PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

pervaded the whole of western Europe.
In effect, the agony and disappointment had jarred loose men's
concentration on the accepted version of the war. Their interests were
no longer held by the ordinary official pronouncements, and their
attention began to wander, fixing now upon their own suffering, now
upon their party and class purposes, now upon general resentments
against the governments. That more or less perfect organization of
perception by official propaganda, of interest and attention by the
stimuli of hope, fear, and hatred, which is called morale, was by way
of breaking down. The minds of men everywhere began to search for new
attachments that promised relief.
Suddenly they beheld a tremendous drama. On the Eastern front there
was a Christmas truce, an end of slaughter, an end of noise, a promise
of peace. At Brest-Litovsk the dream of all simple people had come to
life: it was possible to negotiate, there was some other way to end
the ordeal than by matching lives with the enemy. Timidly, but with
rapt attention, people began to turn to the East. Why not, they asked?
What is it all for? Do the politicians know what they are doing? Are
we really fighting for what they say? Is it possible, perhaps, to
secure it without fighting? Under the ban of the censorship, little of
this was allowed to show itself in print, but, when Lord Lansdowne
spoke, there was a response from the heart. The earlier symbols of the
war had become hackneyed, and had lost their power to unify. Beneath
the surface a wide schism was opening up in each Allied country.
Something similar was happening in Central Europe. There too the
original impulse of the war was weakened; the union sacrÈe was broken.
The vertical cleavages along the battle front were cut across by
horizontal divisions running in all kinds of unforeseeable ways. The
moral crisis of the war had arrived before the military decision was
in sight. All this President Wilson and his advisers realized. They
had not, of course, a perfect knowledge of the situation, but what I
have sketched they knew.
They knew also that the Allied Governments were bound by a series of
engagements that in letter and in spirit ran counter to the popular
conception of what the war was about. The resolutions of the Paris
Economic Conference were, of course, public property, and the network
of secret treaties had been published by the Bolsheviks in November of
1917. [Footnote: President Wilson stated at his conference with the
Senators that he had never heard of these treaties until he reached
Paris. That statement is perplexing. The Fourteen Points, as the text
shows, could not have been formulated without a knowledge of the
secret treaties. The substance of those treaties was before the
President when he and Colonel House prepared the final published text
of the Fourteen Points.] Their terms were only vaguely known to the