9. Freedom and Government by Crowds

Ever since the days of Rousseau certain crowds have persisted in the conviction that all tyrannies were foisted upon an innocent humanity by a designing few. There may have been a few instances in history where such was the case, but tyrannies of that kind have never lasted long. For the most part the tyrant is merely the instrument and official symbol of a dominant crowd. His acts are his crowd's acts, and without his crowd to support him he very soon goes the way of the late Sultan of Turkey. The Caesars were hardly more than "walking delegates," representing the ancient Roman Soldiers' soviet. They were made and unmade by the army which, though Caesars might come and Caesars might go, continue to lord it over the Roman world. While the army was pagan, even the mild Marcus Aurelius followed Nero's example of killing Christians. When finally the army itself became largely Christian, and the fiction that the Christians drank human blood, worshiped the head of an ass, and were sexually promiscuous was no longer good patriotic propaganda, the Emperor Constantine began to see visions of the Cross in the sky. The Pope, who is doubtless the most absolute monarch in the Occident, is, however, "infallible" only when he speaks ex cathedra - that is, as the "Church Herself." His infallibility is that of the Church. All crowds in one way or another claim infallibility. The tyrant Robespierre survived only so long as did his particular revolutionary crowd in France.

The fate of Savoranala was similar. From his pulpit he could rule Florence with absolute power just so long as his crowd was able to keep itself together and remain dominant. The Stuarts, Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, with all their claims to divine rights, were little more than the living symbols of their respective nation-crowds. They vanished when they ceased to represent successfully the crowd-will.

In general, then, it may be said that where the crowd is, there is tyranny. Tyranny may be exercised through one agent or through many, but it nearly always comes from the same source - the crowd. Crowd-rule may exist in a monarchical form of government, or in a republic. The personnel of the dominant crowd will vary with a change in form of the state, but the spirit will be much the same. Conservative writers are in the habit of assuming that democracy is the rule of crowds pure and simple. Whether crowd-government is more absolute in a democracy then in differently constituted states is a question. The aim of democratic constitutions like our own is to prevent any special crowd from intrenching itself in a position of social control and thus becoming a ruling class. As the experiment has worked out thus far it can hardly be said that it has freed us from the rule of crowds. It has, however, multiplied the number of mutually suspicious crowds, so that no one of them has for long enjoyed a sufficiently great majority to make itself clearly supreme, though it must be admitted that up to the present the business-man crowd has had the best of the deal. The story of the recent Eighteenth Amendment shows how easy it is for a determined crowd, even though in a minority, to force its favorite dogmas upon the whole community. We shall doubtless see a great deal more of this sort of thing in the future than we have in the past. And if the various labor groups should become sufficiently united in a "proletarian" crowd there is nothing to prevent their going to any extreme.

We are passing through a period of socialization. All signs point to the establishment of some sort of social state or industrial commonwealth. No one can foresee the extent to which capital now privately owned is to be transferred to the public. It is doubtful if anything can be done to check this process. The tendency is no sooner blocked along one channel than it begins to seep through another. In itself there need be nothing alarming about this transition. If industry could be better co-ordinated and more wisely administered by non-crowd men for the common good, the change might work out to our national advantage.

It is possible to conceive of a society in which a high degree of social democracy, even communism, might exist along with a maximum of freedom and practical achievement. But we should first have to get over our crowd-ways of thinking and acting. People would have to regard the state as a purely administrative affair. They would have to organize for definite practical ends, and select their leaders and administrators very much as certain corporations now do, strictly on the basis of their competency. Political institutions would have to be made such that they could not be seized by any special groups to enhance themselves at the expense of the rest. Partisanship would have to cease. Every effort would have to be made to loosen the social control over the individual's personal habits. The kind of people who have an inner gnawing to regulate their neighbors, the kind who cannot accept the fact of their psychic inferiority and must consequently make crowds by way of compensation, would have to be content to mind their own business. Police power would have to be reduced to the minimum necessary to protect life and keep the industries running. People would have to become much more capable of self-direction as well as of voluntary co-operation than they are now. They would have to become more resentful of petty official tyranny, more independent in their judgements and at the same time more willing to accept the advice and authority of experts. They would have to place the control off affairs in the hands of the type of man against whose dominance the weaker brethren have in all ages waged war - that is, the free spirits and natural masters of men. All pet dogmas and cult ideas that clashed with practical considerations would have to be swept away.

Such a conception of society is, of course, wholly utopian. It could not possibly be realized by people behaving and thinking as crowds. With our present crowd-making habits, the process of greater socialization of industry means only increased opportunities for crowd-tyranny. In the hands of a dominant crowd an industrial state would be indeed what Herbert Spencer called the "coming slavery."

As it is, the state has become overgrown and bureaucratic. Commissions of all sorts are being multiplied year by year. Public debts are piled up till they approach the point of bankruptcy. Taxes are increasing in the same degree. Statutes are increased in number until one can hardly breathe without violating some decree, ordinance, or bit of sumptuary legislation. Every legislative assembly is constantly beseiged by the professional lobbyists of a swarm of reformist crowds. Busybodies of every description twist the making an enforcement of law into conformity with their particular prejudices. Censorships of various kinds are growing in number and effrontery. Prohibition is insincerely put forth as a war measure. Ignorant societies for the "suppression of vice" maul over our literature and our art. Parents of already more children than they can support may not be permitted lawfully to possess scientific knowledge of the means of the prevention of conception. The government, both state and national, takes advantage of the war for freedom to pass again the hated sort of "alien and sedition" laws from which the country thought it had freed itself a century ago. A host of secret agents and volunteer "guardians of public safety" are ready to place every citizen under suspicion of disloyalty to the government. Any advocacy of significant change in established political practices is regarded as sedition. An inquisition is set up for the purposes of inquiring into people's private political opinions. Reputable citizens are, on the flimsiest hearsay evidence or rumor that they entertain nonconformist views, subjected to public censure by notoriety-seeking "investigation commissions" - and by an irresponsible press. Only members of an established political party in good standing are permitted to criticize the acts of the President of the United States. Newspapers and magazines are suppressed and denied the privilege of the mails at the whim of opinionated post-office workers or of ignorant employees of the Department of Justice. An intensely patriotic weekly paper in New York, which happened to hold unconventional views on the subject of religion, has had certain issues of its paper suppressed for the offence of publishing accounts of the alleged misconduct of the Y.C.M.A.

The stupidity and irresponsibility of the Russian spy-system which has grown up in this country among with our overweening state is illustrated by an amusing little experience which happened to myself several months after the signing of the armistice with Germany. All through the trying months of the war the great audience of Cooper Union had followed me with a loyalty and tolerance which was truly wonderful. Though I knew that many had not always been in hearty accord with my rather spontaneous and outspoken Americanism, the Cooper Union Forum was one of the few places in America where foreign and labor elements were present in large numbers in which there was no outbreak or demonstration of any kind which could possibly be interpreted as un-American. We all felt that perhaps the People's Institute with all its record of twenty years' work behind it had been of some real service to the nation in adhering strictly to its educational method and keeping its discussions wholly above the level of any sort of crowd-propaganda.

However, in the course of our educational work, it became my task to give to a selected group of advanced students a course of lectures upon the Theory of Knowledge. The course was announced with the title, "How Free Men Think," and the little folder contained the statement that it was to be a study of the Humanist logic, with Professor F. C. S. Schiller's philosophical writings to be used as textbooks. The publication of this folder announcing the course was held up by the printer, and we learned that he had been told not to print it by some official personage whose identity was not revealed. Notwithstanding the fact that Schiller is professor of philosophy in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and is one of the best-known philosophical writers in the English-speaking world, and holds views practically identical with what is called the "American School," led by the late William James, it developed that the government agents - or whoever they were - objected to the publication of the announcement on the ground that they thought Schiller was a German. Such is our intellectual freedom regarding matters which have no political significance whatever, in a world made "safe for democracy." But we must not permit ourselves to despair or grow weary of life in this "safety first" world - waves of pseudo-patriotic panic often follow on the heels of easily won victory. Crowd-phenomena of such intensity are usually of short duration, as these very excesses soon produce the inevitable reaction.

The question, however, arises, is democracy more conducive to freedom than other forms of political organization? To most minds the term "liberty" and "democracy" are almost synonymous. Those who consider that liberty consists in having a vote, in giving everyone a voice regardless of whether he has anything to say, will have no doubts in the matter. But to those whose thinking means more than the mere repetition of eighteenth-century crowd-ideas, the question will reduce itself to this: Is democracy more conducive to crowd-behavior than other forms of government? Le Bon and those who identify the crowd with the masses would answer with an a priori affirmative. I do not believe the question may be answered in any such offhand manner. It is a question of fact rather than of theory. Theoretically, since we have demonstrated I think that the crowd is not the common people as such, but is a peculiar form of psychic behavior, it would seem that there is no logical necessity for holding that democracy must always and everywhere be the rule of the mob. And we have seen that other forms of society may also suffer from crowd-rule. I suspect that the repugnance which certain aristocratic, and bourgeois writers also, show for democracy is less the horror of crowd-rule as such, than dislike of seeing control pass over to a crowd other than their own. Theoretically, at least, democracy calls for a maximum of self-government and personal freedom. The fact that democracy is rapidly degenerating into tyranny of all over each may be due, not to the democratic ideal itself, but the growing tendency to crowd-behavior in modern times. It may be that certain democratic ideals are not so much causes as effects of crowd-thinking and action. It cannot be denied that such ideals come in very handy these days in the way of furnishing crowds with effective catchwords for their propaganda and of providing them with ready-made justifications for their will to power. I should say that democracy has indirectly permitted, rather than directly caused, an extension in the range of thought and behavior over which the crowd assumes dictatorship.

In comparing democracy with more autocratic forms of government, this extent or range of crowd-control over the individual is important. Of course, human beings will never permit to one another a very large degree of personal freedom. It is to the advantage of everyone in the struggle for existence to reduce his neighbors as much as possible to automatons. In this way one's own adjustment to the behavior of others is made easier. If we can induce or compel all about us to confine their actions to perfect routine, then we may predict with a fair degree of accuracy their future behavior, and be prepared in advance to meet it. We all dread the element of the unexpected, and nowhere so much as in the conduct of our neighbors. If we could only get rid of the humanly unexpected, society would be almost fool-proof. Hence the resistance to new truths, social change, progress, nonconformity of any sort; hence our orthodoxies and conventions; hence our incessant preaching to our neighbors to "be good"; hence the fanaticism with which every crowd strives to keep its believers in line. Much of this insistence on regularity is positively necessary. Without it there can be no social or moral order at all. It is in fact the source and security of the accepted values of civilization, as Schiller has shown.

But the process of keeping one another in line is carried much farther than is necessary to preserve the social order. It is insisted upon to the extent that will guarantee the survival, even the dominance, of the spiritually sick, the morally timid, the trained-animal men, those who would revert to savagery, or stand utterly helpless the moment a new situation demanded that they do some original thinking in the place of performing the few stereotyped tricks which they have acquired; the dog-in-the-manger people, who because they can eat no meat insist that all play the dyspeptic lest the well-fed outdistance them in the race of life or set them an example in following which they get the stomach ache; the people who, because they cannot pass a saloon door without going in and getting drunk, cannot see a moving-picture, or read a modern book, or visit a bathing beach without being tormented with their gnawing promiscuous eroticism, insist upon setting up their own perverted dilemmas as the moral standard for everybody.

Such people exist in great numbers in every society. They are always strong for "brotherly love," for keeping up appearances, for removing temptation from the path of life, for uniform standards of belief and conduct. Each crowd, in its desire to become the majority, to hold the weaker brethren within its fold, and especially as every one of us has a certain amount of this "little brother" weakness in his own nature, which longs to be pampered if only the pampering can be done without hurting our pride - the crowd invariably plays to this sort of thing and bids for its support. As the little brother always expresses his survival-values in terms of accepted crowd-ideas, no crowd can really turn him down without repudiating its abstract principles. In fact, it is just this weakness in our nature which, as we have seen, leads us to becoming crowd-men in the first place. Furthermore, we have seen that any assertion of personal independence is resented by the crowd because it weakens the crowd-faith of all.

The measure of freedom granted to men will depend, therefore, upon how many things the crowd attempts to consider its business. There is a law of inertia at work here. In monarchical forms of government, where the crowd-will is exercised through a single human agent, the monarch may be absolute in regard to certain things which are necessary to his own and his crowd's survival. In such matters "he can do no wrong"; there is little or no appeal from his decisions. But the very thoroughness with which he hunts down nonconformity in matters which directly concern his authority, leaves him little energy for other things. Arbitrary power is therefore usually limited to relatively few things, since the autocrat cannot busy himself with everything that is going on. Within the radius of the thing which the monarch attempts to regulate he may be an intolerable tyrant, but so long as he is obeyed in these matters, so long as things run on smoothly on the surface, there are all sorts of things which he would prefer not to have brought to his attention, as witness, for instance, the letter of Trajan to the younger Pliny.

With a democracy it is different. While the exercise of authority is never so inexorable - indeed democratic states frequently pass laws for the purpose of placing the community on record "for righteousness," rather than with the intention of enforcing such laws - the number of things which a democracy will presume to regulate is vastly greater than in monarchical states. As sovereignity is universal, everyone becomes lawmaker and regulator of his neighbors. As the lawmaking power is present everywhere, nothing can escape its multieyed scrutiny. All sorts of foibles, sectional interests, group demands, class prejudices become part of the law of the land. A democracy is no respecter of persons and can, under its dogma of equality before the law, admit of no exceptions. The whole body politic is weighed down with all the several bits of legislation which may be demanded by any of the various groups within it. An unusual inducement and opportunity are thus provided for every crowd to force its own crowd-dilemmas upon all.

The majority not only usurps the place of the king, but it tends to subject the whole range of human thought and behavior to its authority - everything, in fact that anyone, disliking in his neighbors or finding himself tempted to do, may wish to "pass a law against." Every personal habit and private opinion becomes a matter for public concern. Custom no longer regulates; all is rationalized according to the logic of the crowd-mind. Public policy sits on the doorstep of every man's personal conscience. The citizen in us eats up the man. Not the tiniest personal comfort may yet be left us in private enjoyment. All that cannot be translated into propaganda or hold its own in a legislative lobby succumbs. If we are to preserve anything of our personal independence, we must organize ourselves into a crowd like the rest and get out on the streets and set up a public howl. Unless someone pretty soon starts a pro-tobacco crusade and proves to the newspaper-reading public that the use of nicotine by everybody in equal amount is absolutely necessary for the preservation of the American home, for economic efficiency and future military supremacy, we shall all doubtless soon be obliged to sneak down into the cellar and smoke our pipes in the dark.

Here we see the true argument for a written constitution, and also, I think, a psychological principle which helps us to decide what should be in a constitution and what should not. The aim of a constitution is to put a limit on the number of things concerning which a majority-crowd may lord it over the individual. I am aware that the appeal to the Constitution is often abused by predatory interests which skulk behind its phraseology in their defense of special economic privilege. But nevertheless, people in a democracy may be free only so long as they submit to the dictation of the majority in just and only those few interests concerning which a monarch, were he in existence, would take advantage of them for his personal ends. There are certain political and economic relations which cannot be left to the chance explanation of any individual or group that happens to come along. Some one is sure to come along, for you may be sure that if there is a possible opportunity to take advantage, some one will do it sooner or later.

Now because people have discovered that there is no possible individual freedom in respect to certain definite phases of their common life which are always exposed to seizure by exploiters, democrats have substituted a tyranny of the majority for the tyranny of the one or the favored few which would otherwise be erected at these points. Since it is necessary to give up freedom in these regions anyway, there is some compensation in spreading the tyrannizing around so that each gets a little share of it. But every effort should be made to limit the tyranny of the majority to just these points. And the line limiting the number of things that the majority may meddle with must be drawn as hard and fast as possible, since every dominant crowd, as we have seen, will squeeze the life out of everything human it can get its hands on. The minute a majority finds it can extend its tyranny beyond this strict constitutionally limited sphere, nothing remains to stop it; it becomes worse than an autocracy. Tyranny is no less abhorrent just because the number of tyrants is increased. A nation composed of a hundred million little tyrants snooping and prying into every corner may be democratic, but, personally, if that ever comes to be the choice I think I should prefer one tyrant. He might occasionally look the other way and leave me a free man, long enough at least for me to light my pipe.

True democrats will be very jealous of government. Necessary as it is, there is no magic about government, no saving grace. Government cannot redeem us from our sins; it will always require all the decency we possess to redeem the government. Government always represents the moral dilemmas of the worst people, not the best. It cannot give us freedom; it can give or grant us nothing but what it first takes from us. It is we who grant to the government certain powers and privileges necessary for its proper functioning. We do not exist for the government; it exists for us. We are not its servants; it is our servant. Government at best is a useful and necessary machine, a mechanism by which we protect ourselves from one another. It has no more rights and dignities of its own than are possessed by any other machine. Its laws should be obeyed, for the same reason that the laws of mechanics should be obeyed - otherwise the machine will not run.

As a matter of fact it is not so much government itself against which the democrat must be on guard, but the various crowds which are always seeking to make use of the government in order to oppose their peculiar tyranny upon all and invade the privacy of everyone. By widening the radius of governmental control, the crowd thus pinches down the individuality of everyone with the same restrictions as are imposed by the crowd upon its own members.

Conway says:

Such passages as the above, quoted from the words of a friendly student of American democracy, show the impression which, notwithstanding our popular prattle about freedom, thoughtful foreigners have since the beginning received. And de Toqueville wrote long before crowd-thinking had reached anything like the development we see at present. To-day the tyrannizing is not confined to the majority-crowd. All sort of minority-crowds, impatient of waiting until they can by fair means persuade the majority to agree with them, begin to practice coercion upon everyone within reach the minute they fall into possession of some slight advantage which may be used as a weapon. From the industrial side we were first menaced by the "invisible government" of organized vested interests; now, by a growing tendency to government by strikes. Organized gangs of all sorts have at last learned the amusing trick of pointing a pistol at the public's head and threatening it with starvation, and up go its hands, and the gang gains whatever it wants for itself, regardless of anyone else. But this "hold-up game" is by no means confined to labor. Capitalistic soviets have since the beginning of the war taken advantage of situations to enhance their special crowd-interests. The following, quoted from a letter written during the war to the Atlantic Monthly, by a thoroughly American writer, Charles D. Stewart, describes a type of mob rule which existed in almost every part of the nation while we were fighting for freedom abroad:

It would seem that in our democracy freedom consists first of freedom to vote; second, of freedom to make commercial profit; third, of freedom to make propaganda; fourth, of freedom from intellectual and moral responsibility. Each of these "liberties" is little more than a characteristic form of crowd-behavior. The vote, our most highly prized modern right, is nearly always so determined by crowd-thinking that as an exercise of individual choice it is a joke. Men are herded in droves and delivered by counties in almost solid blocks by professional traders of political influence. Before each election a campaign of crowd-making is conducted in which every sort of vulgarity and insincerity has survival value, in which real issues are so lost in partisan propaganda as to become unrecognizable. When the vote is cast it is commonly a choice between professional crowd-leaders whose competency consists in their ability to Billy Sundayize the mob rather than in any marked fitness for the office to which they aspire - also between the horns of a dilemma which wholly misstates the issue involved and is trumped up chiefly for purposes of political advertising. Time and again the franchise thus becomes a agency by which rival crowds may fasten their own tyrannies upon one another.

Freedom to make commercial profit, to get ahead of others in the race for dollars, is what democracy generally means by "opportunity." Nothing is such a give-away of the modern man as the popular use of the word "individualism." It is no longer a philosophy of becoming something genuine and unique, but of getting something and using it according to your own whims and for personal ends regardless of the effect upon others. This pseudo-individualism encourages the rankest selfishness and exploitation to go hand in hand with the most deadly spiritual conformity and inanity. Such "individualism" is, as I have pointed out, a crowd-idea, for it is motivated by a cheaply disguised ideal of personal superiority through the mere fact of possessing things. Paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, this is really the old crowd notion of "equality," for, great as are the differences of wealth which result, every man may cherish the fiction that he possesses the sort of ability necessary for this kind of social distinction. Such superiority thus has little to do with personal excellence; it is the result of the external accident of success. One man may still be "as good as another."

Against this competitive struggle now there has grow up a counter-crowd ideal of collectivism. But here also the fiction of universal spiritual equality is maintained; the competitive struggle is changed from an individual to a gang struggle, while the notion that personal worth is the result of the environment and may be achieved by anyone whose belly is filled still persists. Proletarians for the most part wish, chinch-bug fashion, to crawl into the Elysian fields now occupied by the hated capitalists. The growing tendency to industrial democracy will probably in the near future cut off this freedom to make money, which has been the chief "liberty" of political democracy until now, but whether liberty in general will be the gainer thereby remains to be seen. One rather prominent Socialist in New York declares that liberty is a "myth." He is correct, in so far as the democratic movement, either political or social, is a crowd-phenomenon. Socialist agitators are always demanding "liberty" nevertheless, but the liberty which they demand is little more than freedom to make their own propaganda. And this leads us to the third liberty permitted by modern democracy.

The "freedom of speech" which is everywhere demanded in the name of democracy is not at all freedom in the expression of individual opinion. It is only the demand for advertising space on the part of various crowds for the publication of their shibboleths and propaganda. Each crowd, while demanding this freedom for itself, seeks to deny it to the non-crowd man wherever possible. The Puritan's "right to worship according to the dictates of a man's own conscience" did not apply to Quakers, Deists, or Catholics. When Republicans were "black abolitionists" they would have regarded any attempt to suppress The Liberator, as edited by William Lloyd Garrison, as an assault upon the constitutional liberties of the nation as represented in the right of circulation of The Liberator, edited by Max Eastman. In Jefferson's time, when Democrats were accused of "Jacobinism," they invoked the "spirit of 1776" in opposition to the alien and sedition laws under which their partisan propaganda suffered limitation. To-day, when they are striving to outdo the Republicans in "Americanization propaganda," they actually stand sponsor for an espionage law which would have made Jefferson or Andrew Jackson froth at the mouth. Socialists are convinced that liberty is dead because Berger and Debs are convicted of uttering opinions out of harmony with temporarily dominant crowd-ideas of patriotism. But when Theodore Dreiser was put under the ban for the crime of writing one of the few good novels produced in America, I do not recall that Socialists held any meetings of protest in Madison Square Garden. I have myself struggled in vain for three hours or more on a street corner in Green Point trying to tell liberty-loving Socialists the truth about the Gary schools. When the politicians in our legislative assemblies were tricked into passing the obviously unliberal Eighteenth Amendment, I was much interested in learning how the bulk of the Socialists in the Cooper Union audiences felt about it. As I had expected, they regarded it as an unpardonable infringement of personal freedom, as a typical piece of American Puritan hypocrisy and pharisaism. But they were, on the whole, in favor of it because they thought it would be an aid to Bolshevist propaganda, since it would make the working class still more discontented! Such is liberty in a crowd-governed democracy.... It is nothing but the liberty of crowds to be crowds.

The fourth liberty in democratic society today is freedom from moral and intellectual responsibility. This is accomplished by the magic of substituting the machinery of the law for self-government, bureaucratic meddlesomeness for conscience, crowd-tyranny for personal decency. Professor Faguet has called democracy the "cult of incompetence" and the "dread of responsibility." He is not far wrong, but these epithets apply not so much to democracy as such as to democracy under the heel of the crowd. The original aim of democracy, so far as its philosophical thinkers conceived of it, was to set genius free from the trammels of tradition, realize a maximum of self-government, and make living something of an adventure But crowds do not so understand democracy. Every crowd looks upon democracy simply as a scheme whereby it may have its own way. We have seen that the crowd-mind as such is a device for "kidding" ourselves, for representing the easiest path to the enhancement of our self-feeling as something highly moral, for making our personal right appear like universal righteousness, for dressing up our will to lord it over others, as if it were devotion to impersonal principle. As we have seen, the crowd therefore insists upon universal conformity; goodness means only making everyone alike. By taking refuge in the abstract and ready-made system of crowd-ideas, the unconscious will to power is made to appear what it is not; the burden of responsibility is transferred to the group with its fiction of absolute truth. Le Bon noted the fact of the irresponsibility of crowds, but thought that such irresponsibility was due to the fact that the crowd, being an anonymous gathering, the individual could lose his identity in the multitude. The psychology of the unconscious has provided us with what I think is a better explanation, but the fact of irresponsibility remains and is evident in all the influence of crowd-thinking upon democratic institutions. The crowd-ideal of society is one in which every individual is protected not only against exploitation, but against temptation - protected therefore against himself. The whole tendency of democracy in our times is toward just this inanity. Without the least critical analysis of accepted moral dilemmas, we are all to be made moral in spite of ourselves, regardless of our worth, without effort on our part, moral in the same way that machines are moral, by reducing the will to mere automatic action, leaving no place for choice and uncertainty, having everyone wound up and oiled and regulated to run at the same speed. Each crowd therefore strives to make its own moral ideas the law of the land. Law becomes thus a sort of anthology of various existing crowd-hobbies. In the end moral responsibility is passed over to legislatures, commissions, detectives, inspectors, and bureaucrats. Anything that "gets by" the public censor, however rotten, we may wallow in with a perfect feeling of respectability. The right and necessity of choosing our way is superseded by a system of statutory taboos, which as often as not represent the survival values of the meanest little people in the community - the kind who cannot look upon a nude picture without a struggle with their perverted eroticism, or entertain a significant idea without losing their faith.

The effect of all this upon the intellectual progress and the freedom of art in democratic society is obvious, and is just what, to one who understands the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, is obvious, and is just what, to one who understands the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, might be expected. No wonder de Toqueville said he found less freedom of opinion in American than elsewhere. Explain it as you will, the fact is here staring us in the face. Genius in our democracy is not free. It must beg the permission of little crowd-men for its right to exist. It must stand, hat in hand, at the window of the commissioner of licenses and may gain a permit for only so much of its inspiration as happens to be of use-value to the uninspired. It must play the conformist, pretend to be hydra-headed rather than unique, useful rather than genuine, a servant of the "least of these" rather than their natural master. It must advertise, but it may not prophesy. It may flatter and patronize the stupid, but it may not stand up taller than they. In short, democracy everywhere puts out the eyes of its Samson, cuts off his golden-rayed locks, and makes him grind corn to fill the bellies of the Philistines.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century until now it has been chiefly the business man, the political charlatan, the organizer of trade, the rediscoverer of popular prejudices who have been preferred in our free modern societies. Keats dies of a broken heart; Shelley and Wagner were exiled; Beethoven and Schubert were left to starve; Darwin was condemned to hell fire; Huxley was denied his professorship; Schopenhauer was ostracized by the elite; Nietzsche ate his heart out in solitude; Walt Whitman had to be fed by a few English admirers, while his poems were prohibited as obscene in free America; Emerson was for the greater part of his life persona non grata at his own college; Ingersoll was denied the political career which his genius merited; Poe lived and died in poverty; Theodore Parker was consigned to perdition; Percival Lowell and Simon Newcomb lived and died almost unrecognized by the American public. Nearly every artist and writer and public teacher is made to understand from the beginning that he will be popular in just the degree that he strangles his genius and becomes a vulgar, commonplace, insincere clown.

On the other hand steel manufacturers and railroad kings, whose business record will often scarcely stand the light, are rewarded with fabulous millions and everyone grovels before them. When one turns from the "commercialism," which everywhere seems to be the dominant and most sincere interest in democratic society, when one seeks for spiritual values to counterbalance this weight of materialism, one finds in the prevailing spirit little more than a cult of naive sentimentality.

It can hardly be denied that if Shakespeare, Boccacio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Casanova, Goethe, Dostoievsky, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Rousseau, St. Augustine, Milton, Nietzsche, Swinburne, Rossetti, or even Flaubert, were alive and writing his masterpiece in America today, he would be instantly silenced by some sort of society for the prevention of vice, and held up to the public scorn and ridicule as a destroyer of our innocence and a corruptor of public morals. The guardians of our characters are ceaselessly expurgating the classics lest we come to harm reading them. I often think that the only reason why the Bible is permitted to pass through our mails is because hardly anyone reads it.

It is this same habit of crowd-thinking which accounts to a great extent for the dearth of intellectual curiosity in this country. From what we have seen to be the nature of the crowd-mind, it is to be expected that in a democracy in which crowds play an important part the condition described by de Toqueville will generally prevail. There is much truth in his statement that it seems at first as if the minds of all the Americans "were formed upon the same model." Spiritual variation will be encouraged only in respect to matters in which one crowd differs from another. The conformist spirit will prevail in all. Intellectual leadership will inevitably pass to the "tight-minded." There will be violent conflicts of ideas, but they will be crowd ideas.

The opinions about which people differ are for the most part ready-made. They are concerned with the choice of social mechanisms, but hardly with valuations. With nearly all alike, there is a notion that mankind may be redeemed by the magic of externally manipulating the social environment. There is a wearisome monotony of professions of optimism, idealism, humanitarianism, with little knowledge of what these terms mean.

I am thinking of all those young people who, in the decade and a half which preceded the war, represented the finished product of our colleges and universities. What a stretch of imagination is needed before one may call these young people educated! How little of intellectual interest they have brought back from school to their respective communities! How little cerebral activity they have stirred up! Habits of study, of independent thinking, have seldom been acquired. The "educated" have possibly gained a little in social grace; they have in some cases learned things which are of advantage to them in the struggle for position. Out of the confused mass of unassimilated information which they dimly remember as the education which they "got," a sum of knowledge doubtless remains which is greater in extent than that possessed by the average man, but, though greater in extent, this knowledge is seldom different in kind. There is the same superficiality, the same susceptibility to crowd-thinking on every subject. The mental habits of American democracy are probably best reflected to-day by the "best-seller" novel, the Saturday Evening Post, the Chautaqua, the Victrola, the moving picture.

Nearly everyone in American read, for the "schoolhouse is the bulwark of democratic freedom." However, with the decrease in illiteracy there has gone a corresponding lowering of literary and intellectual standards, a growing timidity in telling the truth, and a passion for the sensationally commonplace. If it be true that before people may be politically free they must be free to function mentally, one wonders how much of an aid to liberty the public schools in this country have been, or if, with their colossal impersonal systems and stereotyped methods of instruction, they have not rather on the whole succeeded chiefly in making learning uninteresting, dulling curiosity and killing habits of independent thinking. There is probably no public institution where the spirit of the crowd reigns to the extent that it does in the public school. The aim seems to be to mold the child to type, make him the good, plodding citizen, teaching him only so much as some one thinks it is to the public's interest that he should know. I am sure that everyone who is familiar with the actions of the school authorities in New York City during the two years, 1918 and 1919, will be impelled to look elsewhere for much of that liberty which is supposed to go with democracy.

Some years ago I conducted a little investigation into the mental habits of the average high-school graduate. An examination was made of twenty or more young people who had been out of school one year. This is doubtless too limited a number to give the findings great general significance, but I give the results in brief for what they are worth. These students had been in school for eleven years. I thought that they ought at least to have a minimum of general cultural information and to be able to express some sort of opinion about the commonplaces of our spiritual heritage. The questions asked were such as follow: What is the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States? What is dicotyledon? Does the name Darwin mean anything to you? Have you ever heard of William James? What is the significance of the Battle of Tours? Who was Thomas Jefferson? There were twenty questions in all. The average grade, even with the most liberal marking, was 44.6. The general average was raised by one pupil who made a grade of 69. But then we should not be too severe upon the public-school graduate. One of the brightest college graduates I know left a large Eastern institution believing that Karl Marx was a philologist. Another, a graduate from a Western college, thought that Venus de Milo was an Italian count who had been born without any arms. I know a prominent physician, whose scientific training is such that he had been a lecturer in a medical college, who believes that Heaven is located just a few miles up in the sky, beyond the Milky Way. These are doubtless exceptional cases, but how many persons with university degrees are there who have really caught the spirit of the humanistic culture, or have ever stopped to think why the humanities are taught in our colleges? How many are capable of discriminating criticism of works of music, or painting, literature, or philosophy? My own experiences convinces me, and I am sure that other public teachers who have had a like experience will bear witness to the same lamentable fact, that such little genuine intellectual interest as there is in this country is chiefly confined to immigrant Jews, our American youth being, on the whole, innocent of it. The significance of this fact is obvious, as is its cause. Due to the conformist spirit of the dominant crowd, native-born Americas are losing their intellectual leadership.

We must not ignore the fact that there is among the educated here a small and, let us hope, growing group of youthful "intellectuals." But in the first place the proportion of these to the whole mass is tragically small. In the second place intellectual liberalism has been content for the most part to tag along behind the labor movement, as if the chief meaning of the intellectual awakening were economic. It is no disparagement of labor to say that the intellect in this country of crowds has also other work to do, and that, until it strikes out for itself, neither the labor movement nor anything will rise above commonplace crowd dilemmas. Too much of our so-called intellectualism is merely the substitution of ready-made proletarian crowd-ideas for the traditional crowd-ideas which pass for thinking among the middle classes.

All the facts which have been pointed out above are the inevitable consequences of government by crowds. There can be no real liberty with crowds because there can be no personal independence. The psychic mechanisms of the crowd are hostile to conscious personality. The independent thinker cannot be controlled by catchwords. In our day intellectual freedom is not smothered in actual martyr fires, but it is too often strangled in the cradle. The existence of new values, a thing which will inevitably happen where the human spirit is left free in its creative impulses, is disturbing to the crowd-mind. Education must therefore be made "safe for democracy"; it must be guarded carefully lest the youth become an original personal fact, a new spiritual creation. I realize the element of truth in the statement often made, that there is already too much spiritual originality in the youths of this generation. I am not contending that certain phases of egoism should not be checked by education. A solid intellectual basis must be created which will make social living possible. The trouble is, however, that this task is done too well. It is the merely useful man, not the unusual man, whom the crowd loves. Skill is encouraged, for, whether it be skill in serving or in demanding service, skill in itself does not upset existing crowd-values. Reflection is "wicked" for it leads to doubt, and doubt is non-gregarious behavior. Education ceases to be the path of spiritual freedom; it becomes a device for harnessing the spirit of youth in the treadmill of the survival-values of the crowd. It is also the revenge of the old against the young, a way of making them less troublesome. It teaches the rules for success in a crowd-governed world while taking advantage of the natural credulity of childhood to draw the curtain with such terrifying mummery about the figure of wisdom that the average mind, never having the daring or curiosity to lift it, will remain to its dying day a dullard and a mental slave without suspecting the fact. Every "dangerous" thought is denatured and expurgated. The student is skillfully insulated from any mental shock that might galvanize him into original intellectual life. The classic languages are taught for purposes of "discipline." After six or seven years' study of Greek literature in the accepted manner one may be able to repeat most of the rules of Goodwin's Greek Grammar, and pride himself upon being a cultivated person, knowing in the end less of the language than a bootblack from modern Athens knows of it, or than a waiter from Bologna knows of English after one year's residence in Greenwich Village. And the all-important thing is that never once has the student been given a glimpse of the beautiful free pagan life which all this literature is about.

Science is taught that the student, if he has ability, may learn how to make a geological survey of oil lands, construct and operate a cement factory, make poison gas, remove infected tonsils, or grow a culture out of bacteria; but should he cease to hold popular beliefs about the origin of life or the immortality of the soul it is well for him to keep the tragic fact to himself. Those who teach history, economics, and political science in such a way as to stimulate independence of thinking on the part of the students are likely to be dismissed from their faculties by the practical business men who constitute the boards of trustees of our institutions of higher learning; the purpose of these sciences is to make our youth more patriotic. Finally, the average instructor receives less pay than a policeman, or a headwaiter, and the unconscious reason for this is all of a piece with the psychology of the crowd-mind. The ignorant man's resentment toward superiority, or "highbrowism," is thereby vindicated. Moreover, the integrity of the complex of ruling crowd-ideas is less endangered. There is less likelihood of its being undermined in the process of education when vigorous, independent spirits are diverted from intellectual pursuits by richer prizes offered in other fields, and the task of instruction therefore left largely to the underfed and timid who are destined by temperament to trot between the shafts.

In this discussion of the government of crowds I have ignored consideration of the mechanisms of political and social organizations which usually characterize the treatment of this subject. It is not that I wish to divert attention from the necessity of more practical and just social arrangements and political forms of organizations. These we must achieve. But the facts which ultimately make for our freedom or slavery are of the mind. The statement that we cannot be politically or economically a free people until we attain mental freedom is a platitude, but it is one which needs special emphasis on this day when all attention is directed to the external form of organization.