PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

and assistance "until such time as they are able to stand alone." The
way in which the mandatories and the mandated conceive that time will
influence deeply their relations. Thus in the case of Cuba the
judgment of the American government virtually coincided with that of
the Cuban patriots, and though there has been trouble, there is no
finer page in the history of how strong powers have dealt with the
weak. Oftener in that history the estimates have not coincided. Where
the imperial people, whatever its public expressions, has been deeply
convinced that the backwardness of the backward was so hopeless as not
to be worth remedying, or so profitable that it was not desirable to
remedy it, the tie has festered and poisoned the peace of the world.
There have been a few cases, very few, where backwardness has meant to
the ruling power the need for a program of forwardness, a program with
definite standards and definite estimates of time. Far more
frequently, so frequently in fact as to seem the rule, backwardness
has been conceived as an intrinsic and eternal mark of inferiority.
And then every attempt to be less backward has been frowned upon as
the sedition, which, under these conditions, it undoubtedly is. In our
own race wars we can see some of the results of the failure to realize
that time would gradually obliterate the slave morality of the Negro,
and that social adjustment based on this morality would begin to break
down.
It is hard not to picture the future as if it obeyed our present
purposes, to annihilate whatever delays our desire, or immortalize
whatever stands between us and our fears.
8
In putting together our public opinions, not only do we have to
picture more space than we can see with our eyes, and more time than
we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more
actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine. We
have to summarize and generalize. We have to pick out samples, and
treat them as typical.
To pick fairly a good sample of a large class is not easy. The problem
belongs to the science of statistics, and it is a most difficult
affair for anyone whose mathematics is primitive, and mine remain
azoic in spite of the half dozen manuals which I once devoutly
imagined that I understood. All they have done for me is to make me a
little more conscious of how hard it is to classify and to sample, how
readily we spread a little butter over the whole universe.
Some time ago a group of social workers in Sheffield, England, started
out to substitute an accurate picture of the mental equipment of the
workers of that city for the impressionistic one they had. [Footnote:
_The Equipment of the Worker_.] They wished to say, with some