Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/343

 graduate from the country districts was seen at Commencement wearing a full-bottomed wig.

During this interval, if the much-heralded principles of liberty and fraternity were rather irregularly and gingerly applied, that of equality, at least equality of externals, was more and more insisted upon. The new idea of democracy seemed to demand, with a certain self-distrustfulness, that if every man was as good as his neighbor, he must prove it by dressing, talking, acting, and (so far as possible) thinking like his neighbor. In the popular creed, this novel application of majority rule rapidly hardened into an ironbound dogma. The astute Alexis de Tocqueville, aged twenty-five, travelling through the United States in 1831, noted with amazement the overwhelming “‘power of public opinion, which discourages the development of individual character and initiative.” This “tyranny of mass opinion,” he predicted, would in time prove highly deleterious to the best phases of national development. It would, for example, “gradually destroy that fine flower of individual independence in thought and expression which produces a great literature.” And in spite of all the publishers’ agents in the country the prediction seems