For harmonization, as we saw in Mr. Hughes's speech, is a
hierarchy of symbols. As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include
more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional
connection though you lose the intellectual. But even the emotion
becomes thinner. As you go further away from experience, you go higher
into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw
more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached
the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made
Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little. Yet
the people whose emotions are entrained do not remain passive. As the
public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the
emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private
meanings are given a universal application. Whatever you want badly is
the Rights of Humanity. For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of
meaning almost anything, soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything.
Mr. Wilson's phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in
every corner of the earth. No document negotiated and made of public
record existed to correct the confusion. [Footnote: The American
interpretation of the fourteen points was explained to the allied
statesmen just before the armistice.] And so, when the day of
settlement came, everybody expected everything.
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