For more than a century* private philanthropy has loomed large on the social horizon of American cities. Their governments, as inept and clumsy as they were politically corrupt, were not readily entrusted with delicate social service functions. Happily for urban welfare, Americans not only extolled the great virtue of charity but conspicuously practiced it. As no other people, they have made relief of human misery a part of their life purpose, devoting time, thought and money to the task regardless of its source: in some calamity of nature or in social maladjustment such as urban poverty, industrial conflict or world misunderstanding. Besides giving for giving's sake as befits religious folk—they have characteristically expected handsome dividends on their investment either in the way of improved character development or in more reasonable and just social arrangements. Many wage-earners and social reformers feared, it is true, that the benevolent enterprise might dull the people's desire for a better economic order. By and large, however, charity in America has been an aid and auxiliary of justice rather than its substitute.

Friedrich meinecke, the Dean of German historians, celebrated* in October 1951, the month of his eighty-ninth birthday, the fiftieth anniversary of his appointment to a full professorship. In his reply to an adress by the Freie Universität Berlin, of which he is one of the founders and Ehrenrektor, Professor Meinecke called our time great because of its concern with the “highest and most sacred values of mankind, the liberty, honor, right and dignity of the individual,” a struggle which draws “all the vital forces of Western civilization” closer together, labor and the middle class, Catholics and Protestants. This emphasis on individual liberty and on the unity of Western civilization has rarely been heard among German historians. Perhaps Meinecke's personal evolution is one of the hopeful signs in Germany. For he came from the strictest conservative Old-Prussian background: his upbringing was satiated with anti-liberalism, anti-semitism and a fervent Bismarckism. In his younger years he praised the German “ascent” from the cosmopolitanism of a Kant or Goethe to the nation-state of a Ranke and Bismarck. As an old man he began to ask himself whether Ranke had not misled German historiography and the German intellectual development. As far back as 1924, in an introduction to a new edition of Ranke's Politisches Gespräch, he pointed out that Ranke's concept of the powerful states as the embodiment of God's thoughts and ideas ennobled and sanctioned their elemental struggle for power. This glorification of the State became even more dangerous when later German historians abandoned the objective

In the summer of 1943 a group of German prisoners in the Soviet Union founded an association under Russian auspices designed to combat the war effort and government of Nazi Germany. The group, made up of soldiers, officers, and political exiles, called itself the National Committee “Free Germany,” and under that title operated with varying intensity throughout the remainder of the war. It was disbanded late in 1945, and by now has been largely forgotten. But many of its arguments are still effective in Germany today, and many of its members are now politically active in the Eastern Zone. I shall attempt to reconstruct here the history of the Free Germany movement, primarily as an addition to our historical knowledge of the Second World War. At the same time, I think, this account can provide an interesting insight into the workings of a certain type of German officer's mind, as well as a picture of a complete Russian operation in political warfare. With German rearmament an imminent problem and Soviet political strategy a continuing one, an examination of the Free Germany movement seems to be appropriate at the present time.

That politics should not be a matter either of impulse and whim or of pure ratiocination, hardly anyone will dispute. But there is no settled agreement on the precise role that reason should play in political decisions. Disagreement is aggravated because those who have written on the question usually intended to correct some prevalent error and in their fervor have often fostered other, equally pernicious, errors. As a result, discussion about the nature of political reasoning has tended to oscillate between extreme positions that hardly anyone would uphold consistently. This tendency is illustrated once again in the recent attacks on Rationalism, where the authors, in criticizing the Rationalist misuse of reason, seem to identify all abstract reasoning with Rationalism and appear to distrust all general principles.

Current proposals for reform of the electoral college system are embodied in three plans which appear to be designed to enable the “conservatives” to elect a President of the United States. Since 1932, the present electoral college system has compelled both parties to nominate presidential candidates who advocate policies devised to win the votes of conscious ethnic, religious, and economic groups in metropolitan centers, where these minorities hold a balance of power in populous states controlling large blocs of electoral votes. Consequently, all recent presidential candidates have supported social security, collective bargaining, and civil rights legislation. An inspection of congressional roll calls discloses the rather obvious fact that a number of Republicans and southern Democrats hardly approve of these and other so-called Fair Deal measures.