man than is held in awe by the harsh penalties of the law. Only the criminaloid and the moral hero care not what others think of them. The majority of the men of today are fortified by public praise and wilt quickly under general disapproval.[1] Then, too, certain phases of social development strengthen the rule of the mass. The growing reliance of men upon each other in order to get the economic advantages of cooperation strengthens the grip of the group on the individual. Liable as he is to have his life course changed and his prosperity blighted by the resentful action of his fellows, he is loath to fly in the face of the common will. The increasing contact of men and the better facilities for forming and focusing the public will also point the same way. The day of the sturdy backwoodsman, settler, flatboatman or prospector, defiant not alone of law but of public opinion as well, is gone never to return. We are come to a time when ordinary men are scarcely aware of the coercion of public opinion, so used are they to follow it. They cannot dream of aught but acquiescence in an unmistakable edict of the mass they live in.[2] It is not so much the dread of what an angry public may do that disarms the modern American as it is sheer inability to stand unmoved in the rush of totally hostile comment, to endure a life perpetually at variance with the conscience and feeling of those about him.
Stanford University, Cal.
- ↑ "The power transcending all others, which has influenced individuals and nations since time began, that power which is a convergence of the invisible, intangible, spiritual forces of all humanity is public opinion" Tolstoi, The Kingdom of God, p. 266.
- ↑ "In the fatalism of the multitude there is neither legal nor moral compulsion; there is merely a loss of resisting power, a diminished sense of personal responsibility and of the duty to battle for one's own opinions, such as has been bred in some peoples by the belief in an overmastering fate. It is true that the force to which the citizen of a vast democracy submits is a moral force, not that of an unapproachable Allah, nor of the unchangeable laws of matter. But it is a moral force acting on so vast a scale, and from causes so often unpredictable, that its effect on the mind of the individual may well be compared with that which religious or scientific fatalism creates." Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 332.
