A private opinion may be quite complicated, and may issue in quite complicated actions, in a whole train of subsidiary opinions, as when a man decides to build a house and then makes a hundred judgments as to how it shall be built. But a public opinion has no such immediate responsibility or continuous result. It leads in politics to the making of a pencil mark on a piece of paper, and then to a period of waiting and watching as to whether one or two years hence the mark shall be made in the same column or in the adjoining one. The decision to make the mark may be for reasons _a_^1, _a_^2, _a_^3 ... _a_^n: the result, whether an idiot or genius has voted, is A. For great masses of people, though each of them may have more or less distinct views, must when they act converge to an identical result. And the more complex the collection of men the more ambiguous must be the unity and the simpler the common ideas. 3 In English-speaking countries during the last century the contrast between the action of men individually and in the mass has been much emphasized, and yet greatly misunderstood. Macaulay, for example, speaking on the Reform Bill of 1832, drew the conventional distinction between private enterprise and public action: “In all those things which depend on the intelligence, the knowledge, the industry, the energy of individuals, this country stands preëminent among all countries of the world ancient and modern. But in those things which it belongs to the state to direct we have no such claim to superiority ... can there be a stronger contrast than that which exists between the beauty, the completeness, the speed, the precision with which every process is performed in our factories, and the awkwardness, the crudeness, the slowness, the uncertainty of the apparatus by which offenses are punished and rights vindicated?... Surely we see the barbarism of the Thirteenth Century and the highest civilization of the Nineteenth Century side by side, and we see that the barbarism belongs to the government, and the civilization to the people.”[13] Macaulay was, of course, thinking of the contrast between factory production and government as it existed in England under Queen Victoria’s uncles and the hard-drinking, hard-riding squirearchy. But the Prussian bureaucracy amply demonstrated that there is no such necessary contrast between governmental and private action. There is a contrast between action by and through great masses of people and action that moves without them.