to them.
When a number of people all say Yes they may have all kinds of reasons
for saying it. They generally do. For the pictures in their minds are,
as we have already noted, varied in subtle and intimate ways. But this
subtlety remains within their minds; it becomes represented publicly
by a number of symbolic phrases which carry the individual emotion
after evacuating most of the intention. The hierarchy, or, if it is a
contest, then the two hierarchies, associate the symbols with a
definite action, a vote of Yes or No, an attitude pro or con. Then
Smith who was against the League and Jones who was against Article X,
and Brown who was against Mr. Wilson and all his works, each for his
own reason, all in the name of more or less the same symbolic phrase,
register a vote _against_ the Democrats by voting for the
Republicans. A common will has been expressed.
A concrete choice had to be presented, the choice had to be connected,
by the transfer of interest through the symbols, with individual
opinion. The professional politicians learned this long before the
democratic philosophers. And so they organized the caucus, the
nominating convention, and the steering committee, as the means of
formulating a definite choice. Everyone who wishes to accomplish
anything that requires the cooperation of a large number of people
follows their example. Sometimes it is done rather brutally as when
the Peace Conference reduced itself to the Council of Ten, and the
Council of Ten to the Big Three or Four; and wrote a treaty which the
minor allies, their own constituents, and the enemy were permitted to
take or leave. More consultation than that is generally possible and
desirable. But the essential fact remains that a small number of heads