ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the increased ability to diagnose and predict the platform which resulted from the pioneer work of the late Professor Edward S. Robinson of Yale, a psychologist who chose to observe law and economics. The fact-minded observer is one who realizes that disillusionment about the human race is a futile attitude. The present status of fact-minded observations on governmental affairs can be pictured by comparing it with the diagnosis of a physician. The more respectable elements of the organization are pained by this phenomenon in exactly the same way that the statesman is pained at having to deal with a political machine. The language of medicine, which once was a moral and theological debate over principles, has become to a large extent a pure nonphilosophical tool. Mencken's book on the American language is a far greater contribution to the study of political institutions in America than Mencken himself realized when he wrote it.
