The Growth of Public Opinion, &^<r. 23 



transgressor must earn his pardon. It prescribed all nfianner of 

 customs and usages, fashions and amusements, tastes and 

 judgments. It determined most of the literary and artistic 

 criticisms that were passed — they were motived by what someone 

 had heard said by someone else. A few stray private opinions 

 that happened to be shared by the right group of people 

 cry.stallised into what was called a public opinion, and the series 

 forthwith began to advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical 

 progression. In matters of social or of political or of economic 

 interest there was in every little knot of persons a set of orthodox 

 conventions, and nine out of ten of these kindred spirits repeated 

 them without hesitation and without reflection. But those 

 judgments which we had simply absorbed from our environment 

 in the same way in which we had adopted its dress, its language, 

 and its amusemenrs, we commonly supposed ourselves to have 

 reached by logic and reasoning. One man was a free trader 

 and another a tariff reformer, one a collectivist and another an 

 individualist, in virtue far more of the kind of community in 

 which he had lived than of the intellectual processes through 

 which he had passed. We seldom confessed it — the utmost that 

 we would confess was that we could not give on demand the 

 reasons that had convinced us ; but we felt sure that the reasons 

 were producible, and that if we were given a chance of reflection 

 and of reference to those books and newspapers which had formed 

 our minds the reasons could be produced. It w-as of the first 

 consequence for understanding our social life that we should trace 

 this thing to its psychological roots. How^ did a public opinion 

 on any matter grow up ? What were the steps that intervened 

 between the stage at which it was a mere whim or eccentricity of 

 one or two individuals and the stage at which it became the 

 settled conviction, or even the over-mastering passion, of a 

 community, so strong that the individual questioned or resisted it 

 at his peril ? What, in short, were the modes of mental inter- 

 action ? The first was that of logical reasoning. We might call 



