How does public opinion come to be superior to individual and to average opinion? There seems to be something paradoxical in the statement.
The fact is of the utmost importance; for public opinion is the ultimate source of sanctions of all public acts, the highest court of appeal before which every executive act performed in the name of the nation must justify itself. If public opinion were merely the immediate expression of the collective feelings and judgments of an unorganised mass of men, its verdicts would be (as we have seen) inferior to those of the average individuals, whereas, as a matter of fact, its expressions are much superior to those of the average individuals.
The influence of public opinion is especially clear and interesting in its relations to law. In this country it is not made by law, but makes law. Where law is imposed and long maintained by the authority of despotic power, it will of course mould public opinion; but, in any progressive highly organised nation, law and the lawyers are always one or two or more generations behind public opinion. The most progressive body of law formally embodies the public opinion of past generations rather than of the generation living at the time.
The fact of the superiority of public opinion is generally admitted and various explanations are current, for the most part very vague and incomplete. There is the mystical explanation embodied in the dictum that the voice of the people is the voice of God. A rather less vague explanation is that adopted by Mr Beattie Crozier[101] (among others). It is said that the average man carries within him a germ of an ideal of justice and right, and that he applies this to the criticism or approval of the actions of other men; though he often fails to apply it to his own actions, because, where his own interests are concerned, he is apt to be the sport of purely egoistic impulses.
But this explanation is only partially true. It represents the average man as more hypocritical than he really is, and as falling farther below the standards he acknowledges than he actually does fall. It leaves unexplained the fact that he has this sentiment for an ideal of justice and right; and it proceeds on a false assumption as to the nature of the problem, in assuming that men judge the actions of other men by higher standards than those which they apply to their own conduct; whereas this is by no means generally true.