t opportunities for their education.

It is a widespread popular notion that everybody already knows what is
good for the State, and that it is this common knowledge which finds
expression in the assembly. Here, in the assembly, are developed
virtues, talents, skill, which have to serve as examples. To be sure,
the ministers may find these assemblies onerous, for ministers must
possess large resources of wit and eloquence to resist the attacks which
are hurled against them. Nevertheless, publicity is one of the best
means of instruction in the interests of the State generally, for where
publicity is found the people manifest an entirely different regard for
the State than in those places where there are no assemblies or where
they are not public. Only through the publication of every one of their
proceedings are the chambers related to the larger public opinion; and
it is shown that what one imagines at home with his wife and friends is
one thing, and what happens in a great assembly, where one feat of
eloquence wrecks another, is quite a different thing.

PUBLIC OPINION

Public opinion is the unorganized way in which what a people wants and
thinks is promulgated. That which is actually effective in the State
must be so in an organic fashion. In the constitution this is the case.
But at all times public opinion has been a great power, and it is
particularly so in our time, when the principle of subjective freedom
has such importance and significance. What shall now prevail, prevails
no longer through force, little through use and custom, but rather
through insight and reasons.

Public opinion contains, therefore, the eternal substantial principles
of justice, the true content, and the result of the whole constitution,
legislation, and the universal condition in general. The form
underlying public opinion is sound common sense, which is a fundamental
ethical principle winding its way through everything, in spite of
prepossessions. But when this inner character is formulated in the shape
of general propositions, partly for their own sake, partly for the
purpose of actual reasoning about events, institutions, relations, and
the recognized wants of the State, there appears also the whole
character of accidental opinion, with its ignorance and perversity, its
false knowledge and incorrect judgment.

It is therefore not to be regarded as merely a difference in subjective
opinion when it is asserted on the one hand--