JELLY-FISH OPINION.
TT is very remarkable that the greatest deference ever paid to public opinion, appears to be paid by those who do the least for the formation of a sound and manly standard of public conviction. Everywhere you hear of people who make their obeisance to public opinion, and acquiesce in its decisions, while they confess themselves entirely unconvinced in their own minds. Now, if that is deference to public opinion, it certainly is not true respect. Public opinion is not good for much, unless it emerges strong and solid after running the gaunt- let of all reasonable and honest antagonism. Opinion which has
• surmounted courageous opposition, which has convinced some and defeated others by its intrinsic reasonableness, may well receive a certain deference and respect from the antagonists whom it has defied and beaten. But opinion which has not passed this test, which has only been swelled by the formal and nominal adhesion of a number of mere neutrals, or has been made to appear more potent than it is by the precipitate abdication of their objections by those who are at heart opposed to it, is not sound, even though it be widely enough accepted to be called Public Opinion, and it is as likely as not that the public who profess it will one day be seized with some panic which will show how weak and worthless it is. We hear every day of men of great position who, on more than one question, declare that it is not their intention to support their private opinion by either their voice or their vote, since they know that the case has been prejudged by the nation. We can only say that if they do know this, they must be prophets, and prophets of the most dismal kind,—prophets who allege their foreknowledge of their own defeat as an excuse for not doing what in them lies to prevent that defeat. What should we say to a sifter who, because a great deal of the substance he was sifting was certain to get through the meshes of his sieve, deliberately resolved to take away the meshes altogether, and so to leave the substance =sifted ? That is precisely what a man does who, because he does not expect opinion to go with him, refuses to take up his own stand against it, and so abdicates his functions as a sifter. For example, there were many, we believe, who took part in the Oxford Congregation on Tuesday who did not vote, and who yet were in their inmost minds opposed to giving women the same opportunities of education as men. They held in secret with Canon Liddon, but had not Canon Liddon's courage in declaring their real opinion. It seems to us that any man who acted thus, must have been either secretly convinced that his own prejudices were mere preju- dices, and ought to be voted down, though he could not persuade himself to confess his conversion ; or else must have been doing all in his power to generate a false and hollow public opinion, a public opinion which, since it had not encountered the full weight of the argument on the other side, had not surmounted, therefore, as it ought to have surmounted, the real obstacle's to its triumph. In either case, such men are untrue to themselves. If they had been convinced, but were too much out of temper with themselves to confess that they were, they did not give the victorious opinion the fair credit to which it was entitled of having removed their deepest ob- jections. If they had not been convinced, but were simply cowed by the volume of the opinion opposed to them, they failed in their duty to their own view of the troth, to which they ought to have given their adhesion in the fall confidence that even if they were beaten, the strength of the case on their own side must produce more or less effect, whether that effect consisted in modifying the absoluteness of the vic- torious view, or only in preparing a speedy reaction against that victorious view. We have no respect at all for a public opinion which is formed without encountering the fall resistance of all the weighty and reasonable criticisms which can be brought against it. And we hold that every man who bows to a public opinion which he distrusts, helps to make that public opinion one unworthy of deference, by the very fact that he defers to it.
We expressed the other day our regret that the Archbishop of Canterbury, in referring to a matter of the first importance to the Church, should have been content to wait on public opinion, instead of helping in forming it. The truth is, that the kind of public opinion on which men wait, is, in nine cases out of ten, nothing at all but a mere potentiality or possibility of opinion not yet condensed into substance. Unless very clear and strong individual opinions, and such individual opinions in great numbers, are formed and expressed, there is no pos- sibility that a true public opinion can exist. There is an old German play, mentioned in one of his earlier essays by Dr. Martineau, in which Adam walks across the stage going to be created. That is the chronic condition of a very great part of so-called public opinion in all countries. It does not exist, but is going to exist. And yet often the people who ought to create it, instead of creating it in the proper and manly fashion, by bringing their own opinion and its grounds before the public attention, are feeble enough to attempt to discount what as yet does not exist, and to indulge in complimentary guesses as to the direc- tion which it is about to take, but has not yet taken. Now, this is not contributing to the formation of public opinion at all. That pulpy and gelatinous state of mind in which people ob- sequiously declare their willingness to follow in a track which is not yet marked out, and which they only discover even in vision by asking themselves what is the line of least resistance, is not a state of mind which sustains public conviction, but, on the contrary, one which renders public conviction almost un- meaning.
Some people seem to think that they must perform for public opinion the mere function which the co-opted members of a public body are supposed to perform for the majority of that body,—namely, the throwing of additional weight into the winning scale, so that there may be no outward appearance of indecision. But even a corporate body with the power to co-opt additional members takes care to know its own mind and the mind of these additional members, on the chief subject of discussion, before it lends this extra weight to the opinion of the majority. Now the
man who gives in his adhesion to public opinion before it is really formed, does nothing of the kind ; he promises a proxy of no moral value to an intellectual cause which is not yet pro- claimed, and thereby only makes known to everybody how entirely gelatinous is the mass of so-called opinion before which so many people quail. No one ought to know better than British politicians how often public opinion formed by the multitudinous echoes of a few great interests, collapses when it comes into rude collision with a single great fact, or with a single disinterested and wise denial. The public opinion formed in this country on the issues involved in the American civil war was shattered by the victories of the North. The public opinion formed on the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was shattered by a very little experience of the effect produced by those once illegal Roman Catholic titles, and of the no-effect produced by disallow- ing them. The public opinion formed on the value of the Public Worship Act was shattered by our experience of the respect gained by the Bishops who refused to put it in force, and the respect lost by the Bishops who enforced it. And to go to a very different subject, the public opinion formed on the im- portance to England of an alliance with the Ottoman Empire has been shattered by finding how invariably the Turk has em- barrassed us in every attempt to improve the state of the East, and has increased all the dangers which seemed to us most threatening. The truth is that public opinion is worthless, unless it is made up of solid and intelligent individual opinions; and, therefore, that the disposition to make obeisance to an opinion not yet really in existence,—the disposition to sign a blank cheque, which the public are, as it were, empowered to fill up,—is a most mischievous disposition, which tends to create a loose and fibreless imitation of that which ought to be firm, close-knit, and permeated with earnest conviction.
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