is to take steps against
the rabble-rousers by seeking to make it appear that they are traitors,
and so arousing the mob against them--in brief, to deny them their
constitutional right to free speech under colour of criminal statutes.
The second is to combine this plan with that of flooding the country
with official news by a corps of press-agents, chautauquans and other
such professors of deception. The third is to meet the rabble-rousers on
their own ground, matching their appeals to the emotions with appeals
even more powerful, and out-doing their vague and soothing words with
words even more vague and soothing. All three plans have been in
operation since the first days of the republic; the early Federalists
employed the first two with such assiduity that the mob of that time
finally revolted. All three have been brought to the highest conceivable
point of perfection by Dr. Wilson, a man whose resolute fidelity to his
moral ideas is matched only by his magnificent skill at playing upon
every prejudice and weakness of the plain people.

But men of such exalted and varied gifts are not common. The average
head of a democratic state is not _ipso facto_ the best rabble-rouser
within that state, but merely one of the best. He may be able, on fair
terms, to meet any individual rival, but it is rare for him to be able
to meet the whole pack, or even any considerable group. To relieve him
from that difficulty, and so prevent the incessant running amuck of the
populace, it is necessary to handicap all the remaining rabble-rousers,
and this is most effectively done by limitations upon free speech which
originate as statutes and gradually take on the form and potency of
national customs. Such limitations arose in the United States by
precisely that process. They began in the first years of the republic as
definite laws. Some of those laws were afterward abandoned, but what was
fundamentally sound in them remained in force as custom.

It must be obvious that even Dr. Wilson, despite his tremendous gift for
the third of the devices that we have named, would have been in sore
case during his second administration if it had not been for his
employment of the other two. Imagine the United States during the Summer
of 1917 with absolute free speech the order of the day! The mails would
have been flooded with Socialist and pacifist documents, every
street-corner would have had its screaming soap-box orator, the
newspapers would have