POLITICAL FORMS AND FORCES. 637 



average sentiment and opinion over conduct at large. Such facts as 

 that, while public opinion is in favor of dueling, law fails to prevent 

 it, and that sacred injunctions, backed by threats of damnation, are 

 powerless to check the most iniquitous aggressions when the prevail- 

 ing interests and passions prompt them, alone suffice to show that 

 legal codes and religious creeds, with the agencies enforcing them, are 

 impotent in face of an adverse sentiment. On remembering the eager- 

 ness for public applause and the dread of public disgrace which stim- 

 ulate and restrain men, we can not question that the diffused manifes- 

 tations of feeling habitually dictate their careers when their immediate 

 necessities have been satisfied. It requires only to contemplate the 

 social code which regulates life down even to the color of an evening 

 necktie, and to note how those who dare not break this code have no 

 hesitation in smuggling, to see that an unwritten law enforced by 

 opinion is more peremptory than a written law not so enforced. And 

 still more on observing that men disregard the just claims of credi- 

 tors, who for goods given can not get the money, while they are anx- 

 ious to discharge so-called debts of honor to those who have rendered 

 neither goods nor services, we are shown that the control of prevail- 

 ing sentiment, unenforced by law and religion, may be more potent 

 than law and religion together when they are backed by sentiment 

 less strongly manifested. Looking at the total activities of men, we 

 are obliged to admit that they are still, as they were at the outset of 

 social life, guided by the aggregate feeling, past and present ; and 

 that the political agency, itself a gradually-developed product of such 

 feeling, continues still to be in the main the vehicle for a specialized 

 portion of it, regulating actions of certain kinds. 



Partly, of course, I am obliged here to set forth this general truth 

 as an essential element of political theory. My excuse for insisting 

 at some length on what appears to be a trite conclusion must be, that, 

 however far nominally recognized, it is actually recognized to a very 

 small extent. Even in our own country, where non-political agencies 

 spontaneously produced and worked are many and large, and still 

 more in most other countries less characterized by them, there is no 

 due consciousness of the truth that the combined impulses which work 

 through political agencies can, in the absence of such agencies, produce 

 others through which to work. Politicians reason as though state- 

 instrumentalities have intrinsic power, which they have not, and as 

 though the feeling which creates them has not intrinsic power, which 

 it has. Evidently their actions must be greatly affected by reversal 

 of these ideas. 



