PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

dignity of all men, were immediately involved by the immense size and
confusion of their ruling class--the male electorate. Their science
told them that politics was an instinct, and that the instinct worked
in a limited environment. Their hopes bade them insist that all men in
a very large environment could govern. In this deadly conflict between
their ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without
much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of God.
The paradox was too great, the stakes too big, their ideal too
precious for critical examination. They could not show how a citizen
of Boston was to stay in Boston and conceive the views of a Virginian,
how a Virginian in Virginia could have real opinions about the
government at Washington, how Congressmen in Washington could have
opinions about China or Mexico. For in that day it was not possible
for many men to have an unseen environment brought into the field of
their judgment. There had been some advances, to be sure, since
Aristotle. There were a few newspapers, and there were books, better
roads perhaps, and better ships. But there was no great advance, and
the political assumptions of the Eighteenth Century had essentially to
be those that had prevailed in political science for two thousand
years. The pioneer democrats did not possess the material for
resolving the conflict between the known range of man's attention and
their illimitable faith in his dignity.
Their assumptions antedated not only the modern newspaper, the
world-wide press services, photography and moving pictures, but, what
is really more significant, they antedated measurement and record,
quantitative and comparative analysis, the canons of evidence, and the
ability of psychological analysis to correct and discount the
prejudices of the witness. I do not mean to say that our records are
satisfactory, our analysis unbiased, our measurements sound. I do mean
to say that the key inventions have been made for bringing the unseen
world into the field of judgment. They had not been made in the time
of Aristotle, and they were not yet important enough to be visible for
political theory in the age of Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Thomas
Jefferson. In a later chapter I think we shall see that even in the
latest theory of human reconstruction, that of the English Guild
Socialists, all the deeper premises have been taken over from this
older system of political thought.
That system, whenever it was competent and honest, had to assume that
no man could have more than a very partial experience of public
affairs. In the sense that he can give only a little time to them,
that assumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence. But
ancient theory was compelled to assume, not only that men could give
little attention to public questions, but that the attention available
would have to be confined to matters close at hand. It would have been
visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and