thing of
music or the drama, and view a public library merely as something to be
rigorously censored. We are convinced that their ignorant moral
enthusiasm is largely to blame for the prevalence of lynching. No doubt
they themselves are sneakingly conscious of the fact, or at least aware
of it subconsciously, for lynching is the only public amusement that
they never denounce.

Their influence reveals strikingly the readiness of the inferior
American to accept ready-made opinions. He seems to be pathetically
eager to be told what to think, and he is apparently willing to accept
any instructor who takes the trouble to tackle him. This, also, was
brilliantly revealed during the late war. The powers which controlled
the press during that fevered time swayed the populace as they pleased.
So long as the course of Dr. Wilson was satisfactory to them he was
depicted as a second Lincoln, and the plain people accepted the estimate
without question. To help reinforce it the country was actually flooded
with lithographs showing Lincoln and Wilson wreathed by the same branch
of laurel, and copies of the print got into millions of humble homes.
But immediately Dr. Wilson gave offence to his superiors, he began to be
depicted as an idiot and a scoundrel, and this judgment promptly
displaced the other one in the popular mind. The late Major General
Roosevelt was often a victim of that sort of boob-bumping. A man of
mercurial temperament, constantly shifting his position on all large
public questions, he alternately gave great joy and great alarm to the
little group of sagaciously wilful men which exercises genuine
sovereignty over the country, and this alternation of emotions showed
itself, by way of the newspapers and other such bawdy agencies, in the
vacillation of public opinion. The fundamental platitudes of the nation
were used both for him and against him, and always with immense effect.
One year he was the last living defender of the liberties fought for by
the Fathers; the next year he was an anarchist. Roosevelt himself was
much annoyed by this unreliability of the mob. Now and then he sought to
overcome it by direct appeals, but in the long run he was usually
beaten. Toward the end of his life he resigned himself to a policy of
great discretion, and so withheld his voice until he was sure what hymn
was being lined out.

The newspapers and press associations, of course, do not impart the
official doctrine of the moment in te