ABSTRACT
A thorough scientific psychology of the workings of universal suffrage in populous nations would be instructive. It is being attempted in the United States, not so much, apparently, for the sake of 356science as in the service of business organisation and of democracy itself, assumed to be a sacred principle. But between the lines of these statistical investigations, there looms the spectre of universal hygienic hypnotisation; for when the statistical psychologists find out what strings and wires move the human psyche, they will have all those strings and wires in their hands and, being legally commissioned to pull them, will have to do so. And then the truly political question will arise for them: To what end should the race be scientifically caused to act, to think, and to vote? Have they all a similar primal Will? Are they all capable of the same ultimate virtues?
