Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/373

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 359

people together. Investors expect the men of millions to speak first and oftenest. The church-meeting looks to the "elders in Israel " to point the way. Workingmen defer to the time-tested trades-unionist. The primary or caucus expects some "old war- horse" to give the cue. People meet with a scale of worthies in mind, and the guidance of their deliberations drifts spontaneously into experienced hands. Most of the ancient popular assemblies listened only to chiefs and dignitaries. The undistinguished had the right to express assent or dissent, but not the right to be heard. If a Thersites ventured to speak up, he was likely to suffer for it.

It is a most difficult thing to get a great company of men to deliberate, because in the throng it takes so little to make the heart overflow and put out the light in the brain. The big assembly skirts ever the slippery incline that leads down to the abyss, and all manner of guard-rails in the form of prescribed modes of procedure are necessary in order to save it from a mis- step. A well-known chairman described the body he presided over as a wild beast he could feel tugging and springing against the leash. Now, this leash is the code of parliamentary law. This venerable body of usage anciently wrought out in the House of Commons is a miracle of applied psychology, and counts not the least among England's contributions to the world. Mirabeau did well to translate for the French Constituent Assembly Romilly's little book on parliamentary procedure, and it was an ill hour when the assembly rejected it as "too English." The Rules of Order constitute a strait-jacket put on a giant liable to convulsive seizures. The rules requiring that a meeting shall have a chairman, that the chairman shall not take part in debate, that no one shall speak without first securing recognition, that the speaker shall address the chair and not the assembly, that remarks shall pertain to a pending motion, that personalities shall be taboo, and that members shall not be referred to by name what are they but so many devices to keep the honey-tongued or brazen- throated crowd-leader from springing to the center of the stage and weaving his baleful spells ! The rules that the galleries be cleared of too demonstrative outsiders,