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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
permanent than an ordinary statute.

A presumption about time enters widely into our opinions. To one
person an institution which has existed for the whole of his conscious
life is part of the permanent furniture of the universe: to another it
is ephemeral. Geological time is very different from biological time.
Social time is most complex. The statesman has to decide whether to
calculate for the emergency or for the long run. Some decisions have
to be made on the basis of what will happen in the next two hours;
others on what will happen in a week, a month, a season, a decade,
when the children have grown up, or their children's children. An
important part of wisdom is the ability to distinguish the
time-conception that properly belongs to the thing in hand. The person
who uses the wrong time-conception ranges from the dreamer who ignores
the present to the philistine who can see nothing else. A true scale
of values has a very acute sense of relative time.

Distant time, past and future, has somehow to be conceived. But as
James says, "of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizing'
sense." [Footnote: _Principles of Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 638.]
The longest duration which we immediately feel is what is called the
"specious present." It endures, according to Titchener, for about six
seconds. [Footnote: Cited by Warren, _Human Psychology_, p. 255.]
"All impressions within this period of time are present to us _at
once_. This makes it possible for us to perceive changes and events
as well as stationary objects. The perceptual present is supplemented
by the ideational present. Through the combination of perceptions with
memory images, entire days, months, and even years of the past are
brought together into the present."

In this ideational present, vividness, as James said, is proportionate
to the number of discriminations we perceive within it. Thus a
vacation in which we were bored with nothing to do passes slowly while
we are in it, but seems very short in memory. Great activity kills
time rapidly, but in memory its duration is long. On the relation
between the amount we discriminate and our time perspective James has
an interesting passage: [Footnote: _Op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 639.]

"We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ
enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and
in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Baer has indulged
in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in
changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length
of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10 as
now; [Footnote: In the moving picture this effect is admirably produced
by the ultra-rapid camera.] if our life were then destined to hold the
same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We should
live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of
seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now
believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The motions of organic
beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The
sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change,
and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get
only one 1000th part of the sensations we get in a given time, and
consequently to live 1000 times as long. Winters and summers will be
to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing
plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous
creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like
restless boiling water springs; the motions of animals will be as
invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the
sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail
behind him, etc."

5

In his Outline of History Mr. Wells has made a gallant effort to
visualize "the true proportions of historical to geological time"
[Footnote: 1 Vol. II, p. 605. See also James Harvey Robinson, _The
New History,_ p. 239.] On a scale which represents the time from
Columbus to ourselves by three inches of space, the reader would have
to walk 55 feet to see the date of the painters of the Altamara caves,
550 feet to see the earlier Neanderthalers, a mile or so to the last
of the dinosaurs. More or less precise chronology does not begin until
after 1000 B.C., and at that time "Sargon I of the Akkadian-Sumerian
Empire was a remote memory,... more remote than is Constantine the
Great from the world of the present day.... Hammurabi had been dead a
thousand years... Stonehedge in England was already a thousand years
old."

Mr. Wells was writing with a purpose. "In the brief period of ten
thousand years these units (into which men have combined) have grown
from the small family tribe of the early neolithic culture to the vast
united realms--vast yet still too small and partial--of the present
time." Mr. Wells hoped by changing the time perspective on our present
problems to change the moral perspective. Yet the astronomical measure
of time, the geological, the biological, any telescopic measure which
minimizes the present is not "more true" than a microscopic. Mr.
Simeon Strunsky is right when he insists that "if Mr. Wells is
thinking of his subtitle, The Probable Future of Mankind, he is
entitled to ask for any number of centuries to work out his solution.
If he is thinking of the salvaging of this western civilization,
reeling under the effects of the Great War, he must think in decades
and scores of years." [Footnote: In a review of _The Salvaging of
Civilization, The Literary Review of the N. Y. Evening Post_, June
18, 1921, p. 5.] It all depends upon the practical purpose for which
you adopt the measure. There are situations when the time perspective
needs to be lengthened, and others when it needs to be shortened.

The man who says that it does not matter if 15,000,000 Chinese die of
famine, because in two generations the birthrate will make up the
loss, has used a time perspective to excuse his inertia. A person who
pauperizes a healthy young man because he is sentimentally
overimpressed with an immediate difficulty has lost sight of the
duration of the beggar's life. The people who for the sake of an
immediate peace are willing to buy off an aggressive empire by
indulging its appetite have allowed a specious present to interfere
with the peace of their children. The people who will not be patient
with a troublesome neighbor, who want to bring everything to a
"showdown" are no less the victims of a specious present.

6

Into almost every social problem the proper calculation of time
enters. Suppose, for example, it is a question of timber. Some trees
grow faster than others. Then a sound forest policy is one in which
the amount of each species and of each age cut in each season is made
good by replanting. In so far as that calculation is correct the
truest economy has been reached. To cut less is waste, and to cut more
is exploitation. But there may come an emergency, say the need for
aeroplane spruce in a war, when the year's allowance must be exceeded.
An alert government will recognize that and regard the restoration of
the balance as a charge upon the future.

Coal involves a different theory of time, because coal, unlike a tree,
is produced on the scale of geological time. The supply is limited.
Therefore a correct social policy involves intricate computation of
the available reserves of the world, the indicated possibilities, the
present rate of use, the present economy of use, and the alternative
fuels. But when that computation has been reached it must finally be
squared with an ideal standard involving time. Suppose, for example,
that engineers conclude that the present fuels are being exhausted at
a certain rate; that barring new discoveries industry will have to
enter a phase of contraction at some definite time in the future. We
have then to determine how much thrift and self-denial we will use,
after all feasible economies have been exercised, in order not to rob
posterity. But what shall we consider posterity? Our grandchildren?
Our great grandchildren? Perhaps we shall decide to calculate on a
hundred years, believing that to be ample time for the discovery of
alternative fuels if the necessity is made clear at once. The figures
are, of course, hypothetical. But in calculating that way we shall be
employing what reason we have. We shall be giving social time its
place in public opinion. Let us now imagine a somewhat different case:
a contract between a city and a trolley-car company. The company says
that it will not invest its capital unless it is granted a monopoly of
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
before they were distinguishable; in the other on the period after
which they became distinct. And the view which fits the mood is taken
as the "truth."

An amiable variation is the family tree. Usually one couple are
appointed the original ancestors, if possible, a couple associated
with an honorific event like the Norman Conquest. That couple have no
ancestors. They are not descendants. Yet they were the descendants of
ancestors, and the expression that So-and-So was the founder of his
house means not that he is the Adam of his family, but that he is the
particular ancestor from whom it is desirable to start, or perhaps the
earliest ancestor of which there is a record. But genealogical tables
exhibit a deeper prejudice. Unless the female line happens to be
especially remarkable descent is traced down through the males. The
tree is male. At various moments females accrue to it as itinerant
bees light upon an ancient apple tree.

7

But the future is the most illusive time of all. Our temptation here
is to jump over necessary steps in the sequence; and as we are
governed by hope or doubt, to exaggerate or to minimize the time
required to complete various parts of a process. The discussion of the
role to be exercised by wage-earners in the management of industry is
riddled with this difficulty. For management is a word that covers
many functions. [Footnote: Cf. Carter L. Goodrich, The Frontier of
Control.] Some of these require no training; some require a little
training; others can be learned only in a lifetime. And the truly
discriminating program of industrial democratization would be one
based on the proper time sequence, so that the assumption of
responsibility would run parallel to a complementary program of
industrial training. The proposal for a sudden dictatorship of the
proletariat is an attempt to do away with the intervening time of
preparation; the resistance to all sharing of responsibility an
attempt to deny the alteration of human capacity in the course of
time. Primitive notions of democracy, such as rotation in office, and
contempt for the expert, are really nothing but the old myth that the
Goddess of Wisdom sprang mature and fully armed from the brow of Jove.
They assume that what it takes years to learn need not be learned at
all.

Whenever the phrase "backward people" is used as the basis of a
policy, the conception of time is a decisive element. The Covenant of
the League of Nations says, [Footnote: Article XIX.] for example, that
"the character of the mandate must differ according to the stage of
the development of the people," as well as on other grounds. Certain
communities, it asserts, "have reached a stage of development" where
their independence can be provisionally recognized, subject to advice
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
decent grounds for saying it, how the workers of Sheffield were
equipped. They found, as we all find the moment we refuse to let our
first notion prevail, that they were beset with complications. Of the
test they employed nothing need be said here except that it was a
large questionnaire. For the sake of the illustration, assume that the
questions were a fair test of mental equipment for English city life.
Theoretically, then, those questions should have been put to every
member of the working class. But it is not so easy to know who are the
working class. However, assume again that the census knows how to
classify them. Then there were roughly 104,000 men and 107,000 women
who ought to have been questioned. They possessed the answers which
would justify or refute the casual phrase about the "ignorant workers"
or the "intelligent workers." But nobody could think of questioning
the whole two hundred thousand.

So the social workers consulted an eminent statistician, Professor
Bowley. He advised them that not less than 408 men and 408 women would
prove to be a fair sample. According to mathematical calculation this
number would not show a greater deviation from the average than 1 in
22. [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 65.] They had, therefore, to
question at least 816 people before they could pretend to talk about
the average workingman. But which 816 people should they approach? "We
might have gathered particulars concerning workers to whom one or
another of us had a pre-inquiry access; we might have worked through
philanthropic gentlemen and ladies who were in contact with certain
sections of workers at a club, a mission, an infirmary, a place of
worship, a settlement. But such a method of selection would produce
entirely worthless results. The workers thus selected would not be in
any sense representative of what is popularly called 'the average run
of workers;' they would represent nothing but the little coteries to
which they belonged.

"The right way of securing 'victims,' to which at immense cost of time
and labour we rigidly adhered, is to get hold of your workers by some
'neutral' or 'accidental' or 'random' method of approach." This they
did. And after all these precautions they came to no more definite
conclusion than that on their classification and according to their
questionnaire, among 200,000 Sheffield workers "about one quarter"
were "well equipped," "approaching three-quarters" were "inadequately
equipped" and that "about one-fifteenth" were "mal-equipped."

Compare this conscientious and almost pedantic method of arriving at
an opinion, with our usual judgments about masses of people, about the
volatile Irish, and the logical French, and the disciplined Germans,
and the ignorant Slavs, and the honest Chinese, and the untrustworthy
Japanese, and so on and so on. All these are generalizations drawn
from samples, but the samples are selected by a method that
statistically is wholly unsound. Thus the employer will judge labor by
the most troublesome employee or the most docile that he knows, and
many a radical group has imagined that it was a fair sample of the
working class. How many women's views on the "servant question" are
little more than the reflection of their own treatment of their
servants? The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble
upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to
make it the representative of a whole class.

A great deal of confusion arises when people decline to classify
themselves as we have classified them. Prophecy would be so much
easier if only they would stay where we put them. But, as a matter of
fact, a phrase like the working class will cover only some of the
truth for a part of the time. When you take all the people, below a
certain level of income, and call them the working class, you cannot
help assuming that the people so classified will behave in accordance
with your stereotype. Just who those people are you are not quite
certain. Factory hands and mine workers fit in more or less, but farm
hands, small farmers, peddlers, little shop keepers, clerks, servants,
soldiers, policemen, firemen slip out of the net. The tendency, when
you are appealing to the "working class," is to fix your attention on
two or three million more or less confirmed trade unionists, and treat
them as Labor; the other seventeen or eighteen million, who might
qualify statistically, are tacitly endowed with the point of view
ascribed to the organized nucleus. How very misleading it was to
impute to the British working class in 1918-1921 the point of view
expressed in the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress or in the
pamphlets written by intellectuals.

The stereotype of Labor as Emancipator selects the evidence which
supports itself and rejects the other. And so parallel with the real
movements of working men there exists a fiction of the Labor Movement,
in which an idealized mass moves towards an ideal goal. The fiction
deals with the future. In the future possibilities are almost
indistinguishable from probabilities and probabilities from
certainties. If the future is long enough, the human will might turn
what is just conceivable into what is very likely, and what is likely
into what is sure to happen. James called this the faith ladder, and
said that "it is a slope of goodwill on which in the larger questions
of life men habitually live." [Footnote: William James, _Some
Problems of Philosophy_, p. 224.]

"1. There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true,
nothing contradictory;

2. It _might_ have been true under certain conditions;

3. It _may_ be true even now;

4. It is _fit_ to be true;

5. It _ought_ to be true;

6. It _must_ be true;

7. It _shall_ be true, at any rate true for me."

And, as he added in another place, [Footnote: _A Pluralistic
Universe_, p. 329.] "your acting thus may in certain special cases
be a means of making it securely true in the end." Yet no one would
have insisted more than he, that, so far as we know how, we must avoid
substituting the goal for the starting point, must avoid reading back
into the present what courage, effort and skill might create in the
future. Yet this truism is inordinately difficult to live by, because
every one of us is so little trained in the selection of our samples.

If we believe that a certain thing ought to be true, we can almost
always find either an instance where it is true, or someone who
believes it ought to be true. It is ever so hard when a concrete fact
illustrates a hope to weigh that fact properly. When the first six
people we meet agree with us, it is not easy to remember that they may
all have read the same newspaper at breakfast. And yet we cannot send
out a questionnaire to 816 random samples every time we wish to
estimate a probability. In dealing with any large mass of facts, the
presumption is against our having picked true samples, if we are
acting on a casual impression.

9

And when we try to go one step further in order to seek the causes and
effects of unseen and complicated affairs, haphazard opinion is very
tricky. There are few big issues in public life where cause and effect
are obvious at once. They are not obvious to scholars who have devoted
years, let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage
movements, or the migration and the assimilation of peoples, or the
diplomatic purposes of foreign powers. Yet somehow we are all supposed
to have opinions on these matters, and it is not surprising that the
commonest form of reasoning is the intuitive, post hoc ergo propter
hoc.

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