Public Opinion | Page 4

baggage-master literally bent under the weight
of the boxes, of the packages and letters which unknown people sent
him with a frantic testimonial of their admiration. I think that outside of
General Joffre, no commander in the war has been able to realize a
comparable idea of what glory is. They sent him boxes of candy from
all the great confectioners of the world, boxes of champagne, fine
wines of every vintage, fruits, game, ornaments and utensils, clothes,

smoking materials, inkstands, paperweights. Every territory sent its
specialty. The painter sent his picture, the sculptor his statuette, the
dear old lady a comforter or socks, the shepherd in his hut carved a pipe
for his sake. All the manufacturers of the world who were hostile to
Germany shipped their products, Havana its cigars, Portugal its port
wine. I have known a hairdresser who had nothing better to do than to
make a portrait of the General out of hair belonging to persons who
were dear to him; a professional penman had the same idea, but the
features were composed of thousands of little phrases in tiny characters
which sang the praise of the General. As to letters, he had them in all
scripts, from all countries, written in every dialect, affectionate letters,
grateful, overflowing with love, filled with adoration. They called him
Savior of the World, Father of his Country, Agent of God, Benefactor
of Humanity, etc.... And not only Frenchmen, but Americans,
Argentinians, Australians, etc. etc.... Thousands of little children,
without their parents' knowledge, took pen in hand and wrote to tell
him their love: most of them called him Our Father. And there was
poignancy about their effusions, their adoration, these sighs of
deliverance that escaped from thousands of hearts at the defeat of
barbarism. To all these naif little souls, Joffre seemed like St. George
crushing the dragon. Certainly he incarnated for the conscience of
mankind the victory of good over evil, of light over darkness.
Lunatics, simpletons, the half-crazy and the crazy turned their darkened
brains toward him as toward reason itself. I have read the letter of a
person living in Sydney, who begged the General to save him from his
enemies; another, a New Zealander, requested him to send some
soldiers to the house of a gentleman who owed him ten pounds and
would not pay.
Finally, some hundreds of young girls, overcoming the timidity of their
sex, asked for engagements, their families not to know about it; others
wished only to serve him."
This ideal Joffre was compounded out of the victory won by him, his
staff and his troops, the despair of the war, the personal sorrows, and
the hope of future victory. But beside hero-worship there is the
exorcism of devils. By the same mechanism through which heroes are
incarnated, devils are made. If everything good was to come from
Joffre, Foch, Wilson, or Roosevelt, everything evil originated in the

Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin and Trotsky. They were as omnipotent for evil
as the heroes were omnipotent for good. To many simple and
frightened minds there was no political reverse, no strike, no
obstruction, no mysterious death or mysterious conflagration anywhere
in the world of which the causes did not wind back to these personal
sources of evil.
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Worldwide concentration of this kind on a symbolic personality is rare
enough to be clearly remarkable, and every author has a weakness for
the striking and irrefutable example. The vivisection of war reveals
such examples, but it does not make them out of nothing. In a more
normal public life, symbolic pictures are no less governant of behavior,
but each symbol is far less inclusive because there are so many
competing ones. Not only is each symbol charged with less feeling
because at most it represents only a part of the population, but even
within that part there is infinitely less suppression of individual
difference. The symbols of public opinion, in times of moderate
security, are subject to check and comparison and argument. They
come and go, coalesce and are forgotten, never organizing perfectly the
emotion of the whole group. There is, after all, just one human activity
left in which whole populations accomplish the union sacrée. It occurs
in those middle phases of a war when fear, pugnacity, and hatred have
secured complete dominion of the spirit, either to crush every other
instinct or to enlist it, and before weariness is felt.
At almost all other times, and even in war when it is deadlocked, a
sufficiently greater range of feelings is aroused to establish conflict,
choice, hesitation, and compromise. The symbolism of public opinion
usually bears, as we shall see, [Footnote:
Part V.] the marks
of this balancing of interest. Think, for example, of how rapidly, after
the armistice, the precarious and by no