PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

of the Franco-Prussian war. The official French formula for annexing
the Saar was to subsume it under "Alsace-Lorraine" meaning the
Alsace-Lorraine of 1814-1815. By insistence on "1871" the President
was really defining the ultimate boundary between Germany and France,
was adverting to the secret treaty, and was casting it aside.
Number nine, a little less subtly, does the same thing in respect to
Italy. "Clearly recognizable lines of nationality" are exactly what
the lines of the Treaty of London were not. Those lines were partly
strategic, partly economic, partly imperialistic, partly ethnic. The
only part of them that could possibly procure allied sympathy was that
which would recover the genuine Italia Irredenta. All the rest, as
everyone who was informed knew, merely delayed the impending Jugoslav
revolt.
5
It would be a mistake to suppose that the apparently unanimous
enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on
a program. Everyone seemed to find something that he liked and
stressed this aspect and that detail. But no one risked a discussion.
The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the
civilized world, were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but
they evoked a common emotion. And to that extent they played a part in
rallying the western peoples for the desperate ten months of war which
they had still to endure.
As long as the Fourteen Points dealt with that hazy and happy future
when the agony was to be over, the real conflicts of interpretation
were not made manifest. They were plans for the settlement of a wholly
invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups
each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public
hope. For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes's speech, is a
hierarchy of symbols. As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include
more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional
connection though you lose the intellectual. But even the emotion
becomes thinner. As you go further away from experience, you go higher
into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw
more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached
the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made
Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little. Yet
the people whose emotions are entrained do not remain passive. As the
public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the
emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private
meanings are given a universal application. Whatever you want badly is
the Rights of Humanity. For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of
meaning almost anything, soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything.
Mr. Wilson's phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in