Government must rest on the consent of the governed. This rule, of course, does not apply to aliens, Negroes, Filipinos or inhabitants of the District of Columbia. The consent of the governed is a synonym for the will of the majority, and the will of the majority is expressed by a plurality of those who take the trouble to vote. ...Taking our state and municipal elections, and averaging them for the country as a whole, the figures show that the will of the people is regularly expressed by less than twenty per cent of our adult citizenship, or about ten per cent of the population. What was have in fact, therefore, is not a government by the whole people, or by a majority of the people, or even by a majority, of the registered voters, but government by a mere plurality of the politically active.

So widely, then, is our doctrine of popular sovereignty at variance with the facts. Nor does the situation seem to be growing better....

We are asked to believe that public opinion rules the Unitd States. It is the ultimate sovereign, the supreme law of the land. This is proposition number three in our fundamentalist decalogue. Government by public opinion is a phrase that slips easily from the tongue and has been so often repeated that most people believe it to be true. Yet public opinion, when you try to define it, proves to be a very elusive thing. What passes on public opinion, in perhaps the majority of cases, is simply the outcome of propegrade and counter-propaganda working the upon the traditions, prejudices, aversions or inertia of the people. The rst. inclination of most men and women is to connect every new problem with something already silhouetted in their imaginations some principle that has already found lodgment there. Very few of us approach any new public question with open minds; or rather, we do it with minds that are open at the bottom only, not open at the top. Arguments and appeals to reason go in and fall right out again. The stereotype remains unaltered.

Public Opinion Not Spontaneous

Public opinion does not exude spontaneously from the cogitations of the multitude...In large measure it is a manufactured product, prepared for the purpose of selling it to the people and marketed to them in the accustomed way. We are prone to forget that you can sell an idea to the people in the same way that you sell them any other commodity, from a Liberty Bond to a break and our politicians are the brokers who put through the sale. Our political brokers even deal in futures, and have marketed to the country a large block of that somewhat speculative stock known as "America's entry into the League of Nations," when, as issued.

No Chance for Qualified Opinion

We speak of the refundum as an expression of the public will. But this is merely one of the pleasant self-deceptions which a democracy likes to cherish. For a referendum is at best nothing more than a call for the yeas and nays, with no opportunity for anyone to voice a qualified opinion. It assumes that every voter is ready to say yes or no to any question that may be placed before him, whether it relate to the extension of a street-railway franchise, the independence of the Philippines, or the pay of the police force. The unthinking person may be able to do this, but the thoughtful man or woman, when confronted with an issue of public policy, is truely able to express his true opinion by the simple expedient of marking a cross on a slip of paper and this is particularly true when the question carries various implications as referendum questions so often do... Small wonder it is that under such conditions the voice of the people turns out to be a babel of discordance like unto that which was heard on the plain of Shinar when men sought to build a city whose tower should spike the sky....

No, the justification of elections, referenda, and majority rule is not the wisdom of the multitude, much less its omniscience, but the pressing necessity of devising some crude makeshift whereby decisions can be reached which the people will accept....

Substitute for Revolution

A presdential is merely our modern and highly refined substitute for the ancient revolution a mobilization of opposing forces, a battle of the ins against the cuts, with leaders and strategy and campaign chests and all the other paraphernilia of civil war, but without bodily violence to the warriors. This refinement of the struggle for political control, this transition from bullets to ballots is perhaps the greatest contributor of modern times to the progress of civilization.

Public opinion does not follow the dictates of human reason, for if it did it would have some degree of stability, which it has not. It obeys what we may call, for lack of a better name the law of the pendulum swinging from one extreme to another, with almost mathematical regularity.

"Who rules England?" asked a Stuart satirist. "The King rules England, of course." "But who rules the King?" "The Duke." "Who rules the Duke?" "The Devil." And so it is public opinion that rules in a democracy, and propaganda makes public opinion, and the politicians make the propaganda.

No Government of Laws Alone

We come to the fourth commandment "Ours must be a government, of laws, not of men." ...So, indeed, it was written by the Fathers in the Federalist.

Put no government ever has been or ever can be a government of laws alone. Laws are inanimate things. They have no motion of their own. Like clocks, they go from the motion that men give been. They must be interpreted, applied and enforced by human agencies. Hence every government must be to a large extent a government of men, no matter what our delusions to the contrary may be....