lic opinion.

If two highwaymen meet a belated traveler on a dark road and propose to
relieve him of his watch and wallet, it would clearly be an abuse of
terms to say that in the assemblage on that lonely spot there was a
public opinion in favor of a redistribution of property. Nor would it
make any difference, for this purpose, whether there were two highwaymen
and one traveler, or one robber and two victims. The absurdity in such a
case of speaking about the duty of the minority to submit to the verdict
of public opinion is self-evident; and it is not due to the fact that
the three men on the road form part of a larger community, or that they
are subject to the jurisdiction of a common government. The expression
would be quite as inappropriate if no organized state existed; on a
savage island, for example, where two cannibals were greedy to devour
one shipwrecked mariner. In short, the three men in each of the cases
supposed do not form a community that is capable of a public opinion on
the question involved. May this not be equally true under an organized
government, among people that are for certain purposes a community?

To take an illustration nearer home. At the time of the Reconstruction
that followed the American Civil War the question whether public opinion
in a southern state was or was not in favor of extending the suffrage to
the Negroes could not in any true sense be said to depend on which of
the two races had a slight numerical majority. One opinion may have been
public or general in regard to the whites, the other public or general
in regard to the Negroes, but neither opinion was public or general in
regard to the whole population. Examples of this kind could be
multiplied indefinitely. They can be found in Ireland, in
Austria-Hungary, in Turkey, in India, in any country where the cleavage
of race, religion, or politics is sharp and deep enough to cut the
community into fragments too far apart for an accord on fundamental
matters.

In all these instances an opinion cannot be public or general with
respect to both elements in the state. For that purpose they are as
distinct as if they belonged to different commonwealths. You may count
heads, you may break heads, you may impose uniformity by force; but on
the matters at stake the two elements do not form a community capable
of an opinion that is in any rational sense public or general. If we are
to employ the term in a sense that is significant for go