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The people on whom we depend for contact with the outer world are
those who seem to be running it. [Footnote: _Cf._ Bryce, _Modern
Democracies_ Vol. II, pp. 544-545.] They may be running only a
very small part of the world. The nurse feeds the child, bathes it, and
puts it to bed. That does not constitute the nurse an authority on
physics, zoology, and the Higher Criticism. Mr. Smith runs, or at least
hires, the man who runs the factory. That does not make him an
authority on the Constitution of the United States, nor on the effects
\of the Fordney tariff. Mr. Smoot runs the Republican party in the State
of Utah. That in itself does not prove he is the best man to consult
about taxation. But the nurse may nevertheless determine for a while
what zoology the child shall learn, Mr. Smith will have much to say on
what the Constitution shall mean to his wife, his secretary, and perhaps
even to his parson, and who shall define the limits of Senator Smoot's
authority?

The priest, the lord of the manor, the captains and the kings, the
party leaders, the merchant, the boss, however these men are chosen,
whether by birth, inheritance, conquest or election, they and their
organized following administer human affairs. They are the officers,
and although the same man may be field marshal at home, second
lieutenant at the office, and scrub private in politics, although in many
institutions the hierarchy of rank is vague or concealed, yet in every
institution that requires the cooperation of many persons, some such
hierarchy exists. [Footnote: _Cf._ M. Ostrogorski, _Democracy and the
Organization of Political Parties, passim;_ R. Michels, _Political Parties,
passim;_ and Bryce, _Modern Democracies,_ particularly Chap.
LXXV; also Ross, _Principles of Sociology,_ Chaps. XXII-XXIV. ]
In American politics we call it a machine, or "the organization."

3

There are a number of important distinctions between the members of
the machine and the rank and file. The leaders, the steering committee
and the inner circle, are in direct contact with their environment.
They may, to be sure, have a very limited notion of what they ought to
define as the environment, but they are not dealing almost wholly with
abstractions. There are particular men they hope to see elected,
particular balance sheets they wish to see improved, concrete
objectives that must be attained. I do not mean that they escape the
human propensity to stereotyped vision. Their stereotypes often make
them absurd routineers. But whatever their limitations, the chiefs are
in actual contact with some crucial part of that larger environment.
They decide. They give orders. They bargain. And something definite,
perhaps not at all what they imagined, actually happens.

Their subordinates are not tied to them by a common conviction. That
is to say the lesser members of a machine do not dispose their loyalty
according to independent judgment about the wisdom of the leaders. In
the hierarchy each is dependent upon a superior and is in turn
superior to some class of his dependents. What holds the machine
together is a system of privileges. These may vary according to the
opportunities and the tastes of those who seek them, from nepotism and
patronage in all their aspects to clannishness, hero-worship or a
fixed idea. They vary from military rank in armies, through land and
services in a feudal system, to jobs and publicity in a modern
democracy. That is why you can breakup a particular machine by
abolishing its privileges. But the machine in every coherent group is,
I believe, certain to reappear. For privilege is entirely relative,
and uniformity is impossible. Imagine the most absolute communism of
which your mind is capable, where no one possessed any object that
everyone else did not possess, and still, if the communist group had
to take any action whatever, the mere pleasure of being the friend of
the man who was going to make the speech that secured the most votes,
would, I am convinced, be enough to crystallize an organization of
insiders around him.

It is not necessary, then, to invent a collective intelligence in
order to explain why the judgments of a group are usually more
coherent, and often more true to form than the remarks of the man in
the street. One mind, or a few can pursue a train of thought, but a
group trying to think in concert can as a group do little more than
assent or dissent. The members of a hierarchy can have a corporate
tradition. As apprentices they learn the trade from the masters, who
in turn learned it when they were apprentices, and in any enduring
society, the change of personnel within the governing hierarchies is
slow enough to permit the transmission of certain great stereotypes
and patterns of behavior. From father to son, from prelate to novice,
from veteran to cadet, certain ways of seeing and doing are taught.
These ways become familiar, and are recognized as such by the mass of
outsiders.

4

Distance alone lends enchantment to the view that masses of human
beings ever cooperate in any complex affair without a central machine
managed by a very few people. "No one," says Bryce, [Footnote: _Op.
cit._, Vol. II, p. 542.] "can have had some years' experience of
the conduct of affairs in a legislature or an administration without
observing how extremely small is the number of persons by whom the
world is governed." He is referring, of course, to affairs of state.
To be sure if you consider all the affairs of mankind the number of
people who govern is considerable, but if you take any particular
institution, be it a legislature, a party, a trade union, a
nationalist movement, a factory, or a club, the number of those who
govern is a very small percentage of those who are theoretically
supposed to govern.

Landslides can turn one machine out and put another in; revolutions
sometimes abolish a particular machine altogether. The democratic
revolution set up two alternating machines, each of which in the
course of a few years reaps the advantage from the mistakes of the
other. But nowhere does the machine disappear. Nowhere is the idyllic
theory of democracy realized. Certainly not in trades unions, nor in
socialist parties, nor in communist governments. There is an inner
circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into
the disinterested or uninterested rank and file.

Democrats have never come to terms with this commonplace of group
life. They have invariably regarded it as perverse. For there are two
visions of democracy: one presupposes the self-sufficient individual;
the other an Oversoul regulating everything.

Of the two the Oversoul has some advantage because it does at least
recognize that the mass makes decisions that are not spontaneously
born in the breast of every member. But the Oversoul as presiding
genius in corporate behavior is a superfluous mystery if we fix our
attention upon the machine. The machine is a quite prosaic reality. It
consists of human beings who wear clothes and live in houses, who can
be named and described. They perform all the duties usually assigned
to the Oversoul.

5

The reason for the machine is not the perversity of human nature. It
is that out of the private notions of any group no common idea emerges
by itself. For the number of ways is limited in which a multitude of
people can act directly upon a situation beyond their reach. Some of
them can migrate, in one form or another, they can strike or boycott,
they can applaud or hiss. They can by these means occasionally resist
what they do not like, or coerce those who obstruct what they desire.
But by mass action nothing can be constructed, devised, negotiated, or
administered. A public as such, without an organized hierarchy around
which it can gather, may refuse to buy if the prices are too high, or
refuse to work if wages are too low. A trade union can by mass action
in a strike break an opposition so that the union officials can
negotiate an agreement. It may win, for example, the _right_ to
joint control. But it cannot exercise the right except through an
organization. A nation can clamor for war, but when it goes to war it
must put itself under orders from a general staff.

The limit of direct action is for all practical purposes the power to
say Yes or No on an issue presented to the mass. [Footnote: _Cf_.
James, _Some Problems of Philosophy_, p. 227. "But for most of
our emergencies, fractional solutions are impossible. Seldom can we
act fractionally." _Cf_. Lowell, _Public Opinion and Popular
Government_, pp. 91, 92.] For only in the very simplest cases does
an issue present itself in the same form spontaneously and
approximately at the same time to all the members of a public. There
are unorganized strikes and boycotts, not merely industrial ones,
where the grievance is so plain that virtually without leadership the
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
present a choice to a large group.

6

The abuses of the steering committee have led to various proposals
such as the initiative, referendum and direct primary. But these
merely postponed or obscured the need for a machine by complicating
the elections, or as H. G. Wells once said with scrupulous accuracy,
the selections. For no amount of balloting can obviate the need of
creating an issue, be it a measure or a candidate, on which the voters
can say Yes, or No. There is, in fact, no such thing as "direct
legislation." For what happens where it is supposed to exist? The
citizen goes to the polls, receives a ballot on which a number of
measures are printed, almost always in abbreviated form, and, if he
says anything at all, he says Yes or No. The most brilliant amendment
in the world may occur to him. He votes Yes or No on that bill and no
other. You have to commit violence against the English language to
call that legislation. I do not argue, of course, that there are no
benefits, whatever you call the process. I think that for certain
kinds of issues there are distinct benefits. But the necessary
simplicity of any mass decision is a very important fact in view of
the inevitable complexity of the world in which those decisions
operate. The most complicated form of voting that anyone proposes is,
I suppose, the preferential ballot. Among a number of candidates
presented the voter under that system, instead of saying yes to one
candidate and no to all the others, states the order of his choice.
But even here, immensely more flexible though it is, the action of the
mass depends upon the quality of the choices presented. [Footnote:
_Cf._ H. J. Laski, _Foundations of Sovereignty,_ p. 224. "...
proportional representation... by leading, as it seems to lead, to the
group system... may deprive the electors of their choice of leaders."
The group system undoubtedly tends, as Mr. Laski says, to make the
selection of the executive more indirect, but there is no doubt also
that it tends to produce legislative assemblies in which currents of
opinion are more fully represented. Whether that is good or bad
cannot be determined a priori. But one can say that successful
cooperation and responsibility in a more accurately representative
assembly require a higher organization of political intelligence and
political habit, than in a rigid two-party house. It is a more complex
political form and may therefore work less well.] And those choices
are presented by the energetic coteries who hustle about with
petitions and round up the delegates. The Many can elect after the Few
have nominated.

CHAPTER XV

LEADERS AND THE RANK AND FILE

I

BECAUSE of their transcendent practical importance, no successful
leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols which organize
his following. What privileges do within the hierarchy, symbols do for
the rank and file. They conserve unity. From the totem pole to the
national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from
the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham,
symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves
unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged.
The detached observer may scorn the "star-spangled" ritual which
hedges the symbol, perhaps as much as the king who told himself that
Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows by experience that
only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to
move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target,
and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates
what he calls destructive criticism, sometimes called by free spirits
the elimination of buncombe. "Above all things," says Bagehot, "our
royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you
cannot reverence it." [Footnote: _The English Constitution,_ p.
127. D. Appleton & Company, 1914.] For poking about with clear
definitions and candid statements serves all high purposes known to
man, except the easy conservation of a common will. Poking about, as
every responsible leader suspects, tends to break the transference of
emotion from the individual mind to the institutional symbol. And the
first result of that is, as he rightly says, a chaos of individualism
and warring sects. The disintegration of a symbol, like Holy Russia,
or the Iron Diaz, is always the beginning of a long upheaval.

These great symbols possess by transference all the minute and
detailed loyalties of an ancient and stereotyped society. They evoke
the feeling that each individual has for the landscape, the furniture,
the faces, the memories that are his first, and in a static society,
his only reality. That core of images and devotions without which he
is unthinkable to himself, is nationality. The great symbols take up
these devotions, and can arouse them without calling forth the
primitive images. The lesser symbols of public debate, the more casual
chatter of politics, are always referred back to these proto-symbols,
and if possible associated with them. The question of a proper fare on
a municipal subway is symbolized as an issue between the People and
the Interests, and then the People is inserted in the symbol American,
so that finally in the heat of a campaign, an eight cent fare becomes
unAmerican. The Revolutionary fathers died to prevent it. Lincoln
suffered that it might not come to pass, resistance to it was implied
in the death of those who sleep in France.

Because of its power to siphon emotion out of distinct ideas, the
symbol is both a mechanism of solidarity, and a mechanism of
exploitation. It enables people to work for a common end, but just
because the few who are strategically placed must choose the concrete
objectives, the symbol is also an instrument by which a few can fatten
on many, deflect criticism, and seduce men into facing agony for
objects they do not understand.

Many aspects of our subjection to symbols are not flattering if we
choose to think of ourselves as realistic, self-sufficient, and
self-governing personalities. Yet it is impossible to conclude that
symbols are altogether instruments of the devil. In the realm of
science and contemplation they are undoubtedly the tempter himself.
But in the world of action they may be beneficent, and are sometimes a
necessity. The necessity is often imagined, the peril manufactured.
But when quick results are imperative, the manipulation of masses
through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing
done. It is often more important to act than to understand. It is
sometimes true that the action would fail if everyone understood it.
There are many affairs which cannot wait for a referendum or endure
publicity, and there are times, during war for example, when a nation,
an army, and even its commanders must trust strategy to a very few
minds; when two conflicting opinions, though one happens to be right,
are more perilous than one opinion which is wrong. The wrong opinion
may have bad results, but the two opinions may entail disaster by
dissolving unity. [Footnote: Captain Peter S. Wright, Assistant
Secretary of the Supreme War Council, _At the Supreme War
Council,_ is well worth careful reading on secrecy and unity of
command, even though in respect to the allied leaders he wages a
passionate polemic.]

Thus Foch and Sir Henry Wilson, who foresaw the impending disaster to
Cough's army, as a consequence of the divided and scattered reserves,
nevertheless kept their opinions well within a small circle, knowing
that even the risk of a smashing defeat was less certainly
destructive, than would have been an excited debate in the newspapers.
For what matters most under the kind of tension which prevailed in
March, 1918, is less the rightness of a particular move than the
unbroken expectation as to the source of command. Had Foch "gone to
the people" he might have won the debate, but long before he could
have won it, the armies which he was to command would have dissolved.
For the spectacle of a row on Olympus is diverting and destructive.

But so also is a conspiracy of silence. Says Captain Wright: "It is in
the High Command and not in the line, that the art of camouflage is
most practiced, and reaches to highest flights. All chiefs everywhere
are now kept painted, by the busy work of numberless publicists, so as
to be mistaken for Napoleons--at a distance....It becomes almost
impossible to displace these Napoleons, whatever their incompetence,
because of the enormous public support created by hiding or glossing
failure, and exaggerating or inventing success.... But the most
insidious and worst effect of this so highly organized falsity is on
the generals themselves: modest and patriotic as they mostly are, and
as most men must be to take up and follow the noble profession of
arms, they themselves are ultimately affected by these universal
illusions, and reading it every morning in the paper, they also grow
persuaded they are thunderbolts of war and infallible, however much
they fail, and that their maintenance in command is an end so sacred
that it justifies the use of any means.... These various conditions,
of which this great deceit is the greatest, at last emancipate all
General Staffs from all control. They no longer live for the nation:
the nation lives, or rather dies, for them. Victory or defeat ceases
to be the prime interest. What matters to these semi-sovereign
corporations is whether dear old Willie or poor old Harry is going to
be at their head, or the Chantilly party prevail over the Boulevard
des Invalides party." [Footnote: _Op. cit._, pp. 98, 101-105.]

Yet Captain Wright who can be so eloquent and so discerning about the
dangers of silence is forced nevertheless to approve the silence of
Foch in not publicly destroying the illusions. There is here a
complicated paradox, arising as we shall see more fully later on,
because the traditional democratic view of life is conceived, not for
emergencies and dangers, but for tranquillity and harmony. And so
where masses of people must cooperate in an uncertain and eruptive
environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility
without real consent. The symbol does that. It obscures personal
intention, neutralizes discrimination, and obfuscates individual
purpose. It immobilizes personality, yet at the same time it
enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group,
as nothing else in a crisis can weld it, to purposeful action. It
renders the mass mobile though it immobilizes personality. The symbol
is the instrument by which in the short run the mass escapes from its
own inertia, the inertia of indecision, or the inertia of headlong
movement, and is rendered capable of being led along the zigzag of a
complex situation.

2

But in the longer run, the give and take increases between the leaders
and the led. The word most often used to describe the state of mind in
the rank and file about its leaders is morale. That is said to be good
when the individuals do the part allotted to them with all their
energy; when each man's whole strength is evoked by the command from
above. It follows that every leader must plan his policy with this in
mind. He must consider his decision not only on "the merits," but also
in its effect on any part of his following whose continued support he
requires. If he is a general planning an attack, he knows that his
organized military units will scatter into mobs if the percentage of
casualties rises too high.

In the Great War previous calculations were upset to an extraordinary
degree, for "out of every nine men who went to France five became
casualties." [Footnote: _Op. cit_., p. 37. Figures taken by
Captain Wright from the statistical abstract of the war in the
Archives of the War Office. The figures refer apparently to the
English losses alone, possibly to the English and French.] The limit
of endurance was far greater than anyone had supposed. But there was a
limit somewhere. And so, partly because of its effect on the enemy,
but also in great measure because of its effect on the troops and
their families, no command in this war dared to publish a candid
statement of its losses. In France the casualty lists were never
published. In England, America, and Germany publication of the losses
of a big battle were spread out over long periods so as to destroy a
unified impression of the total. Only the insiders knew until long
afterwards what the Somme had cost, or the Flanders battles;
[Footnote: _Op cit._, p. 34, the Somme cost nearly 500,000
casualties; the Arras and Flanders offensives of 1917 cost 650,000
British casualties.] and Ludendorff undoubtedly had a very much more
accurate idea of these casualties than any private person in London,
Paris or Chicago. All the leaders in every camp did their best to
limit the amount of actual war which any one soldier or civilian could
vividly conceive. But, of course, among old veterans like the French
troops of 1917, a great deal more is known about war than ever reaches
the public. Such an army begins to judge its commanders in terms of
its own suffering. And then, when another extravagant promise of
victory turns out to be the customary bloody defeat, you may find that
a mutiny breaks out over some comparatively minor blunder, [Footnote:
The Allies suffered many bloodier defeats than that on the Chemin des
Dames.] like Nivelle's offensive of 1917, because it is a cumulative
blunder. Revolutions and mutinies generally follow a small sample of a
big series of evils. [Footnote: _Cf._ Pierrefeu's account, _op.
cit._, on the causes of the Soissons mutinies, and the method
adopted by Pétain to deal with them. Vol. I, Part III, _et seq._]

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