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
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.
4
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.
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