John Dewey: “Public opinion, even if it happens to be correct, is intermittent when it is not the product of methods of investigation…”

Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public.

That and that only gives reality to public opinion.

Publication is partial and the public which results is partially informed and formed until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth.

So to the patent objection that the state is a very modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of those structures which go by the name of states, yet all history, or almost all, records the exercise of analogous…