PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

tells me it is three miles and think evil of the aviator who told me
it was one mile. Both of them are talking about the space they have to
cover, not the space I must cover.
In the drawing of boundary lines absurd complications have arisen
through failure to conceive the practical geography of a region. Under
some general formula like self-determination statesmen have at various
times drawn lines on maps, which, when surveyed on the spot, ran
through the middle of a factory, down the center of a village street,
diagonally across the nave of a church, or between the kitchen and
bedroom of a peasant's cottage. There have been frontiers in a grazing
country which separated pasture from water, pasture from market, and
in an industrial country, railheads from railroad. On the colored
ethnic map the line was ethnically just, that is to say, just in the
world of that ethnic map.
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But time, no less than space, fares badly. A common example is that of
the man who tries by making an elaborate will to control his money
long after his death. "It had been the purpose of the first William
James," writes his great-grandson Henry James, [Footnote: _The
Letters of William James_, Vol. I, p. 6.] "to provide that his
children (several of whom were under age when he died) should qualify
themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony
which he expected to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a
will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and instructions.
He showed thereby how great were both his confidence in his own
judgment and his solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants."
The courts upset the will. For the law in its objection to
perpetuities recognizes that there are distinct limits to the
usefulness of allowing anyone to impose his moral stencil upon an
unknown future. But the desire to impose it is a very human trait, so
human that the law permits it to operate for a limited time after
death.
The amending clause of any constitution is a good index of the
confidence the authors entertained about the reach of their opinions
in the succeeding generations. There are, I believe, American state
constitutions which are almost incapable of amendment. The men who
made them could have had but little sense of the flux of time: to them
the Here and Now was so brilliantly certain, the Hereafter so vague or
so terrifying, that they had the courage to say how life should run
after they were gone. And then because constitutions are difficult to
amend, zealous people with a taste for mortmain have loved to write on
this imperishable brass all kinds of rules and restrictions that,
given any decent humility about the future, ought to be no more