ABSTRACT
Public opinion offers a base line against which to assess the attitudes of business leaders. There is now a considerable collection of opinion-poll data which gives a basis for understanding the man-in-the-street attitudes toward the issue. In addition to knowing the general direction of public sentiment on foreign-trade policy, concerned with whether this topic was one in which the public was much interested. An additional dimension of public opinion—other than direction of sentiment and degree of interest—is the degree of stability of those opinions. Foreign trade is a complicated issue on which the public's attitudes are unstable by reason of its complexity and of their lack of information and interest in it. The most important pattern to be noted in the distribution of public attitudes toward foreign-trade policy is that they are closely related to level of education. The appearance of public opinion changes when something raises the iceberg higher out of the water.
