PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

the main highway for ninety-nine years. In the minds of the men who
make that demand ninety-nine years is so long as to mean "forever."
But suppose there is reason to think that surface cars, run from a
central power plant on tracks, are going out of fashion in twenty
years. Then it is a most unwise contract to make, for you are
virtually condemning a future generation to inferior transportation.
In making such a contract the city officials lack a realizing sense of
ninety-nine years. Far better to give the company a subsidy now in
order to attract capital than to stimulate investment by indulging a
fallacious sense of eternity. No city official and no company official
has a sense of real time when he talks about ninety-nine years.
Popular history is a happy hunting ground of time confusions. To the
average Englishman, for example, the behavior of Cromwell, the
corruption of the Act of Union, the Famine of 1847 are wrongs suffered
by people long dead and done by actors long dead with whom no living
person, Irish or English, has any real connection. But in the mind of
a patriotic Irishman these same events are almost contemporary. His
memory is like one of those historical paintings, where Virgil and
Dante sit side by side conversing. These perspectives and
foreshortenings are a great barrier between peoples. It is ever so
difficult for a person of one tradition to remember what is
contemporary in the tradition of another.
Almost nothing that goes by the name of Historic Rights or Historic
Wrongs can be called a truly objective view of the past. Take, for
example, the Franco-German debate about Alsace-Lorraine. It all
depends on the original date you select. If you start with the Rauraci
and Sequani, the lands are historically part of Ancient Gaul. If you
prefer Henry I, they are historically a German territory; if you take
1273 they belong to the House of Austria; if you take 1648 and the
Peace of Westphalia, most of them are French; if you take Louis XIV
and the year 1688 they are almost all French. If you are using the
argument from history you are fairly certain to select those dates in
the past which support your view of what should be done now.
Arguments about "races" and nationalities often betray the same
arbitrary view of time. During the war, under the influence of
powerful feeling, the difference between "Teutons" on the one hand,
and "Anglo-Saxons" and French on the other, was popularly believed to
be an eternal difference. They had always been opposing races. Yet a
generation ago, historians, like Freeman, were emphasizing the common
Teutonic origin of the West European peoples, and ethnologists would
certainly insist that the Germans, English, and the greater part of
the French are branches of what was once a common stock. The general
rule is: if you like a people to-day you come down the branches to the
trunk; if you dislike them you insist that the separate branches are
separate trunks. In one case you fix your attention on the period