inclinations, but he
must at least have led his mameluks, or praetorian bands, like
men, by their opinions.

Hume's statement is too epigrammatic to be true. Governments can and do
maintain themselves by force rather than consent. They have done this
even when they were greatly inferior in numbers. Witness Cortez in
Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, and the recent English conquest, with
two hundred aeroplanes, of the Mad Mullah in Somaliland. Civilized
people must be governed in subtle ways. Unpopular governments maintain
themselves sometimes by taking possession of the means of communication,
by polluting the sources of information, by suppressing newspapers, by
propaganda.

Caspar Schmidt, "Max Stirner," the most consistent of anarchists, said
the last tyranny is the tyranny of the idea. The last tyrant, in other
words, is the propagandist, the individual who gives a "slant" to the
facts in order to promote his own conception of the welfare of the
community.

We use the word public opinion in a wider and in a narrower sense. The
public, the popular mind, is controlled by something more than opinion,
or public opinion, in the narrower sense.

We are living today under the subtle tyranny of the advertising man. He
tells us what to wear, and makes us wear it. He tells us what to eat,
and makes us eat it. We do not resent this tyranny. We do not feel it.
We do what we are told; but we do it with the feeling that we are
following our own wild impulses. This does not mean that, under the
inspiration of advertisements, we act irrationally. We have reasons; but
they are sometimes after-thoughts. Or they are supplied by the
advertiser.

Advertising is one form of social control. It is one way of capturing
the public mind. But advertising does not get its results by provoking
discussion. That is one respect in which it differs from public opinion.

Fashion is one of the subtler forms of control to which we all bow. We
all follow the fashions at a greater or less distance. Some of us fall
behind the fashions, but no one ever gets ahead of them. No one ever can
get ahead of the fashions because we never know what they are, until
they arrive.

Fashion, in the broad sense, comes under the head of what Herbert
Spencer called ceremonial government. Ceremony, he said, is the most
primitive and the most effective of all forms of government. There is no
rebellion against fashion; no rebellion against social ritual.