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By Root 1021 0

series of lectures he delivered at Yale in 1909 on “Hindrances to Good Citizenship,” he admitted that the practice of democracy had not lived up to the theory. The numbers who could read and vote had increased twenty times in the last seventy years but “the percentage of those who reflect before they vote has not kept pace either with popular education or with the extension of the suffrage.” The “natural average man” was not exhibiting in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy had presumed he possessed. He was more interested in betting at the races than in casting his vote. Old evils of class hatred, corruption, militarism, had recurred and new evils emerged. Although the world was undeniably better off than it had been, the faith of the Nineteenth Century in the ultimate wisdom of government of the people, by the people, had met “disappointment.” For the man who once described himself as “almost a professional optimist,” the Yale lectures were a painful confession.

The philosophers of Liberalism, looking around them, were making the equally painful discovery that laissez-faire, essence of the Liberal creed, had not worked. It had produced the evils of sweated labour, unemployment and destitution which Liberalism, unready for the wholehearted state intervention of the Fabian dream, could not cope with. In three years of office the Liberal Government, after coming to power in a new century with the greatest mandate in party history, had not been able to give shape to the great promise of 1906. By 1910 the number of men involved in strikes was the highest for any year since 1893. “We began slowly to lose what we had of the confidence” of working people, admitted Haldane, and “this gradually became apparent.” J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse, the economic and moral philosophers of social planning, had come to the conclusion that neither man nor society was operating properly. In The Crisis of Liberalism, published in 1909, Hobson wrote that if Liberalism could not transform its role into a more positive one, then “it is doomed to the same sort of impotence as has already befallen Liberalism in most continental countries.”

Hobhouse and a number of other investigators were concerned with man’s curious refusal to behave rationally in what seemed his own best interest. The low level on which the populace reacted politically, the appeal of the sensationalist press and the new phenomenon of mass interest in spectator sports were disturbing. Henri Bergson’s idea of man as moved by a force which he called élan vital had stimulated a new science of social psychology to probe the role of emotions and instinct as the basis of human conduct. One of the most influential of English studies of the mental processes at work in public affairs was Hobhouse’s Democracy and Reaction, published in 1904. An Oxford don whose deep interest in the labour movement led him to leave the University for the staff of the Manchester Guardian, Hobhouse found that the average man “has not the time to think and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time.” His opinions faithfully reflect “the popular sheet and shouting newsboy.… To this new public of the streets and tramcars it is useless to appeal in terms of reason.”

This was the public which had shouted “Pigtail!” and the phenomenon of herd behavior suddenly was recognized as an entity. The Columbus of this discovery was a surgeon, Wilfred Trotter, who named the phenomenon, gave it status as a subject for scientific study and quietly concluded his first voyage in sociology with a sentence as pessimistic as any ever written. “A quiet man,” as a friend described him, with a wide variety of interests in philosophy, literature and science, Trotter, who was 36 in 1908, was to be judged thirty years later “the greatest surgeon of the present century in this country.” He had “the head and face of a scholar redeemed from austerity by a smile of great charm and sincerity.” In his two essays on “The Herd Instinct” in the Sociological Review in 1908 and 1909 he found man’s social behavior springing