John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1587"

Elbert Hubbard - "Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6"

Julian Hawthorne - "Hawthorne and His Circle"

P. G. Wodehouse - "A Prefect's Uncle"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Public Opinion

W >> Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion




No administrative scheme is workable without good will, and good will
about strange practices is impossible without education. The better
way is to introduce into the existing machinery, wherever you can find
an opening, agencies that will hold up a mirror week by week, month by
month. You can hope, then, to make the machine visible to those who
work it, as well as to the chiefs who are responsible, and to the
public outside. When the office-holders begin to see themselves,--or
rather when the outsiders, the chiefs, and the subordinates all begin
to see the same facts, the same damning facts if you like, the
obstruction will diminish. The reformer's opinion that a certain
bureau is inefficient is just his opinion, not so good an opinion in
the eyes of the bureau, as its own. But let the work of that bureau be
analysed and recorded, and then compared with other bureaus and with
private corporations, and the argument moves to another plane.

There are ten departments at Washington represented in the Cabinet.
Suppose, then, there was a permanent intelligence section for each.
What would be some of the conditions of effectiveness? Beyond all
others that the intelligence officials should be independent both of
the Congressional Committees dealing with that department, and of the
Secretary at the head of it; that they should not be entangled either
in decision or in action. Independence, then, would turn mainly on
three points on funds, tenure, and access to the facts. For clearly if
a particular Congress or departmental official can deprive them of
money, dismiss them, or close the files, the staff becomes its
creature.

4

The question of funds is both important and difficult. No agency of
research can be really free if it depends upon annual doles from what
may be a jealous or a parsimonious congress. Yet the ultimate control
of funds cannot be removed from the legislature. The financial
arrangement should insure the staff against left-handed, joker and
rider attack, against sly destruction, and should at the same time
provide for growth. The staff should be so well entrenched that an
attack on its existence would have to be made in the open. It might,
perhaps, work behind a federal charter creating a trust fund, and a
sliding scale over a period of years based on the appropriation for
the department to which the intelligence bureau belonged. No great
sums of money are involved anyway. The trust fund might cover the
overhead and capital charges for a certain minimum staff, the sliding
scale might cover the enlargements. At any rate the appropriation
should be put beyond accident, like the payment of any long term
obligation. This is a much less serious way of "tying the hands of
Congress" than is the passage of a Constitutional amendment or the
issuance of government bonds. Congress could repeal the charter. But
it would have to repeal it, not throw monkey wrenches into it.

Tenure should be for life, with provision for retirement on a liberal
pension, with sabbatical years set aside for advanced study and
training, and with dismissal only after a trial by professional
colleagues. The conditions which apply to any non-profit-making
intellectual career should apply here. If the work is to be salient,
the men who do it must have dignity, security, and, in the upper ranks
at least, that freedom of mind which you find only where men are not
too immediately concerned in practical decision.

Access to the materials should be established in the organic act. The
bureau should have the right to examine all papers, and to question
any official or any outsider. Continuous investigation of this sort
would not at all resemble the sensational legislative inquiry and the
spasmodic fishing expedition which are now a common feature of our
government. The bureau should have the right to propose accounting
methods to the department, and if the proposal is rejected, or
violated after it has been accepted, to appeal under its charter to
Congress.

In the first instance each intelligence bureau would be the connecting
link between Congress and the Department, a better link, in my
judgment, than the appearance of cabinet officers on the floor of both
House and Senate, though the one proposal in no way excludes the
other. The bureau would be the Congressional eye on the execution of
its policy. It would be the departmental answer to Congressional
criticism. And then, since operation of the Department would be
permanently visible, perhaps Congress would cease to feel the need of
that minute legislation born of distrust and a false doctrine of the
separation of powers, which does so much to make efficient
administration difficult.

5

But, of course, each of the ten bureaus could not work in a watertight
compartment. In their relation one to another lies the best chance for
that "coordination" of which so much is heard and so little seen.
Clearly the various staffs would need to adopt, wherever possible,
standards of measurement that were comparable. They would exchange
their records. Then if the War Department and the Post Office both buy
lumber, hire carpenters, or construct brick walls they need not
necessarily do them through the same agency, for that might mean
cumbersome over-centralization; but they would be able to use the same
measure for the same things, be conscious of the comparisons, and be
treated as competitors. And the more competition of this sort the
better.

For the value of competition is determined by the value of the
standards used to measure it. Instead, then, of asking ourselves
whether we believe in competition, we should ask ourselves whether we
believe in that for which the competitors compete. No one in his
senses expects to "abolish competition," for when the last vestige of
emulation had disappeared, social effort would consist in mechanical
obedience to a routine, tempered in a minority by native inspiration.
Yet no one expects to work out competition to its logical conclusion
in a murderous struggle of each against all. The problem is to select
the goals of competition and the rules of the game. Almost always the
most visible and obvious standard of measurement will determine the
rules of the game: such as money, power, popularity, applause, or Mr.
Veblen's "conspicuous waste." What other standards of measurement does
our civilization normally provide? How does it measure efficiency,
productivity, service, for which we are always clamoring?

By and large there are no measures, and there is, therefore, not so
much competition to achieve these ideals. For the difference between
the higher and the lower motives is not, as men often assert, a
difference between altruism and selfishness. [Footnote: _Cf._
Ch. XII] It is a difference between acting for easily understood aims,
and for aims that are obscure and vague. Exhort a man to make more
profit than his neighbor, and he knows at what to aim. Exhort him to
render more social service, and how is he to be certain what service
is social? What is the test, what is the measure? A subjective
feeling, somebody's opinion. Tell a man in time of peace that he ought
to serve his country and you have uttered a pious platitude, Tell him
in time of war, and the word service has a meaning; it is a number of
concrete acts, enlistment, or buying bonds, or saving food, or working
for a dollar a year, and each one of these services he sees definitely
as part of a concrete purpose to put at the front an army larger and
better armed, than the enemy's.

So the more you are able to analyze administration and work out
elements that can be compared, the more you invent quantitative
measures for the qualities you wish to promote, the more you can turn
competition to ideal ends. If you can contrive the right index numbers
[Footnote: I am not using the term index numbers in its purely
technical meaning, but to cover any device for the comparative
measurement of social phenomena.] you can set up a competition between
individual workers in a shop; between shops; between factories;
between schools; [Footnote: See, for example, _An Index Number for
State School Systems_ by Leonard P. Ayres, Russell Sage Foundation,
1920. The principle of the quota was very successfully applied in the
Liberty Loan Campaigns, and under very much more difficult
circumstances by the Allied Maritime Transport Council.] between
government departments; between regiments; between divisions; between
ships; between states; counties; cities; and the better your index
numbers the more useful the competition.

6

The possibilities that lie in the exchange of material are evident.
Each department of government is all the time asking for information
that may already have been obtained by another department, though
perhaps in a somewhat different form. The State Department needs to
know, let us say, the extent of the Mexican oil reserves, their
relation to the rest of the world's supply, the present ownership of
Mexican oil lands, the importance of oil to warships now under
construction or planned, the comparative costs in different fields.
How does it secure such information to-day? The information is
probably scattered through the Departments of Interior, Justice,
Commerce, Labor and Navy. Either a clerk in the State Department looks
up Mexican oil in a book of reference, which may or may not be
accurate, or somebody's private secretary telephones somebody else's
private secretary, asks for a memorandum, and in the course of time a
darkey messenger arrives with an armful of unintelligible reports. The
Department should be able to call on its own intelligence bureau to
assemble the facts in a way suited to the diplomatic problem up for
decision. And these facts the diplomatic intelligence bureau would
obtain from the central clearing house. [Footnote: There has been a
vast development of such services among the trade associations. The
possibilities of a perverted use were revealed by the New York
Building Trades investigation of 1921.]

This establishment would pretty soon become a focus of information of
the most extraordinary kind. And the men in it would be made aware of
what the problems of government really are. They would deal with
problems of definition, of terminology, of statistical technic, of
logic; they would traverse concretely the whole gamut of the social
sciences. It is difficult to see why all this material, except a few
diplomatic and military secrets, should not be open to the scholars of
the country. It is there that the political scientist would find the
real nuts to crack and the real researches for his students to make.
The work need not all be done in Washington, but it could be done in
reference to Washington. The central agency would, thus, have in it
the makings of a national university. The staff could be recruited
there for the bureaus from among college graduates. They would be
working on theses selected after consultation between the curators of
the national university and teachers scattered over the country. If
the association was as flexible as it ought to be, there would be, as
a supplement to the permanent staff, a steady turnover of temporary
and specialist appointments from the universities, and exchange
lecturers called out from Washington. Thus the training and the
recruiting of the staff would go together. A part of the research
itself would be done by students, and political science in the
universities would be associated with politics in America.

7

In its main outlines the principle is equally applicable to state
governments, to cities, and to rural counties. The work of comparison
and interchange could take place by federations of state and city and
county bureaus. And within those federations any desirable regional
combination could be organized. So long as the accounting systems were
comparable, a great deal of duplication would be avoided. Regional
coordination is especially desirable. For legal frontiers often do not
coincide with the effective environments. Yet they have a certain
basis in custom that it would be costly to disturb. By coordinating
their information several administrative areas could reconcile
autonomy of decision with cooperation. New York City, for example, is
already an unwieldy unit for good government from the City Hall. Yet
for many purposes, such as health and transportation, the metropolitan
district is the true unit of administration. In that district,
however, there are large cities, like Yonkers, Jersey City, Paterson,
Elizabeth, Hoboken, Bayonne. They could not all be managed from one
center, and yet they should act together for many functions.
Ultimately perhaps some such flexible scheme of local government as
Sidney and Beatrice Webb have suggested may be the proper
solution. [Footnote: "The Reorganization of Local Government" (Ch. IV),
in _A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great
Britain_.] But the first step would be a coordination, not of
decision and action, but of information and research. Let the
officials of the various municipalities see their common problems in
the light of the same facts.

8

It would be idle to deny that such a net work of intelligence bureaus
in politics and industry might become a dead weight and a perpetual
irritation. One can easily imagine its attraction for men in search of
soft jobs, for pedants, for meddlers. One can see red tape, mountains
of papers, questionnaires ad nauseam, seven copies of every document,
endorsements, delays, lost papers, the use of form 136 instead of form
2gb, the return of the document because pencil was used instead of
ink, or black ink instead of red ink. The work could be done very
badly. There are no fool-proof institutions.

But if one could assume that there was circulation through the whole
system between government departments, factories, offices, and the
universities; a circulation of men, a circulation of data and of
criticism, the risks of dry rot would not be so great. Nor would it be
true to say that these intelligence bureaus will complicate life. They
will tend, on the contrary, to simplify, by revealing a complexity now
so great as to be humanly unmanageable. The present fundamentally
invisible system of government is so intricate that most people have
given up trying to follow it, and because they do not try, they are
tempted to think it comparatively simple. It is, on the contrary,
elusive, concealed, opaque. The employment of an intelligence system
would mean a reduction of personnel per unit of result, because by
making available to all the experience of each, it would reduce the
amount of trial and error; and because by making the social process
visible, it would assist the personnel to self-criticism. It does not
involve a great additional band of officials, if you take into account
the time now spent vainly by special investigating committees, grand
juries, district attorneys, reform organizations, and bewildered
office holders, in trying to find their way through a dark muddle.

If the analysis of public opinion and of the democratic theories in
relation to the modern environment is sound in principle, then I do
not see how one can escape the conclusion that such intelligence work
is the clue to betterment. I am not referring to the few suggestions
contained in this chapter. They are merely illustrations. The task of
working out the technic is in the hands of men trained to do it, and
not even they can to-day completely foresee the form, much less the
details. The number of social phenomena which are now recorded is
small, the instruments of analysis are very crude, the concepts often
vague and uncriticized. But enough has been done to demonstrate, I
think, that unseen environments can be reported effectively, that they
can be reported to divergent groups of people in a way which is
neutral to their prejudice, and capable of overcoming their
subjectivism.

If that is true, then in working out the intelligence principle men
will find the way to overcome the central difficulty of
self-government, the difficulty of dealing with an unseen reality.
Because of that difficulty, it has been impossible for any
self-governing community to reconcile its need for isolation with the
necessity for wide contact, to reconcile the dignity and individuality
of local decision with security and wide coordination, to secure
effective leaders without sacrificing responsibility, to have useful
public opinions without attempting universal public opinions on all
subjects. As long as there was no way of establishing common versions
of unseen events, common measures for separate actions, the only image
of democracy that would work, even in theory, was one based on an
isolated community of people whose political faculties were limited,
according to Aristotle's famous maxim, by the range of their vision.

But now there is a way out, a long one to be sure, but a way. It is
fundamentally the same way as that which has enabled a citizen of
Chicago, with no better eyes or ears than an Athenian, to see and hear
over great distances. It is possible to-day, it will become more
possible when more labor has gone into it, to reduce the discrepancies
between the conceived environment and the effective environment. As
that is done, federalism will work more and more by consent, less and
less by coercion. For while federalism is the only possible method of
union among self-governing groups, [Footnote: _Cf._ H. J. Laski,
_The Foundations of Sovereignty_, and other Essays, particularly
the Essay of this name, as well as the Problems of Administrative
Areas, The Theory of Popular Sovereignty, and The Pluralistic State.]
federalism swings either towards imperial centralization or towards
parochial anarchy wherever the union is not based on correct and
commonly accepted ideas of federal matters. These ideas do not arise
spontaneously. They have to be pieced together by generalization based
on analysis, and the instruments for that analysis have to be invented
and tested by research.

No electoral device, no manipulation of areas, no change in the system
of property, goes to the root of the matter. You cannot take more
political wisdom out of human beings than there is in them. And no
reform, however sensational, is truly radical, which does not
consciously provide a way of overcoming the subjectivism of human
opinion based on the limitation of individual experience. There are
systems of government, of voting, and representation which extract
more than others. But in the end knowledge must come not from the
conscience but from the environment with which that conscience deals.
When men act on the principle of intelligence they go out to find the
facts and to make their wisdom. When they ignore it, they go inside
themselves and find only what is there. They elaborate their
prejudice, instead of increasing their knowledge.




CHAPTER XXVII

THE APPEAL TO THE PUBLIC

1

IN real life no one acts on the theory that he can have a public
opinion on every public question, though this fact is often concealed
where a person thinks there is no public question because he has no
public opinion. But in the theory of our politics we continue to think
more literally than Lord Bryce intended, that "the action of Opinion
is continuous," [Footnote: _Modern Democracies_, Vol. I, p. 159.]
even though "its action... deals with broad principles only."
[Footnote: Id., footnote, p. 158.] And then because we try to think of
ourselves having continuous opinions, without being altogether certain
what a broad principle is, we quite naturally greet with an anguished
yawn an argument that seems to involve the reading of more government
reports, more statistics, more curves and more graphs. For all these
are in the first instance just as confusing as partisan rhetoric, and
much less entertaining.

The amount of attention available is far too small for any scheme in
which it was assumed that all the citizens of the nation would, after
devoting themselves to the publications of all the intelligence
bureaus, become alert, informed, and eager on the multitude of real
questions that never do fit very well into any broad principle. I am
not making that assumption. Primarily, the intelligence bureau is an
instrument of the man of action, of the representative charged with
decision, of the worker at his work, and if it does not help them, it
will help nobody in the end. But in so far as it helps them to
understand the environment in which they are working, it makes what
they do visible. And by that much they become more responsible to the
general public.

The purpose, then, is not to burden every citizen with expert opinions
on all questions, but to push that burden away from him towards the
responsible administrator. An intelligence system has value, of
course, as a source of general information, and as a check on the
daily press. But that is secondary. Its real use is as an aid to
representative government and administration both in politics and
industry. The demand for the assistance of expert reporters in the
shape of accountants, statisticians, secretariats, and the like, comes
not from the public, but from men doing public business, who can no
longer do it by rule of thumb. It is in origin and in ideal an
instrument for doing public business better, rather than an instrument
for knowing better how badly public business is done.

2

As a private citizen, as a sovereign voter, no one could attempt to
digest these documents. But as one party to a dispute, as a
committeeman in a legislature, as an officer in government, business,
or a trade union, as a member of an industrial council, reports on the
specific matter at issue will be increasingly welcome. The private
citizen interested in some cause would belong, as he does now, to
voluntary societies which employed a staff to study the documents, and
make reports that served as a check on officialdom. There would be
some study of this material by newspaper men, and a good deal by
experts and by political scientists. But the outsider, and every one
of us is an outsider to all but a few aspects of modern life, has
neither time, nor attention, nor interest, nor the equipment for
specific judgment. It is on the men inside, working under conditions
that are sound, that the daily administrations of society must rest.

The general public outside can arrive at judgments about whether these
conditions are sound only on the result after the event, and on the
procedure before the event. The broad principles on which the action
of public opinion can be continuous are essentially principles of
procedure. The outsider can ask experts to tell him whether the
relevant facts were duly considered; he cannot in most cases decide
for himself what is relevant or what is due consideration. The
outsider can perhaps judge whether the groups interested in the
decision were properly heard, whether the ballot, if there was one,
was honestly taken, and perhaps whether the result was honestly
accepted. He can watch the procedure when the news indicates that
there is something to watch. He can raise a question as to whether the
procedure itself is right, if its normal results conflict with his
ideal of a good life. [Footnote: _Cf._ Chapter XX. ] But if he
tries in every case to substitute himself for the procedure, to bring
in Public Opinion like a providential uncle in the crisis of a play,
he will confound his own confusion. He will not follow any train of
thought consecutively.

For the practice of appealing to the public on all sorts of intricate
matters means almost always a desire to escape criticism from those
who know by enlisting a large majority which has had no chance to
know. The verdict is made to depend on who has the loudest or the most
entrancing voice, the most skilful or the most brazen publicity man,
the best access to the most space in the newspapers. For even when the
editor is scrupulously fair to "the other side," fairness is not
enough. There may be several other sides, unmentioned by any of the
organized, financed and active partisans.

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his
Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a
compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature
and an insult to his sense of evidence. As his civic education takes
account of the complexity of his environment, he will concern himself
about the equity and the sanity of procedure, and even this he will in
most cases expect his elected representative to watch for him. He will
refuse himself to accept the burden of these decisions, and will turn
down his thumbs in most cases on those who, in their hurry to win,
rush from the conference table with the first dope for the reporters.

Only by insisting that problems shall not come up to him until they
have passed through a procedure, can the busy citizen of a modern
state hope to deal with them in a form that is intelligible. For
issues, as they are stated by a partisan, almost always consist of an
intricate series of facts, as he has observed them, surrounded by a
large fatty mass of stereotyped phrases charged with his emotion.
According to the fashion of the day, he will emerge from the
conference room insisting that what he wants is some soulfilling idea
like Justice, Welfare, Americanism, Socialism. On such issues the
citizen outside can sometimes be provoked to fear or admiration, but
to judgment never. Before he can do anything with the argument, the
fat has to be boiled out of it for him.