Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-09-11
THE CROWDS ARE A JURY
THAT NEVER ADJOURNS
Wilson. Pershina and Mercier Demon
strate the Need for a Better Under
standing Of the Will That

SNdIulIIS " t'C NN''' ''dN
Rules the World
GONE journalist, somewhere. has been
~ Iikcnng Pershing to the returning
Caesar. To call that writer carpenter
would not do. 1t would be putting an
unjustfablc sur on one of the oldest
and most honorable of the crafts. Per-
shing is about as much like Caesar as
Lincoln was like the German emperor.
He was the visible instrument of a
purpose that has animated the multi
tudes-thc crowds-for centuries, ever
since people began to read and think and
fight for liberty.
When the crowds applaud a man like
Pcrshing or Wilson or Mcrcicr or Roose-
welt they are applauding the light that
these various men have carried into life.
They may not always stop to analyze
their emotions, but they are cheering for
the evidences of victory won for their
hopes, their aspirations and their in
heritcd faith in righteous things.
That is hero worship as it exists today.
Who was Mercier? An old man, in
fnitely wise, whose tranquil soul was the
one thing in Belgium that the Germans
couldn't trample down; a scholar so con-
WINGED of the power of right that even
when his people and his land were over
whelmcd he still could stand alone amid
the ruins and placidly count the days
that must intervene before deliVerance.
Disaster is no uncommon experience
| with those who make up the crowds
They know what defeat and loss and de-
spair are. They are experienced in pa
tence. Even those among them who
happen to be faithleSs are thrilled by
| demonstrations of great faith. The very
virtues by which average men live were
! supreme in Mercier. Why shouldn't the
crowds cheer him as a living proof of
eternal principles that they themselves
cling to, even while they are moved with
troubling doubts?
A commonplace Of criticism has it that
crowds are lethargic. Lethargy? If
crowds are in the habit of withholding
their praise or their cooperation it is
! because they are, for the most part, more
critical and far more discerning than
those who presume to lead them.
They weren't iethargic when Roose
welt used to come to town. No man
| living ever brought the world to its toes
| as President Wilson did in his early war
| addresses. What the crowds recognized
| in the Wilson of those days was the mood
| of passionate sincerity and the dominant
| faith that always have served to carry
mankind forward out of darkness.
Crowds flung themselves to the Presi-
,,,h;1o nnliticiope
hypnotizing themselves with piddling
criticism. They knew the truth when
thev saw it. The crowds were the first
to discern and resent Mr.. Wilson's SEEM
ing departures from his stated policies.
The President is still more astute than his
Senate opponents in going back to ap-
peal to the crowds, without whom nothing
is possible.
Philadelphia might have been swept
| and cleaned long ago if it were not that
| the crowds are wise. They know more
than the politicians who lecture them
| from either side. They know that no
! man is altogether bad and they know,
too, that no man is wholly virtuous and
without fault. So they wait for some one
to come along who will speak the plain
| tiuth-as Roosevelt used to speak it, as
| Wilson presumes to speak it, as Cardinal
MERCER knew it, as Pershing fought
| for it.
Crowds aren't interested in the sort
of truth with a capital T with which
Thomas Robins is wasting the breath that
he ought to save for prayers for deliver
ance from his friends. Nor have they
ever seriously regarded the canned imta-
tions that are presented in political ora
| tions.
To perceive that common opinion as it
is interpreted by crowds is actually and
inexorably discerning and relentlessly
critical it is only necessary to remember
Lincoln, sainted in the mind of the world
after generations Of contemplative ex-
perience, and the former German EN-
peror, shamed, outlawed and condemned,
not by statesmen or governments, but by
the crowds.
| II is because the crowds are nstinc-
| tiyely devoted to truth that America can
be temporary heaven for almost every
demagogue who seems to bring a little
light with him into the fogs of conven-
tional reasoning. But every demagogue
is done to political death sooner or later
and condemned, like Bryan, to Nebraska
or Kansas. Only the amateurs in life
talk of crowd psychology as something
involved and mysterious.
Half million songs have been writ
ten. To only about a dozen of them