OUR understanding of any significant movement in human affairs can hardly be said to even approach completeness until the evidence from literature is in. Because writers of fiction and poetry tend to grope for meanings rather than superimpose them — Yeats called this process the “public dream” —literary criticism can bring to the surface what otherwise might lie buried in the culture's subconscious. And this is perhaps even more true for the history of the Negro in American literature than for other cultural phenomena — the Westering Movement or the Industrial Revolution, for example — since so much of that history has been an unconscious, or at least half-conscious, masking of issues that have been contorted by fear, guilt, and rage.

UNTIL the time Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, the problem of tyranny of the majority had dominated the political thought of no other nation as it had that of America. In the half century before the appearance of Tocqueville's great work, Americans had maintained a virtual monopoly of concern over the question of how popular sovereignty and individual liberty could peacefully coexist. The French Revolution, it is true, raised similar questions abroad, and if we take Burke's concern as representative, we see that he too was seriously troubled over the prospect that democratic tyranny would become the inevitable offspring of popular sovereignty. But despite Burke's eloquent and penetrating analysis, majority tyranny did not become a major preoccupation of English political thought, and to the extent that there was concern with the problem, as in the debate over the Reform Bill of 1832, discussion was confined to the obvious and straightforward issue of whether the suffrage should be extended. In America, on the other hand, the majority problem continued to be a persistent political issue from the beginning and, even today, a host of public questions revolves around the scope of majority rule. Yet for all the attention Americans paid to the majority question before Tocqueville entered upon the scene, they had hardly scratched the surface, and the Frenchman, therefore, was able to suggest an approach that they had not even considered.

FOR many centuries the pattern of political leadership in India was two-tiered. At the top was “the Government” — what I will call macropolitical leadership — surrounded with pomp and magnificence and all the trappings of wealth and power. Macropolitical leadership changed hands with some frequency, and in modern times was often foreign, first Mughal and then British. In general the macropolitical leadership impinged little on the lives of the ordinary Indian. It was remote from the village and interfered seldom in village affairs, except to raise revenue and maintain a relative law and order. Village India had its own ancient pattern of leadership — what I will call micropolitical leadership. The village was a highly traditional and rigid social and political unit. The higher castes within the village combined social, economic, political, and ritual pre-eminence, and the lower castes tended to be dependent on them to a greater or lesser degree. The Indian village was a complicated network of precedence and relationship, but political authority was concentrated in the leaders of the dominant castes. These men were concerned with settling disputes between communities in the village, protecting the village and its lands from outsiders, and gaining concessions for the village from the macropolitical leadership.

AMINOR consequence of the war of 1914 was that the Turks evacuated the south Arabian country of Yemen which they had occupied since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Yahia Hamid al-Din, heir to the throne of the thirteenhundred-year-old Imamate (Muslim theocratic monarchy) was able to reestablish the power of his dynasty. During his long reign he devoted himself to four principal tasks: the restoration of internal order which had collapsed altogether during the era of Turkish domination; keeping foreigners out of Yemen which came to bear the title of “the Tibet of the Middle East”; building up his treasury which also was that of the country at large; and buying surplus World War I weapons. The last he resold to the Ethiopians and others, or he stored in caves. The locations of these supplies were known only to members of his dynasty and trusted servitors.

THE relations between the Church and State have been for many years the subject of interest to the political theorist, the student of contemporary totalitarian movements, and of particular concern to the student of comparative political institutions and systems. To the student of political theory it invokes the old conflict between the spiritual and the temporal authorities, between the papal authority and the claim of the emerging national states. For the student of modern totalitarianism it raises, without answering, the crucial question of the extent to which a totalitarian system can tolerate competing ideologies within the same national community. Finally, for the student of comparative institutions, in certain circumstances (for example, in Poland), it presents certain features of uniqueness that call for explanation.

WHEN the parliamentary bodies, the national assemblies of Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania convene, the mace, the wig, the Hansard, the speakership denote an endowment from the former colonial mentor and Mother of Parliaments, England. Front benches are reserved for the Ministers of Government. Oppositions, such as they are in many of the newly emergent African states of British vintage, face one another or, in one-party states, dissent is heard from the back benches. Inheritance of British parliamentary forms by youthful African states has been extensive. The substance of the democratic bequest from Britain as accepted and practiced by these and other new nations is quite another question. For African statesmen are quickly developing their ideals, adapting the colonial bequests to their own needs.

PARNELL was a rare political genius. The quality of that genius was never more clearly revealed than in those exciting days after he had been deposed as leader of the Irish Party on December 6, 1890, in the House of Commons by the majority of his colleagues. Three days later he returned to Ireland to appeal their decision to the Irish people. Within two weeks he had secured to himself all the effective levers of political power in the country, and his bewildered opponents found themselves without funds, newspapers, or Party organization. He then coolly, from a position of maximum strength, opened negotiations for a surrender he never intended to honor. His strategy was simply to give the various factions among his opponents enough time to fall to quarreling among themselves, and his tactic during the negotiations was to drive wedges at every opportunity. The success of his plan depended on the inability of his opponents to sink their differences. Given the ambitions, needs and temperaments of his opponents, this wager on factionalism must have hardly seemed like a risk at all. In the last analysis, however, Parnell did not have much choice. Since the combination against him was bigger and stronger than he was, if he could not persuade them to turn on each other, he must in the end be overwhelmed.