When a rule is broken not occasionally but very often the rule is defective. It simply does not define the conduct which normally may be expected of men who live under it. It may sound noble. But it does not work. It does not adjust relations. It does not actually organize society. In what way the rule is defective the public cannot specifically determine. By the two tests I have suggested, of assent and of conformity, the public can determine the presence of a defect in the rule. But whether that defect is due to a false measure of the changing balance of forces involved, or to neglect of an important interest or some relevant circumstance, or to a bad technic of adjustment, or to contradictions in the rule, or to obscurity, or to lack of machinery for its interpretation or for the deduction of specific rules from general ones, the public cannot judge. It will have gone, I believe, to the limits of its normal powers if it judges the rule to be defective, and turns then to identify the agency most likely to remedy it. Chapter XII THE CRITERIA OF REFORM 1 The random collections of bystanders who constitute a public could not, even if they had a mind to, intervene in all the problems of the day. They can and must play a part occasionally, I believe, but they cannot take an interest in, they cannot make even the coarsest judgments about, and they will not act even in the most grossly partisan way on, all the questions arising daily in a complex and changing society. Normally they leave their proxies to a kind of professional public consisting of more or less eminent persons. Most issues are never carried beyond this ruling group; the lay publics catch only echoes of the debate. If, by the push and pull of interested parties and public personages, settlements are made more or less continually the party in power has the confidence of the country. In effect, the outsiders are arrayed behind the dominant insiders. But if the interested parties cannot be made to agree, if, as a result, there is disturbance and chronic crisis, then the opposition among the insiders may come to be considered the hope of the country, and be able to entice the bystanders to its side. To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government. Even the most intelligent large public of which we have any experience must determine finally who shall wield the organized power of the state, its army and its police, by a choice between the Ins and Outs. A community where there is no choice does not have popular government. It is subject to some form of dictatorship or it is ruled by the intrigues of the politicians in the lobbies.