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It can be established as a general rule that only certain experimental truths and simple first principles can be conceived uniformly by the majority; but at the moment when objects become complicated in their relationships, and in proportion to how these relationships multiply, how they get in the way of each other, and how the terms recede away to a greater distance, the impossibility of uniformity arises and grows. The majority abandon it, and their examination does not even occur to them, and the few who have an ability and dedicate themselves to the examination see them from different angles and, for that reason, establish on the basis of them very diverse and even, many times, contradictory principles.
All men have the same faculties, but perhaps no two apply them in the same way to their aims, from which grows such a multitude of passions, such a diversity of desires, and the infinite variety of concepts. Everyone experiences pleasures, but each in his own way; everyone suffers pain, but in how different a way, and how many times does the same object that provides pleasures to some, cause anguish and repugnance in others! So, about the only agreement we have is on the vague and indefinite desire to be happy, child of abstract, confused, and general understanding of happiness. But when it comes to realizing or satisfying that desire, each one goes by a very different road and believes himself able to find this treasure in objects very distant from one another. Let us agree, then, that if the truth is not practical and experimental or exceedingly simple, we waste time looking for it with respect to the true opinion and will of the greater number.
As societies and republics are nothing more than the consolidation of families, and these of individuals, it is necessary to acknowledge that public opinion and general will, if they exist, must have the same sources as individual opinion and will, and those can be verified only if the source of these others is identical. Well, now, let us examine the men, or better let each man examine himself, and tell us which were the sources of the opinions they embraced in their lives, which have produced lasting opinions and which transient, and all will respond that their opinions have arisen either from education or from respectful habits that they acquired from their education or from their perceptions or from their reflective meditations and study; that those which originate from this last source are generally readily changeable because, even when they are certain, they are accompanied by fear, because of the experience of other errors and mistakes; that those which originate in the other three primary sources create deep roots and, even should they be false, are set aside with difficulty.
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Assuming this, and it being impossible that the greater part of the citizens dedicate themselves to reflective meditation and study, there only remains to us, as origins of public opinion, general education, sensations, and respectful acquiescence, repeating in regard to this last that it is more likely the source of faith than of opinion because, not providing us with direct foundations, it makes us defer to what the person or persons to whom we give credit present to us as certain.
Sensations provide us only with experimental truths, for example that the sun gives light, that fire burns; and so, putting these to one side, there can be public opinion only with respect to those objects that might have been subjects of general education.
From this, anyone will infer very correctly that, it being unfortunately undeniable, there has never been among us popular education; that the fruits of what is sown today will be gathered twelve or twenty years from now; that the majority of our people did not go to the few and bad schools; that those who went to them learned only and at most the catechism of Ripalda, badly explained most of the time; and that popular instruction has been relative only to religion—and would that they presented it in all its purity!—will infer, we repeat, that, besides the truths of immediate experience, there is among Mexican citizens uniformity of thoughts and desires only in matters of religion, because they drink it with mother’s milk, and in independence of all foreign domination, because it is such a simple object, so perceptible, and because of its deprivation misfortunes came to us through all the senses. Excepted from this rule are neither the few that there may still be who have lost their sense of civic responsibility, longing for the sepulchral calm of the time of slavery, nor some who, for their misfortune and ours, detestable books have corrupted, which they read with neither principles nor criticism, and those books have made them waver in and even abjure the holy religion they professed.
The well-off class among our youth and the humblest and poorest among our citizens provide the confirmation of these truths. Observe the former carefully since our independence and you will note the yearning with which this class searches for works of the sciences whose names we did not previously know; the promptness with which it adopts the principles of each new work that arrives; the ease with which they are applied despite overrunning everything; and the equal ease with which they are abandoned with the arrival of another work
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that establishes different principles. From what does this changeability arise? From an excess of ingenuity and a lack of experience in scientific education. The desire to know and the necessity of governing ourselves make us devour whatever comes to our hands, and not being well rooted in the true principles, because they never gave them to us, nor did we learn them ourselves, we wander from theory to theory, and the same thing will happen to us until sufficient time has passed for reflective meditation and experience to root us in the solid truths which we still distrust. Therefore, for now we must not allege public opinion with such satisfaction and generality, not even in speaking of the well-to-do and studious class, because what we do not acquire in education only study and experience can give us, and those require a greater passage of time than what has passed since we have become free.
In the poorest class, which is incomparably the greater, the assertion is still more palpable: whoever goes out to deal with the people of the country or enters into artisan workshops to explore what they think about the innumerable questions of politics, economics, and morality that legislators must handle daily, will see that some respond only with the smile of suspicion, indicating that they fear one wants to make fun of them; and others, more simple, respond: And what do I know of that? There is no need to give this too much thought. Our people are almost uniquely generally satisfied with religion, with independence, with the desire to pay as little as possible in taxes or nothing if that is possible; with whatever will allow them to work and freely pursue their lives; that their personal security be stable; that they can enjoy their possessions in peace; and they become involved in nothing else, not even to inform themselves about government provisions; they respect their legislators, the government, and the subordinate authorities and let them do their work.
It seems very certain, then, and it is among us even if it might not be everywhere, that the only objects of common opinion are those that derive from popular education, those that come through the senses, that is to say empirical truths, or that are directly deduced from them, and those very few which, because of their simplicity and total lack of relational complication with other objects, are offered to the majority and are perceptible to everyone; but speculative truths, complex and difficult truths like those the science of government embraces, are neither objects of the opinion of the greater number, nor is there regarding them that uniformity
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of the majority, except in the case in which they adopt them by tradition, instilled by three or four people who are referred to as entourage. Then, the majority believes, does not opine; is incited mechanically, does not incite; and thus their thought, as their desire, does not generally last longer than that of the voices with which those who have set themselves up as coryphaeuses urge them on.
The law, we will be told, is the expression of the general will; then how can there be so few objects of public opinion and consequently so few objects of that will? If that maxim, taken from Rousseau, were absolutely true, says the very profound Bentham,1 “there is not a country that would have laws, for neither in Geneva nor in the small democratic cantons does the right of suffrage have that universality, nor is that right of suffrage of the