284 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



do not work out quite like that. The mob shouts itself hoarse ; 

 another mob breaks heads. Intimidation is not unknown ; 

 corruption has been heard of. Appeals are made to personal 

 or class interests or local prejudices ; the larger view is some- 

 what to seek. If reason triumphs in the end — it always does, 

 according to the victor — passion is vastly more in evidence on 

 the polling day. 



The people is always distrusted and sometimes execrated 

 by its leaders, but the leaders are nothing without the people 

 from whom they draw their power. In the last resort, the 

 people, of whom the mob is a visible unit, is public opinion ; 

 and it is because it is decisive that it is appealed to, and because 

 it vacillates that it is distrusted. 



Through the whole of history we see that moving silent 

 background of public opinion ; it is the canvas on which the 

 picture is painted, the sheet on which the cinema plays, the 

 restless sea with hidden and dangerous currents on which the 

 ship of State must float or sink. The malleable multitude, 

 patient and passionate by turns, credulous one minute and 

 sceptical the next, is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs. 



Admittedly, public opinion operates only in certain direc- 

 tions, and on that account it is generally ignored by men of 

 science, as — to be quite frank — it generally ignores them. 

 Public opinion has nothing to say to ascertained facts ; it does 

 not, for example, take sides over the differential calculus. And 

 a large class of subjects interest it only spasmodically, or not 

 at all. There is no real public opinion on aesthetics, which does 

 not interest the crowd. It has a real sense of beauty, but when 

 it does happen to concern itself with art, its attitude is generally 

 destructive ; it destroys what it does not understand, as in the 

 Puritan Revolution in England, and the Bolshevik Revolution 

 in Russia. 



It is less hostile, particularly in this country, to science, 

 but its usual indifference is easily turned to hatred — the hatred 

 of the ignorant for a m^^sterious power which it sometimes 

 respects and sometimes fears. A mob burned the library at 

 Alexandria which contained the knowledge of the ancient world ; 

 the leader of the mob in the French Revolution declared that 

 " the Repubhc has no need of science." Bolshevism in Russia 

 followed the lead of Paris. 



The Church, too, often persecuted men of science in its day 

 of authority ; its action seems never to have been unpopular. 

 Indeed, the Inquisition was probably rather a democratic 

 institution ; it burnt the minority with the approval of the 

 majority, and it provided, from time to time, a series of enter- 

 taining, and to the orthodox even edif^dng, public spectacles. 

 If the Church had retained its strength in the nineteenth 



