It is difficult--impossible might be a better word--to guess at the outcome of a Supreme Court case by attempting to read the minds of the judges through the questions asked from the bench. Here, however, it seemed unusually clear that the court was seriously divided. Burton indicated the course that ultimately was to be taken. During argument on the Topeka case, he put a question to Paul E. Wilson, assistant attorney general of Kansas: “Don’t you recognize it as possible that in seventy-five years the social and economic conditions of the Nation have changed so that which might have been a valid interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment seventy-five years ago would not be valid today?” Wilson replied that he recognized the possibility, but did not believe the record disclosed such a change. Evidently recalling some of Judge Parker’s language in the Clarendon County decision, Burton persisted: “But that might be different from saying that these courts of appeals and State supreme courts have been wrong for seventy-five years?” Wilson agreed, but made the point that until the Supreme Court itself overturned its own precedents, no other guide to the law was available. When John W. Davis arose to argue the South Carolina appeal, Burton put the same question to him. Davis said: “My answer to that is that changed conditions may affect policy, but changed conditions cannot broaden the terminology of the Constitution.” Changes in social or economic conditions, Davis thought, raised “an administrative or political question, not a judicial one.” Burton subsided with a remark that he viewed the Constitution as a living document “that must be interpreted in relation to the facts of the times in which it is interpreted.” Pointedly stating a conflicting view, Frankfurter interrupted Thurgood Marshall’s argument at one point to recall that the court recently had upheld the power of Louisiana to restrict the calling of river pilots “to the question of who your father was.” The court sustained that legislation, he said, “not because we thought it admirable or because we believed in primogeniture, but because it was so imbedded in the history of that problem in Louisiana that we thought on the whole that was an allowable justification.” At the conclusion of the argument, attorneys on both sides were hopeful. The Negro forces felt reasonably certain they had Douglas, Black, and Burton; the State attorneys thought they had impressed Jackson, Minton, Frankfurter, and probably Clark. Vinson and Reed were question marks. It was anticipated that a decision would be handed down by a divided court some time in March or April.