If many people have defined democracy as liberty and equal rights, others have defined it as "the ascendancy of numbers," as "majority rule." Both these definitions are particularistic. Democracy
means the will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not necessarily represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or three-quarters vote, nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is democratic when it is approaching not a unanimous but an integrated will. We have seen that the adding of similarities does not produce the social consciousness; in the same way the adding of similar votes does not give us political will. We have seen that society is not an aggregation of units, of men considered one by one; therefore we understand that the will of the state is not discovered by counting [1].

1. This view of democracy was well satirized by some one, I think Lord Morley, who said, "I do not care who does the voting as long as I do the counting."

This means a new conception of politics: it means that the organization of men in small groups must be the next form which democracy takes. Here the need and will of every man and woman can appear and mingle with the needs and wills of all to produce an all-will. Thus will be abolished the reign of numbers.

A crude view of democracy says that when the working-people realize their power they can have what they want, since their numbers being so great, they can outvote other classes. But the reason the working-people have not already learned something so very obvious is because it is not true -- _we are never to be ruled by numbers alone_.

Moreover, a fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees -- Committee of Fifty, Fifteen, Three -- which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one, and behold -- the full-fledged era of bosses is at hand, with the "consent of the governed" simply because the governed are physically helpless to govern themselves. Many men want majority rule so that they can be this committee of one; some of our most worthy citizens are incipient Greek tyrants longing to give us their best -- tyranny.

Many working-men are clamoring for majority rule in industry, yet we know how often in their own organizations the rule of the many becomes the rule of the few. If "industrial democracy" is to mean
majority rule, let us be warned by our experience of it in politics -- it will rend whoever dallies with it.
Yet it will be objected, "But what other means under the sun is there of finding the common will except by counting votes?" We see already here and there signs of a new method. In many committees,
boards, and commissions we see now a reluctance to take action until all agree; there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it long enough, we can unify our ideas and our wills, and there is also a feeling that such unification of will has value, that our work will be vastly more effective in consequence. How different from our old methods when we were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting with us. Some one has said, "We count heads to save breaking them." We are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought. We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it. We are not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will.

This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted.
Is this the way diplomats meet? Is this the way competing industrial interests adjust differences? Not yet, but it must be. And what will help us more than anything else is just to get rid of the idea that we ever meet to get votes. The corruption in city councils, state legislatures, Congress, is largely the outcome of the idea that the getting of votes is the object of our meeting.
The present barter in votes would not take place if the unimportance of votes was once clearly seen.

Even now so far as a majority has power it is not by the brute force of numbers; it is because there has been a certain amount of unifying; it has real power directly in proportion to the amount of unifying. The composition of a political majority depends at present partly on inheritance and environment (which includes sentiment and prejudice), partly on the mass-induced idea (the spread of thought and feeling throughout a community by suggestion), and partly on some degree of integration of the
different ideas and the different forces of that particular society. Its power is in proportion to the amount of this integration. When we use the expression "artificial majority" we mean chiefly one which shows little integration, and we have all seen how quickly such majorities tend to melt away when the
artificial stimulus of especially magnetic leadership or of an especially catchy and jingoistic idea is withdrawn. Moreover a majority meaning a preponderance of votes can easily be controlled by a party or an "interest"; majorities which represent unities are not so easily managed. Group organization is, above everything else perhaps, to prevent the manipulation of helpless majorities.

But "helpless majority" may sound amusing to those who are telling us of the tyranny of majorities. From one point of view indeed majority rule tends to become majority tyranny, so we do not want a majority in either case, either as a tyrant or as an inert mass. But those who talk of the tyranny of majorities are usually those who are advocating the "rights of minorities." If it is necessary to expose the majority fallacy, it is equally necessary to show that the present worship of minorities in certain quarters is also unsound. There is no inherent virtue in a minority. If as a matter of fact we cannot act forcefully without a certain amount of complacency, then perhaps it is a good thing for those in a
minority to flatter themselves that of twenty people nine are more apt to be right than eleven. It may be one of those false assumptions more useful than a true one, and in our pragmatic age we shall not deny its value. Still sour grapes hang sometimes just as high and no higher than the majority, and it seems possible to find a working assumption that will work even better than this. In fact the assumption that the minority is always right is just as much an error as the assumption that the majority is always right.
The right is not with the majority or minority because of preponderance of numbers or because of lack of preponderance of numbers.

But many people tell us seriously that this is not a question of opinion at all, but of fact: all the great reform of the past, they say, whose victories are now our common heritage, were inaugurated by an intelligent and devoted few. You can indeed point to many causes led by a faithful minority triumphing in the end over a numerical and inert majority, but this minority was usually a majority of those who thought on the subject at all.

But all talk of majority and minority is futile. It is evident that we must not consider majority versus minority, but only the methods by which unity is attained. Our fetich of majorities has held us back, but most of the plans for stopping the control of majorities look to all kinds of bolstering up of minorities. This keeps majorities and minorities apart, whereas they have both one and only use for us -- their contribution to the all-will. Because such integration must always be the ideal in a democracy, we cannot be much interested in those methods for giving the minority more power on election day. The integration must begin further back in our life than this.

I know a woman of small school education, but large native intelligence, who spends her time between her family and the daily laundry work she does to support that family, who, when she goes to her Mothers' Club at the "School Centre" penetrates all the superficialities she may find there, and makes every other woman go home with higher standards for her home, her children and herself.
The education of children, the opportunities of employment for girls and boys, sanitation, housing, and all the many questions which touch one's everyday life are considered in a homely way on those Thursday afternoons. Sometime these women will vote on these questions, but a true intermingling of majority and minority will have taken place before election day.

Moreover, while representation of the minority, as proportional representation [1], is always an interesting experiment, just because it is a method of representation and not a mode of association the party can circumvent it.

1. Proportional representation is interesting to the view put forward in this book because it is a method to bring out all the differences.

We are told that minority representation tried in the lower house of the Illinois legislature has been completely subverted to their own ends by the politicians. And also that in Belgium, where proportional representation has been introduced, this system has become a tool in the hands of the dominant party. No electoral or merely representative method can save us.

Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main concern of politics is _modes of association_. We do not want the rule of the many or the few; we must find that method of political
procedure by which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we are truly ruled by the will of the whole. We shall have democracy only when we learn to produce this will through group organization -- when young men are no longer lectured to on democracy, but when they are made into the stuff of democracy.

When we define democracy as the "rule of the whole," this is usually understood as the rule of all, and unless we fully understand the meaning of "all," we run the danger of falling a victim to the crowd fallacy. The reaction to our long years of particularism, of "individual rights" and "liberty," which led to
special privilege and all the evils in its train has brought many to the worship of the crowd. Walt Whitman sang of men "en masse."
Many of our recent essayists and poets and novelists idealize the crowd. Miss Jane Harrison in her delightful volume, "Alpha and Omega," says, "Human life is lived to the full only in and through
the herd." There is an interesting group of young poets in France [1]

1. Arcos, Romains and Vildrac, are the chief of these. Romains, who has written "La Vie Unanime," is the most interesting for our present purpose, for his togetherness is so plainly that of the herd:
... "quelle joie
De fondre dans ton corps [la ville] immense
o£ l'on a chaud!"
Here is our old friend, the wild ox, in the mask of the most
civilized (perhaps) portion of our most civilized (perhaps)
nation. Again
"Nous sommes indistincts: chacun denous est mort;
Et la vie unanime est notre sepulture."

who call themselves Unanimistes because they believe in the union of all, that an "Altogetherness" is the supreme fact of life. Mr.Ernest Poole in "The Harbor" glorifies the crowd, and the New York "Tribune" said of his book, "'The Harbor' is the first really notable novel produced by the New Democracy," thus identifying the new democracy with the crowd. Another writer, looking at our
present social and political organization and finding it based largely on class and therefore unsound, also leaps to the conclusion that our salvation rests not on this individual or that, this class or that, this body of people or that, but on all together, on "this mass-life, seething, tumultuous, without compass
or guide or will or plan."

This school is doing good service in leading us from the few or the many to the all, in preaching that the race contains within itself the power of its own advancement; but this power which the race contains within itself is not got through its being a crowd, "without guide or will or plan," but just because it contains the potentialities of guide, will, plan, all within itself, through its capability of being a true society, that is, through its capability of adopting group methods. It is in the group that we get that
complex interpenetration which means both modification and adjustment, and at the same time cooperation and fulfillment. The group process, not the crowd or the herd, is the social process.
Out of the intermingling, interacting activities of men and women surge up the forces of life: powers are born which we had not dreamed of, ideas take shape and grow, forces are generated which act and react on each other. This is the dialectic of life. But this upspringing of power from our hidden sources is not the latent power of the mass but of the group. It is useless to preach "togetherness" until we have devised ways of making our togetherness fruitful, until we have thought out the methods of a genuine integrated togetherness. Anything else is indeed "blubbering sentimentality," as Bismarck defined democracy.

But there are two sets of people who are victims of the crowd fallacy: those who apotheosize the crowd and those who denounce the crowd; both ignore the group. The latter fear the crowd because
they see in the crowd the annihilation of the individual. They are opposed to what they call collective action because they say that this is herd action and does not allow for individual initiative.
We are told, "Man loses his identity in a crowd," "The crowd obliterates the individual mind." Quite true, but these writers do not see that the crowd is not the only form of association, that man may belong to a group rather than to a crowd, and that a group fulfills, not wipes out his individuality. The collective action of the group not only allows but consists of individual initiative, of an individual initiative that has learned how to be part of a collective initiative.

Collective thought, moreover, is often called collective mediocrity. But the collective thought evolved by the group is not collective mediocrity. On the contrary there is always a tendency for the group idea to express the largest degree of psychic force there is in a group, ideally it would always do so. Herein lies the difference between the group idea and the mass idea. When we hear it stated as a commonplace of human affairs that combined action is less intelligent than individual action, we must point out that it all depends upon whether it is a crowd combination or a group combination. The insidious error that democracy means the "average" is at the root of much of our current thought.

The confusion of democratic rule and mass rule, the identification of the people with the crowd, has led many people to denounce democracy. One writer, thinking the collective man and the crowd man the same, condemns democracy because of his condemnation of the crowd man. Another speaks of "the crowd-mind or the state," and therefore abandons the state. All these writers think that the more democracy, the more complete the control of the crowd. Our faith in democracy means a profound belief that this need not be true. Moreover this idea that the crowd man must necessarily be the unit of democracy has led many to oppose universal suffrage because they have seen it as a particularist
suffrage, giving equal value, they say, to the enlightened and the unenlightened. True democracy frees us from such particularist point of view. It is the group man, not the crowd man, who must be the unit of democracy.

The philosophy of the all is supposed, by its advocates, to be opposed to the philosophy of the individual, but it is interesting to notice that the crowd theory and the particularistic theory rest on the same fallacy, namely, looking on individuals one by one: the crowd doctrine is an attempt to unite mechanically the isolated individuals we have so ardently believed in. This is the danger of the crowd. The crowd idea of sovereignty is thoroughly atomistic.
This is sometimes called an era of crowds, sometimes an era of individuals: such apparent opposition of judgment need not confuse us, the crowd spirit and the particularist spirit are the same; that spirit will continue to corrupt politics and disrupt society until we replace it by the group spirit.

The crowd theory, like the particularist doctrine, has been strengthened by the upholders of the imitation theory of society.
Many of our political as well as our sociological writers have seen life as some exceptional individual suggesting and the crowd following without reasoning, without effort of mind or will. Even Bagehot, who did so much to set us in the right way of thinking, overemphasizes the part of imitation. What he says of the "imitative part of our natures" is indeed true, but by not mentioning the creative part of our natures more explicitly, he keeps himself in the crowd school.

It is true that at present the people are to a large extent a mass led by those who suggest. The suggestion and imitation of sociology are the leading and following of politics--the leadership of the boss and the following of the mass. The successful politician is one who understands crowds and how to dominate them. He speaks to the emotions, he relies on repetition, he invents catch phrases. The crowd follows. As long as the cornerstone of our political philosophy is the theory that the individual
originates and society accepts, of course any many who can get the people to "accept" will do so. That is the fallacy at the foundation of our political structure. When we have genuine democracy, we shall not have the defective political machinery of the present, but some method by which people will be able not to accept or reject but to create group or whole ideas, to produce a genuine collective will. Because we have invented some governmental machinery by which clever politicians can rule with
the entirely artificial "assent" of their constituencies, does not mean that we know anything about democracy.

It is the ignoring of the group which is retarding our political development. A recent writer on political science says that a study of the interaction between individual and crowd is the basis of politics, and that "the will of nations or states is the sum of individual wills fashioned in accordance with crowd psychology."
In so far as this is true it is to be steadily opposed. Many writers imply that we must either believe in homogeneity, similarity, uniformity (the herd, the crowd), or lose the advantage of fellowship in order to discover and assert our own particularist ideals. But our alternatives are not the individual and the crowd: the choice is not between particularism with all its separatist tendencies and the crowd with its levelling, its mediocrity, the sameness, perhaps even its hysteria; there is the neglected group.
Democracy will not succeed until assemblages of people are governed consciously and deliberately by group laws. We read, "No idea can conquer until a crowd has inscribed it on its banner." I should
say, "No idea can finally conquer which has not been created by those people who inscribe it on their banner." The triumph of ideas will never come by crowds. Union, not hypnotism, is the law of development. There can be no real spiritual unity in the mass life, only in the group life.

Whether the people of America shall be a crowd, under the laws of suggestion and imitation, or follow the laws of the group, is the underlying problem of to-day.

The promise for the future is that there now is in associations of men an increasing tendency for the laws of the group rather than the laws of the crowd to govern. Our most essential duty to the future is to see that that tendency prevail. As we increase the conscious functioning of the group we shall inevitably have less and less of the unconscious response, chauvinists will lose their job, and party bosses will have to change their tactics. People as a matter of fact are not as suggestible as formerly. Men are reading more widely and they are following less blindly what they read.

This largely increased reading, due to reduction in price, spread of railroads, rural delivery, and lessening hours of industry, is often spoken of as making men more alike in their views. Tarde spoke of the "public," which he defined as the people sitting at home reading newspapers as a mental collectivity because of this supposed tendency. Christensen confirms this when he says that the people reading the newspapers are "a scattered crowd." The usually accepted opinion is that the daily press is making us more and more into crowds, but that is not my experience. A man with his daily paper may be obeying the group law or the crowd law as he unites his own thoughts with the thoughts of others or as he is merely amenable to suggestion from others, and it seems to me we see a good deal of the former process. The newspaper brings home to us vividly what others are feeling and thinking. It offers many suggestions; we see less and less tendency to "swallow these whole," the colloquial counterpart of the technical "imitation." These suggestions are freely criticized, readers do a good deal of thinking and the results are fairly rational. The reader more and more I believe is selecting, is unifying difference. The result of all this is that men's minds are becoming more plastic, that they are deciding less by prejudice and hypnosis and more by judgment. And it must be remembered that a man is not necessarily a more developed person because he rejects his newspaper's theories that if he accepts them; the developed man is the group man and the group man neither accepts nor rejects, but joins his own thoughts with that of all he reads to make new thought. The group man is never sterile, he always brings forth [1].

1. Other results of the increased reading of newspapers and magazines are that large questions are driving out trivial interests (I find this very marked in the country), and the enormous amount of publicity now given everything finds a channel to the public through the press. The reports of
commissions, like the Industrial Relations Commission, the surveys, like the Pittsburgh Survey, the reports of foundations, like the Russell Sage, the reports of the rapidly increasing bureaus of research like the New York Municipal Bureau, all find their way to us through the columns of our daily or weekly or monthly. Therefore we have more material on which to found individual thinking.

Democracy can never mean the domination of the crowd. The helter-skelter strivings of an endless number of social atoms can never give us a fair and ordered world. It may be true that we have lived under the domination either of individuals or of crowds up to the present time, but now is the moment when this must be deliberately challenged. The party boss must go, the wise men chosen by the reform associations must go, the crowd must be abandoned. The idea of the All has gripped us--but the idea has not been made workable, we have yet to find the way. We have said, "The people must rule." We now ask, "How are they to rule?" It is the technique of democracy which we are seeking. We shall find it in group organization.