John Dewey: “They are officers; they represent a Public, but the Public acts only through them.”

That and that only gives reality to public opinion.

Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.

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…