44 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
press and the electorate have nothing to do. But presuming that these writers mean political public opinion, it is still essentially incorrect. The press is no more public opinion than the charac- ters upon this page are the thoughts which are in my mind as I write them. The electorate, even with the most extended suf- frage, contains considerably less than half of those people who habitually contribute to political public opinions; and more than this, the electorate contains, under such circumstances, a great many who contribute nothing to the opinion for which they vote. The man who sells his vote cannot be said to have any opinion (not even a prejudiced one), sentiment, or desire in the matter. He votes in a certain way simply because he has been paid to do so.
We have said that the only form of public which is capable of self-expression is a crowd. All other publics are passive and require organs in order to obtain utterance. In times of intense excitement, or when other organs fail, publics may generate crowds for this purpose. This happened frequently during the French Revolution. The crowd which brought the king from Versailles to Paris was simply the executive of a much vaster public. The crowd which rescued the negro Burns in Boston was accomplishing the will of a public of immense extent. We have spoken of how literary and political publics relied upon the crowds of the salon and the coffee-house in the eighteenth cen- tury, before other organs of public opinion had sufficiently developed. But there are other and more customary methods by which publics express themselves.
By an organ of public opinion we mean any agency which gives utterance or expression to otherwise inarticulate opinions which publics may entertain. But just as the Delphian priests who transcribed the oracles of Apollo were in a position to greatly influence the god's deliverances, so the organs of public opinion often exercise a most potent influence upon the opinions which they express. They mold as well as express public opinion. Pub- lics have been compelled from time to time to secure the offices of new organs in order to obtain adequate expression for their opinions. As public opinion has developed, the number of these
