![handle is hein.journals/pclscceqry21 and id is 1 raw text is:
Volume XXI]
POLITICAL SCIENCE
QUARTERLY
SOVEREIGNTY AND GOVERNMENT
E DMUND BURKE'S observation that it is very rare in-
deed for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning
public misconduct; as rare to be right in their specula-
tion upon the cause of it, applies to the operations of the human
mind upon many subjects. As products of evolution, feelings
are older than thoughts; they represent ages of adjustment of
the human organism to its environment; they are closely re-
lated to instincts. Yet it would not be safe to say that, while
the speculations of the multitude upon the causes of things in
general are more or less fantastic, the feelings of the multitude
may always be accepted as right and trusted for guidance. No
writer more vividly than Burke himself, in his Reflections on the
French Revolution and elsewhere, has shown us how darkly evil
the feeling of the multitude may be when, in moments of frenzy,
the populace gives itself over to acts of mad destruction or of
savage cruelty.
Accepting, then, the general truth that, with some startling
exceptions, the feelings of mankind are sounder than its specu-
lations, we are confronted with the complicating fact that theories
play a large part in arousing and sustaining feeling. There has
never been a popular revolution in which abstract theories of
government have not been invoked to inflame the multitude.
Theories of popular sovereignty played this part in the French
Revolution; theories of the essential sacredness of the individual
personality played a like part in the anti-slavery struggle in
the United States. How, then, can we say that feelings are more
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