Public Opinion | Page 8

behavior. We must think
of perhaps fifty sovereign parliaments consisting of at least a hundred
legislative bodies. With them belong at least fifty hierarchies of
provincial and municipal assemblies, which with their executive,
administrative and legislative organs, constitute formal authority on
earth. But that does not begin to reveal the complexity of political life.
For in each of these innumerable centers of authority there are parties,
and these parties are themselves hierarchies with their roots in classes,
sections, cliques and clans; and within these are the individual
politicians, each the personal center of a web of connection and
memory and fear and hope.
Somehow or other, for reasons often necessarily obscure, as the result

of domination or compromise or a logroll, there emerge from these
political bodies commands, which set armies in motion or make peace,
conscript life, tax, exile, imprison, protect property or confiscate it,
encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another, facilitate
immigration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor it,
establish schools, build navies, proclaim "policies," and "destiny," raise
economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring one people under
the rule of another, or favor one class as against another. For each of
these decisions some view of the facts is taken to be conclusive, some
view of the circumstances is accepted as the basis of inference and as
the stimulus of feeling. What view of the facts, and why that one?
And yet even this does not begin to exhaust the real complexity. The
formal political structure exists in a social environment, where there are
innumerable large and small corporations and institutions, voluntary
and semi-voluntary associations, national, provincial, urban and
neighborhood groupings, which often as not make the decision that the
political body registers. On what are these decisions based?
"Modern society," says Mr. Chesterton, "is intrinsically insecure
because it is based on the notion that all men will do the same thing for
different reasons.... And as within the head of any convict may be the
hell of a quite solitary crime, so in the house or under the hat of any
suburban clerk may be the limbo of a quite separate philosophy. The
first man may be a complete Materialist and feel his own body as a
horrible machine manufacturing his own mind. He may listen to his
thoughts as to the dull ticking of a clock. The man next door may be a
Christian Scientist and regard his own body as somehow rather less
substantial than his own shadow. He may come almost to regard his
own arms and legs as delusions like moving serpents in the dream of
delirium tremens. The third man in the street may not be a Christian
Scientist but, on the contrary, a Christian. He may live in a fairy tale as
his neighbors would say; a secret but solid fairy tale full of the faces
and presences of unearthly friends. The fourth man may be a
theosophist, and only too probably a vegetarian; and I do not see why I
should not gratify myself with the fancy that the fifth man is a devil
worshiper.... Now whether or not this sort of variety is valuable, this
sort of unity is shaky. To expect that all men for all time will go on
thinking different things, and yet doing the same things, is a doubtful

speculation. It is not founding society on a communion, or even on a
convention, but rather on a coincidence. Four men may meet under the
same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as part of a great municipal
reform; one to read his breviary in the light of it; one to embrace it with
accidental ardour in a fit of alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely
because the pea green post is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with
his young lady. But to expect this to happen night after night is
unwise...." [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "The Mad Hatter and the Sane
Householder," Vanity Fair, January, 1921, p. 54]
For the four men at the lamp post substitute the governments, the
parties, the corporations, the societies, the social sets, the trades and
professions, universities, sects, and nationalities of the world. Think of
the legislator voting a statute that will affect distant peoples, a
statesman coming to a decision. Think of the Peace Conference
reconstituting the frontiers of Europe, an ambassador in a foreign
country trying to discern the intentions of his own government and of
the foreign government, a promoter working a concession in a
backward country, an editor demanding a war, a clergyman calling on
the police to regulate amusement, a club lounging-room making up its
mind about a strike, a sewing circle preparing to regulate the schools,
nine judges deciding whether a legislature in Oregon may fix the
working