may result in the appointment by the Poincaré Government of a real propaganda agent to meet the foreign newspaper men. The Eclair to-day calls on the new premier to ‘find his own Lord Riddell in the French diplomatic and parliamentary world, who can give the world the French interpretation.’” Walter Lippmann of the New York World in his volume “Public Opinion” declares that “the significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic or political, but the revolution which is taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed.” He goes on: “Within the life of the new generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the only constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the cardinal dogma of democracy, that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”1
In domestic affairs the importance of public opinion not only in political decisions but in the daily industrial life of the nation may be seen from numerous incidents. In the New York Times of Friday, May 20, 1922, I find almost a column article with the heading “Hoover Prescribes Publicity for Coal.” Among the improvements in the coal industry generally, which Mr. Hoover, according to the dispatch, anticipates from widespread, accurate and informative publicity about the industry itself, are the stimulation of industrial consumers to more regular demands, the ability to forecast more reliably the volume of demand, the ability of the consumer to “form some judgment as to the prices he should pay for