material well-being, engineered by "fact-minded persons" and "competent diagnosticians." A democratic regime, to be sure, had to "carry its people along with it emotionally"; but that did not imply that the people should take an active part in governing themselves. As long as the governing classes grasped the nature and importance of political symbolism, they could satisfy the public demand for inspiring slogans and "ceremonials" without allowing public "ritual" to interfere with production and distribution.

The ideal administrator, in Arnold's view, combined the diagnostic skills of a psychiatrist with the arts of persuasion perfected by the advertising industry. Advertisers relied on "slogans rather than descriptions of their products." They would have ridiculed the "suggestion that the best way to sell goods is by making a rational appeal." Moralists might reject the application of advertising techniques to government as "Machiavellian," but their misguided scruples deprived them of any constructive influence on public affairs. They needed to learn that men are moved by myths and symbols, not by moral arguments, and that if responsible leaders did not provide compelling "faiths and dreams," irresponsible demagogues would gladly leap into the breach. The importance Arnold attached to mythology, together with his recognition of the need for moral equivalents of war, might seem at first to align him with James, Sorel, and Niebuhr. For those writers, however, mythology was suprascientific as well as prescientific, in Niebuhr's words. Arnold understood it in the latter sense alone. Mythology could not shed any light on the nature of things. Only science could do that; but most people, alas, could not live up to the austere demands of science. Unable to look facts in the face, they needed comforting illusions.

Arnold regarded mythology in the same way that Voltaire regarded religion. Men of a scientific turn of mind could live on lean meat and water, but the masses craved sweets. The masses, Arnold observed, fool

-435-