se the dangers of
precipitate action. The most trivial incident, in such periods of
tension, may plunge a community into irretrievable disaster. It is under
conditions of crisis that dictatorships are at once possible and
necessary, not merely to enable the community to act energetically, but
in order to protect the community from the mere play of external forces.
The manner in which Bismarck, by a slight modification of the famous
telegram of Ems, provoked a crisis in France and compelled Napoleon III,
against his judgment and that of his advisers, to declare war on
Germany, is an illustration of this danger.[255]

It is this narrowing of the area over which a definite public opinion
may be said to exist that at once creates the possibility and defines
the limits of arbitrary control, so far as it is created or determined
by the existence of public opinion.

Thus far the public has been described almost wholly in terms that could
be applied to a crowd. The public has been frequently described as if it
were simply a great crowd, a crowd scattered as widely as news will
circulate and still be news.[256] But there is this difference. In the
heat and excitement of the crowd, as in the choral dances of primitive
people, there is for the moment what may be described as complete fusion
of the social forces. Rapport has, for the time being, made the crowd,
in a peculiarly intimate way, a social unit.

No such unity exists in the public. The sentiment and tendencies which
we call public opinion are never unqualified expressions of emotion. The
difference is that public opinion is determined by conflict and
discussion, and made up of the opinions of individuals not wholly at
one. In any conflict situation, where party spirit is aroused, the
spectators, who constitute the public, are bound to take sides. The
impulse to take sides is, in fact, in direct proportion to the
excitement and party spirit displayed. The result is, however, that both
sides of an issue get considered. Certain contentions are rejected
because they will not stand criticism. Public opinion formed in this way
has the character of a judgment, rather than a mere unmeditated
expression of emotion, as in the crowd. The public is never ecstatic. It
is always more or less rational. It is this fact of conflict, in the
form of discussion, that introduces into the control exercised by public
opinion the elements of rationality and of fact.

In the final judgment of