PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

1918 this American view could not compete with the traditional French
view, because while the Americans believed enormously in their own
powers, the French at that time (before Cantigny and the Second Marne)
had the gravest doubts. The American confidence suffused the American
stereotype, gave it that power to possess consciousness, that
liveliness and sensible pungency, that stimulating effect upon the
will, that emotional interest as an object of desire, that congruity
with the activity in hand, which James notes as characteristic of what
we regard as "real." [Footnote: _Principles of Psychology_, Vol.
II, p. 300.] The French in despair remained fixed on their accepted
image. And when facts, gross geographical facts, would not fit with
the preconception, they were either censored out of mind, or the facts
were themselves stretched out of shape. Thus the difficulty of the
Japanese reaching the Germans five thousand miles away was, in
measure, overcome by bringing the Germans more than half way to meet
them. Between March and June 1918, there was supposed to be a German
army operating in Eastern Siberia. This phantom army consisted of some
German prisoners actually seen, more German prisoners thought about,
and chiefly of the delusion that those five thousand intervening miles
did not really exist. [Footnote: See in this connection Mr. Charles
Grasty's interview with Marshal Foch, _New York Times_, February
26, 1918. "Germany is walking through Russia. America and Japan, who
are in a position to do so, should go to meet her in Siberia." See
also the resolution by Senator King of Utah, June 10, 1918, and Mr.
Taft's statement in the _New York Times_, June 11, 1918, and the
appeal to America on May 5, 1918, by Mr. A. J. Sack, Director of the
Russian Information Bureau: "If Germany were in the Allied place...
she would have 3,000,000 fighting on the East front within a year."]
3
A true conception of space is not a simple matter. If I draw a
straight line on a map between Bombay and Hong Kong and measure the
distance, I have learned nothing whatever about the distance I should
have to cover on a voyage. And even if I measure the actual distance
that I must traverse, I still know very little until I know what ships
are in the service, when they run, how fast they go, whether I can
secure accommodation and afford to pay for it. In practical life space
is a matter of available transportation, not of geometrical planes, as
the old railroad magnate knew when he threatened to make grass grow in
the streets of a city that had offended him. If I am motoring and ask
how far it is to my destination, I curse as an unmitigated booby the
man who tells me it is three miles, and does not mention a six mile
detour. It does me no good to be told that it is three miles if you
walk. I might as well be told it is one mile as the crow flies. I do
not fly like a crow, and I am not walking either. I must know that it
is nine miles for a motor car, and also, if that is the case, that six
of them are ruts and puddles. I call the pedestrian a nuisance who