Yet it will be objected, “But what other means under the sun is there of finding the common will except by counting votes?” We see already here and there signs of a new method. In many committees, boards and commissions we see now a reluctance to take action until all agree; there is a feeling that somehow, if we keep at it long enough, we can unify our ideas and our wills, and there is also a feeling that such unification of will has value, that our work will be vastly more effective in consequence. How different from our old methods when we were bent merely upon getting enough on our side to carry the meeting with us. Some one has said, “We count heads to save breaking them.” We are beginning to see now that majority rule is only a clumsy makeshift until we shall devise ways of getting at the genuine collective thought. We have to assume that we have this while we try to approximate it. We are not to circumvent the majority, but to aim steadily at getting the majority will nearer and nearer to a true collective will. This may sound absurdly unlike the world as mainly constituted. Is this the way diplomats meet? Is this the way competing industrial interests adjust their differences? Not yet, but it must be. And what will help us more than anything else is just to get rid of the idea that we ever meet to get votes. The corruption in city councils, state legislatures, Congress, is largely the outcome of the idea that the getting of votes is the object of our meeting. The present barter in votes would not take place if the unimportance of votes was once clearly seen. Even now so far as a majority has power it is not by the brute force of numbers; it is because there has been a certain amount of unifying; it has real power directly in proportion to the amount of unifying. The composition of a political majority depends at present partly on inheritance and environment (which includes sentiment and prejudice), partly on the mass-induced idea (the spread of thought and feeling throughout a community by suggestion), and partly on some degree of integration of the different ideas and the different forces of that particular society. Its power is in proportion to the amount of this integration. When we use the expression “artificial majority” we mean chiefly one which shows little integration, and we have all seen how quickly such majorities tend to melt away when the artificial stimulus of especially magnetic leadership or of an especially catchy and jingoistic idea is withdrawn. Moreover a majority meaning a preponderance of votes can easily be controlled by a party or an “interest”; majorities which represent unities are not so easily managed. Group organization is, above everything else perhaps, to prevent the manipulation of helpless majorities.