Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/375

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 361

in equally large bodies. One has but to recall the turbulence of those great meetings of the whole Polish nobility to choose the Polish king.

Another means of giving wisdom the weather-gage in the battle with folly is to delay action so as to compel adjournment and an interval of private reflection before a decision is reached. By this means the winning debater is constrained to educate up his hearers instead of merely carrying them along with him. By forbidding a measure to be voted on at the sitting in which it is proposed, by forbidding it to be discussed on the day of voting, by requiring it to be read at two sittings previous to voting, by requiring that the more serious measures be considered in- the committee of the whole house, it is sought to destroy any tem- porary rapport that may be established between the orator and his auditors, and to evoke as the foundation of the final collec- tive judgment the best individual judgment of the members.

There are two kinds of associations with presence and with- out presence. Crowd, mass-meeting, assembly, parliament, con- stitute a series of associations with presence ranging from the amorphous to the highly organized. To this the scale of asso- ciations without presence public, sect, corporation runs nearly parallel. In many points the public matches the crowd, the sect corresponds to the assembly, and the corporation is twin to the representative body.

The public is the dispersed crowd, a body of heterogeneous persons who, although separated, keep so closely in touch with one another that they not only respond to a given stimulus at almost the same moment, but are aware each of the other's response. In the city the bulletin, the flying rumor, the "man in the street," open paths between minds and permit the ambient mass to press almost irresistibly upon the individual. But mental contact is not bound up with propinquity. With the telegraph to collect and transmit the signs of the ruling mood and the fast mail to hurry to the eager clutch of waiting thousands the still damp sheets of the morning paper remote people are brought, as it were, into one another's presence. Our space-annihilating