Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/59

 PUBUC OPINION 45

organs has greatly increased. In any popular government, it is of the utmost importance that public opinion should be voiced truly and adequately.

Confining our attention now to political public opinion, we shall discuss some of the more important organs. These may be conveniently divided into two classes, governmental, or secondary, and non-governmental, or primary. The former include such as are as well organs of government as organs of public opinion. They are rulers, both elective and hereditary; ministers; legisla- tures; courts, and electorates. The limits of this article do not permit us to more than mention these governmental organs. They only assume the character of organs of public opinion after they are compelled to do so by public opinion acting through the primary organs.

The simplest primary organ of public opinion is conversation. Diderot, in 1775, in a letter to Neckar, defined public opinion in the following words :®

Opinion! that volatile something, with whose power for good and for evil we are all acquainted, in its origin is nothing but the work of a small number of men who speak only after having thought and who continually form in different sections of society centers of instruction from whence both errors and reasoned truths are disseminated little by little to the farthest limits of the city in which they are established, as articles of faith.

This describes accurately the process by which public opinion is transmitted and grows in an age before the development of other organs. Conversation is not supplanted by new organs when they appear, but continues even today perhaps the most important of all methods of expression of opinion. Bryce, whose chapters upon public opinion * must always constitute the founda- tion for any study of the subject, has emphasized the importance of conversation in this connection,^® and Tarde has graphically described the effect of conversation upon the formation and diffusion of opinion.^ ^ Other organs of public opinion, espe- cially the press, have exercised a powerful incidental influence

' Quoted by Tarda, op. cit., p. 83.


 * American Commonzvealth, Vol. II, chaps. 76-87.

^ Ibid., chap. 79.

"Tarde, op, cit., pp. 82-148.