"There can be no settlement of a great cause without discussion, and people will not discuss a cause until their attention is drawn to it"
About this Quote
Democracy, Bryan suggests, doesn’t run on quiet competence; it runs on noise with a purpose. The line is a compact argument for agitation: “settlement” is the calm, legalistic end-state, but he insists it can’t be reached without the messy middle of public argument. That’s the lawyerly move here. Bryan isn’t romanticizing debate as a virtue; he’s treating it as procedural necessity. If a “great cause” is going to become policy, verdict, or reform, it has to be contested out loud first.
The sharper subtext is about attention as a scarce resource. People “will not discuss” until their “attention is drawn” sounds almost bluntly modern: deliberation isn’t a default civic habit, it’s a response to being alerted, provoked, recruited. Bryan is implicitly defending the role of the persuader - the stump speaker, the organizer, the press, the moral entrepreneur - who yanks an issue out of private suffering or elite paperwork and into public consciousness. It’s also a warning: if attention never lands, nothing gets “settled,” and injustice can persist simply because it’s background noise.
Context matters because Bryan made his career inside mass politics at the turn of the century, when industrial capitalism, labor conflict, prohibition, and monetary policy (the famous “Cross of Gold”) were fights over who gets heard and who gets ignored. His populist instinct was that power thrives on silence. Discussion, in this framing, isn’t polite conversation; it’s a redistribution mechanism. You can’t fix what the public has been trained not to see.
The sharper subtext is about attention as a scarce resource. People “will not discuss” until their “attention is drawn” sounds almost bluntly modern: deliberation isn’t a default civic habit, it’s a response to being alerted, provoked, recruited. Bryan is implicitly defending the role of the persuader - the stump speaker, the organizer, the press, the moral entrepreneur - who yanks an issue out of private suffering or elite paperwork and into public consciousness. It’s also a warning: if attention never lands, nothing gets “settled,” and injustice can persist simply because it’s background noise.
Context matters because Bryan made his career inside mass politics at the turn of the century, when industrial capitalism, labor conflict, prohibition, and monetary policy (the famous “Cross of Gold”) were fights over who gets heard and who gets ignored. His populist instinct was that power thrives on silence. Discussion, in this framing, isn’t polite conversation; it’s a redistribution mechanism. You can’t fix what the public has been trained not to see.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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