When such organisation is in any degree attained and a more or less consistent system of national traditions is embodied in the political, religious, literary, and scientific culture, which moulds in some degree the minds of all men, the national mind clearly becomes, as we said in an earlier chapter, a system of interacting mental forces which are not merely tendencies of the living members of the nation, but are also, in an even greater degree, the ideas and tendencies of the dead; and we see also that in such a people the national consciousness is most truly embodied, not in the minds of the average men, but in the minds of the best men of the time. The term ‘public opinion’ is sometimes, perhaps generally, used in a looser and wider sense than the meaning implied in the foregoing pages. It is used in the looser sense by President Lowell in his _Public Opinion and Popular Government_. By ‘public opinion’ he seems to mean simply the algebraic sum or balance of individual opinions; he writes “the opinion of the whole people is only the collected opinions of all the persons therein[103].” In accordance with this view, he regards representative institutions as merely one means by which this sum of opinions may be collected and recorded. And he seems to be prepared to regard the ‘referendum’ or the ‘initiative’ in any of their forms, or other methods of direct legislation, as equally good methods, if only all individuals would take the trouble to register their votes upon every question proposed to them. He is aware, of course, that this can hardly be expected of persons who have other interests and occupations than the purely political, and that the direct methods are therefore impracticable as general methods of legislation. If it were true that representative institutions do and should merely collect and record the individual opinions of all members of the public, then it is obvious that each representative should be merely a delegate sent to record the votes of the majority of his constituents. Whereas, if representative institutions should, and in various degrees do, constitute the formal deliberative organisation of the national mind, through which national deliberation and judgment are raised to a higher plane than that of a mere crowd, it follows that the representative should exert his own powers of reasoning and judgment, aided by his special knowledge and equipment, by the special sources of information that he enjoys, in the light of the discussions in which he takes part, and influenced by all those political traditions whose force he experiences in exceptional fulness by reason of his priviledged position. President Lowell, in discussing the functions of the representative, does not decide in favour of the former view, as consistency should perhaps lead him to do; thereby showing that he is not wholly committed to the individualist view. He discusses the question whether the member of Parliament or