I take it as axiomatic that any battle between armies, if it is going to be fought at all and thus won or lost, must be fought upon a common field of battle. And if this holds true for battles it holds equally true for debates upon fundamental spiritual absolutes: unless the theoretical grounds are common to both parties argument is futile. Precisely because of this, debate is often futile in our time because agreement upon fundamentals is rarely possible within a world as. badly fissioned spiritually as is our own. It is of ten,'better to retire from the game than merely go through the motions mechanically, scoring debater's points and winning empty victories due to a superiority in dialectical skills.

In this country we are fond of polling the public to find out what it thinks about practically any given subject. We have thousands of polls about foreign policy, and the public is ever ready to express attitudes on any question, no matter how complex, about which it might be asked. It is even ready, apparently, to express its convictions on problems which do not exist. One poller, for example, conducted a survey on the public attitude toward the “Metallic Metals Act.” He found that a good sixty percent of the public had an opinion about this act and a majority of them were in favor of it—even though the “act” existed only in the poller's imagination.