Sad and baffling riddles

By 1909 a gathering pessimism converged upon the Liberals and those allied with them. "A thousand sad and baffling riddles" had somehow replaced the simple verities of politics, wrote Masterman[...]. He saw the world divided vertically "between nation and nation armed to the teeth" and horizontally between rich and poor. "The future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity at best appears as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock beaten by wind and wave; we cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning."

James Bryce, another member of the Liberal government as Chief Secretary for Ireland and since 1907 as Ambassador to Washington, found discouragement in the central theme of his life, the democratic process. In a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in 1909 on "Hindrances to Good Citizenship," he admitted that the practice of democracy had not lived up to the theory. The numbers who could read and vote had increased twenty times in the last seventy years but "the percentage of those who reflect before they vote has not kept pace either with popular education or with the extension of the suffrage." The "natural average man" was not exhibiting in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy had presumed he possessed. [...]

One of the most influential of English studies of the mental processes at work in public affairs was Hobhouses's Democracy and Reaction, published in 1904. An Oxford don whose deep interest in the labour movement led him to leave the University for the staff of the Manchester Guardian, Hobhouse found that the average man "has not the time to think and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time." His opinions faithfully reflect "the popular sheet and shouting newsboy...To this new public of the streets and tramcars it is useless to appeal in terms of reason."

The Columbus of this discovery was a surgeon, Wilfred Trotter. [...] In his two essays on "The Herd Instinct" in the Sociological Review in 1908 and 1909 he found man's social behavior springing from that same dark and sinister well of the subconscious whose uncovering marked the end of the Victorian age. [...] Because of man's innate desire for group approval, he is at the mercy of this irrational force and vulnerable to the herd reaction. "It needs but little imagination to see," he concluded, "how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of nature's failures."

- from The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman, pgs. 382-384, 1966