PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

etween schools; [Footnote: See, for example, _An Index Number for
State School Systems_ by Leonard P. Ayres, Russell Sage Foundation,
1920. The principle of the quota was very successfully applied in the
Liberty Loan Campaigns, and under very much more difficult
circumstances by the Allied Maritime Transport Council.] between
government departments; between regiments; between divisions; between
ships; between states; counties; cities; and the better your index
numbers the more useful the competition.
6
The possibilities that lie in the exchange of material are evident.
Each department of government is all the time asking for information
that may already have been obtained by another department, though
perhaps in a somewhat different form. The State Department needs to
know, let us say, the extent of the Mexican oil reserves, their
relation to the rest of the world's supply, the present ownership of
Mexican oil lands, the importance of oil to warships now under
construction or planned, the comparative costs in different fields.
How does it secure such information to-day? The information is
probably scattered through the Departments of Interior, Justice,
Commerce, Labor and Navy. Either a clerk in the State Department looks
up Mexican oil in a book of reference, which may or may not be
accurate, or somebody's private secretary telephones somebody else's
private secretary, asks for a memorandum, and in the course of time a
darkey messenger arrives with an armful of unintelligible reports. The
Department should be able to call on its own intelligence bureau to
assemble the facts in a way suited to the diplomatic problem up for
decision. And these facts the diplomatic intelligence bureau would
obtain from the central clearing house. [Footnote: There has been a
vast development of such services among the trade associations. The
possibilities of a perverted use were revealed by the New York
Building Trades investigation of 1921.]
This establishment would pretty soon become a focus of information of
the most extraordinary kind. And the men in it would be made aware of
what the problems of government really are. They would deal with
problems of definition, of terminology, of statistical technic, of
logic; they would traverse concretely the whole gamut of the social
sciences. It is difficult to see why all this material, except a few
diplomatic and military secrets, should not be open to the scholars of
the country. It is there that the political scientist would find the
real nuts to crack and the real researches for his students to make.
The work need not all be done in Washington, but it could be done in
reference to Washington. The central agency would, thus, have in it
the makings of a national university. The staff could be recruited
there for the bureaus from among college graduates. They would be
working on theses selected after consultation between the curators of