The
precise reasons why change was desired on that November day in 1920
are not recorded, not even in the memories of the individual voters.
The reasons are not fixed. They grow and change and melt into other
reasons, so that the public opinions Mr. Harding has to deal with are
not the opinions that elected him. That there is no inevitable
connection between an assortment of opinions and a particular line of
action everyone saw in 1916. Elected apparently on the cry that he
kept us out of war, Mr. Wilson within five months led the country into
war.
The working of the popular will, therefore, has always called for
explanation. Those who have been most impressed by its erratic working
have found a prophet in M. LeBon, and have welcomed generalizations
about what Sir Robert Peel called "that great compound of folly,
weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and
newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion." Others have
concluded that since out of drift and incoherence, settled aims do
appear, there must be a mysterious contrivance at work somewhere over
and above the inhabitants of a nation. They invoke a collective soul,
a national mind, a spirit of the age which imposes order upon random
opinion. An oversoul seems to be needed, for the emotions and ideas in
the members of a group do not disclose anything so simple and so
crystalline as the formula which those same individuals will accept as
a true statement of their Public Opinion.
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