PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

determined, and, therefore, within whatever limits of time this planet
will continue to support human life, man can set no term upon the
creative energies of men. He can issue no doom of automatism. He can
say, if he must, that for his life there will be no changes which he
can recognize as good. But in saying that he will be confining his
life to what he can see with his eye, rejecting what he might see with
his mind; he will be taking as the measure of good a measure which is
only the one he happens to possess. He can find no ground for
abandoning his highest hopes and relaxing his conscious effort unless
he chooses to regard the unknown as the unknowable, unless he elects
to believe that what no one knows no one will know, and that what
someone has not yet learned no one will ever be able to teach.
PART V - THE MAKING OF A COMMON WILL
CHAPTER XIII
THE TRANSFER OF INTEREST
This goes to show that there are many variables in each man's
impressions of the invisible world. The points of contact vary, the
stereotyped expectations vary, the interest enlisted varies most
subtly of all. The living impressions of a large number of people are
to an immeasurable degree personal in each of them, and unmanageably
complex in the mass. How, then, is any practical relationship
established between what is in people's heads and what is out there
beyond their ken in the environment? How in the language of democratic
theory, do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so
abstract a picture, develop any common will? How does a simple and
constant idea emerge from this complex of variables? How are those
things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or
Public Opinion crystallized out of such fleeting and casual imagery?
That there is a real difficulty here was shown by an angry tilt in the
spring of 1921 between the American Ambassador to England and a very
large number of other Americans. Mr. Harvey, speaking at a British
dinner table, had assured the world without the least sign of
hesitancy what were the motives of Americans in 1917. [Footnote: _New
York Times_, May 20, 1921.] As he described them, they were not the
motives which President Wilson had insisted upon when _he_
enunciated the American mind. Now, of course, neither Mr. Harvey nor
Mr. Wilson, nor the critics and friends of either, nor any one else,
can know quantitatively and qualitatively what went on in thirty or
forty million adult minds. But what everybody knows is that a war was
fought and won by a multitude of efforts, stimulated, no one knows in