To judge from the beginnings of the so-called Atomic Age, the invention of nuclear fission has had as yet greater psychological than physical effects. The atomic bomb climaxed the psychological warfare against Japan and accelerated the surrender of that country. Immediately afterwards, the bomb threw, by its mere existence, the again peaceful world into a turmoil of fear and despair. Prophets arose to proclaim the advent of a final catastrophe. They predicted the demise of mankind in an earth-shattering chain-reaction. Was it not to be expected? We are approaching the end of our millenium. Our contemporaries readily believe in journalistic clichés and scientific absurdities. The mystic of prayer and self-chastisement has been replaced by the magic of mathematical formulas and physical models.

Among the truths of which contemporary thought stands in particular need and from which it could draw substantial profiit, is the doctrine of the distinction between individuality and personality. The essential importance of this distinction is revealed in the principles of St. Thomas. Unfortunately, a right understanding of it is difficult to achieve and requires an exercise of metaphysical insight to which the contemporary mind is hardly accustomed.

Does society exist for each one of us, or does each one of us exist for society? Does the parish exist for the parishioner or die parishioner for the parish? This question, we feel immediately, involves two aspects, in each of which there must be some element of truth. A unilateral answer would only plunge us into error. Hence, we must disengage the formal principles of a truly comprehensive answer and describe the precise hierarchies of values which it implies.

The events that are happening before our eyes are less clear than those of the past because we do not know their meaning, their place in the epoch which is developing. We know the isolated facts, but we do not know their significance; we do not know to what whole they belong and therefore we overestimate some and underestimate others. Who could have realized, for example, that the meetings of some obscure Russian revolutionaries in 1903 would mean the formation of a party of world-historic importance? Who could have believed in 1919 that not General Ludendorff but an unknown private of Austrian origin, Adolf Hitler, would become the decisive figure in the history of German nationalism, its leader and, as it seems today, its executioner?

We do not know the present, because we do not know die future, and therefore we are ignorant of what will be retained as a lasting trend from the mass and maze of today's happenings.

Interest in the study of international relations has considerably increased in American universities since the close of World War II. A School of World Affairs has been established by Columbia University which is also planning institutes for special areas, the first of which, the Russian Institute, will open soon. To promote research and teaching, grants have been given to universities, such as that by the Rockefeller Foundation to Yale University. It is reported that in almost all educational institutions the students, particularly veterans, show an especially great interest in international affairs. The Council on Foreign Relations, keenly aware of this situation, has organized conferences in various parts of the country to investigate problems of teaching and research in international relations.

International law has survived astonishingly well the host of ingenious horoscopes cast regarding its future by magi in many lands. Some have been prophets of gloom and have prognosticated its impending breakdown. Others have purported to see a constellation of circumstances which promised an unexpectedly bright future for the weakling in the laws family. Yet when, at times, such astrologers appear in groups, it is not sufficient to explain their emergence in terms of individual psychology; for, like the phenomenon which they analyze, they themselves are very much the product of their environment. Allowing for exceptional types, they fall into two categories which are fairly closely related to the cycles of pre- and post-war periods. For the sake of brevity, and without disrespect, they may be named the “pre-war” and “post-war” schools.

The harassing problem of our days is that of freedom in Russia. It is not the problem of whether or not freedom exists in the USSR. No one, except ignorant tourists can entertain any doubt on this score. What preoccupies all of us is the feasibility of the resurrection of democracy in victorious Russia. Only reactionary hoodlums, remnants of the so-called “Black Hundreds” of the Tsarist time can feel happy in a Moscow reviving the spirit of Ivan the Terrible. Apologists for the Moscow dictatorship, yesterday's Socialists and liberals, lull their conscience by a belief in Russia's early liberation. The anticipated evolution of the Soviet regime impels them to accept light-heartedly, or even triumphantly, the enslavement by the Soviet Government of more and more European and Asiatic nations. The prospect of life in the freest and happiest community in the world of the future makes for them a few years of oppression well worth their while.

On the two victory days, military action on the fronts stopped. But peace did not return, nor does anyone know when it will. Peace is not simply absence of military .ction. It is a state of international relations corresponding to “periods of normalcy” in the internal affairs of a nation. Peace exists, when these relations are dominated by good will, mutual understanding and friendly cooperation.

The post-war world longs for peace. But there is no peace because, among the sovereign states, there is one which acts against peace. This is the Soviet Union. Is it, however, certain that the foreign policy of the Soviets is aggressive? Is it not true that, in Moscow, aggressiveness is ascribed to the United States and to the alleged Western bloc headed by it?

In March, 1946, Professor E. Tarle, an authoritative spokesman of the Soviet government, placed in opposition “the old imperialistic concept of international relations” practiced by London and Washington and “the Soviet conception which is based on respect for the rights of the peoples and their real independence.”

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous social, political, and economic fermentation. Much of our contemporary civilization was shaped by the forces released during those five decades. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans of great ability and deserved renown had written and were writing of the rights of man and of the citizen. More than ever before in the history of the modern world thought was being given to the lot of the common people. In America, and later in France, Thomas Paine epitomized this liberal intellectual trend in words that have been adopted as classic expressions of the inherent value of the human personality.

Unfortunately, the phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism during he nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused the new bourgeois ruling classes to lose sight of the basic human values stressed so emphatically by the eighteenth-century intellectuals.

The establishment of the Oder-Neisse line as a “provisional” frontier between Germany and Poland and the “elimination of national minorities” connected therewith are part of a settlement which not only affects basically the fate of Germany and Poland but also has some very broad implications. These implications deserve public discussion from various angles.

The Argentine question became a veritable cause célèbre during the months before the conclusion of hostilities and has continued its turbulent way down to the present time. An avalanche of tendentious interpretations and speculation has obscured the issue and distorted the facts. There are several definite stages in the evolution of die Argentine problem. There is die internal one, widi reference to the type of regime set up under Pedro Ramirez, Edelmiro Farrell and President Juan Domingo Perón. There is the war period, during which the tugging and heaving had to do primarily with active collaboration by the Buenos Aires government with the United Nations, and there is the later period, in which we still find ourselves, when the role and place of Argentina in inter-American life is the fundamental issue.

The first requisite for a clear grasp of the tragic situation in India today is the need of distinguishing between two trends, the political one of conflict between autocracy and democracy, and the nationalistic one of conflict between White and Brown. Failure to distinguish can lead to such astonishing ideas as that Gandhi fights for Democracy or that “British” is synonymous with “imperialist.”

The name of Vladimir Soloviev, insofar as it is familiar to the Western world, is known as that of a philosopher and religious thinker. This was, of course, the field in which he was particularly prominent. Russia can boast only a few formal philosophers (as distinguished from philosophizing novelists, poets or historians), and among those Soloviev is probably the most outstanding. Moreover, in the history of modern Russian religious thought, he occupies a central position, serving as a connecting link between the mid-nineteenth century Slavophils and such contemporary writers as Berdiaev and Bulgakov.

But Soloviev's was a versatile and many-sided nature, and many other aspects of his life and activity deserve attention and study. He wrote interpretive essays on Russian poetry, some of which were landmarks in Russian literary criticism, and he was a poet himself—not a great poet, perhaps, but one with a strongly marked individual character.

All aspects of the life of an age are interrelated, even when the interrelations express themselves in cross purposes and intellectual dissolution. Whether or not they embody forms and ideas worthy to be dignified by the name of architecture, the buildings of any period are an expression of it. They reflect, in varying degrees, its economic and social development, the enactments of its legislative bodies, the acts of its administrative officials, the decisions of its law courts, the character and course of its wars. They also express, again in varying degrees, its methods of education, its religious life, its natural science, its thought and its art. They are, to some extent, the expression of past traditions and works of the mind which have retained a hold on the life of the period or have been revived by its thinkers and artists, as classical antiquity has been revived again and again in Western European history since the eleventh century.

The three years of struggle and attempted negotiations between Poland and the Soviet Union over the readjustment of their frontiers were concluded by a two-fold decision. Thanks to Moscow, Poland was given a government which readily consented to give up both the Western Ukraine and White Ruthenia, territories occupied by Poland after the First World War; now they become parts of the Soviet Union. On the motion of Viacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Ukraine was accepted as a member of the world organization, the United Nations.

The first event means that after six hundred years, Poland has withdrawn her claim to an extensive tract of land which she ruled at times as far east as the River Dnieper and beyond. Polish ambitions to control the Ukrainian and White Ruthenian lands and to assimilate these two peoples culturally in order to make them an ethnographic Polish entity, with some exceptions of course, failed.

To European economists, cartels are old acquaintances. Beyond the Atlantic, they have been under discussion since Kleinwaechter, in 1883, made them the object of the first analysis. It was about the time when, in this country, monopolies and trusts were much debated. As early as Europe waxed cartel-conscious, this country became monopoly and trust-conscious. Not that American scholars were unaware of the cartels—no less than Europeans were unaware of the trusts; but it appeared to most that the sin of industry in this country was “monopolies,” whereas the enemies of cartels in Europe were equally inclined to call the cartel the sin of their economies.

In the short-lived days of the NRA cartel-like organizations were entrusted with the establishment of industrial codes for market regulation. They were not called cartels, but actually they functioned, or were supposed to function, like cartels.

It is perhaps of the nature of wars that they should hasten developments endemic in a society and bring to pass in a few short years what would also have happened under conditions of peace, but in a much longer span of time. This at least has been in some measure the effect of the recent war on Great Britain's position in the world. It is now apparent and generally recognized that the situation of privilege if not domination which was the lot of the English people from the time before the Seven Years War—or from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards—has come to an end. Perhaps this change in England's position has been recognized for some while in the United States. On the other hand Americans have perhaps never realized the striking contrast in the past between the standard of living and the stability and security of this island and that of the larger continental countries and centers of force—France and Germany.

In September, 1939, the war caught the French in a state of political uncertainty and intellectual confusion. Considered generally, they were poorly prepared for the terrible trial awaiting them. The approaching war was less a national war with clearly defined territorial or economic objectives than a great ideological crusade. Now, ideologically, it found the French divided and uncertain.

From the political point of view, the normal operation of the governmental processes of the Republic had not functioned since February 6, 1934, the date of the Riots with their Fascist tendencies; the great élan for moral and political as well as social reconstruction, which in June, 1936, had carried the political parties of the Left to power, combined as they were in the Popular Front, soon bogged down into impotence and ended finally in a lamentable failure.

This paper will treat only a small part of the subject promised by its title. A really correct evaluation of present-day Germany would demand, above all, a thorough economic and sociological analysis for which sufficient data are not available. Even establishing and naming events and facts is, in the present state of affairs, a matter of interpretation.

Further, it would be necessary especially to describe the forces engaged in reconstruction, in church work and administration, in governmental agencies and in the press, in parties and in trade unions, in universities and in public colleges. What is being accomplished by these elements cannot be judged until later, when they have reached a stage of crystallization. Here we shall discuss only the circumstances under which reconstruction is taking place.

The part assigned to me today is a humble one. It is not that of the specialist who diagnoses and prescribes for the disease, but that of the attendant who induces the patient to practise the regimen ordered, by persuading him that, repulsive as at first sight it appears, he will find it in reality not only forțifying, but positively agreeable; that it involves the surrender of no habits or activities which a sensible man ought to wish to retain; and that, if only he will pluck up the courage to give it a trial, bc will end by being astonished that he did not take to it before. I am only too conscious of my inability to utter convincingly the reassuring noises which such a rôle requires; but, in doing business with so experienced and wary an animal as the British lion, an approach which allays his initial alarms is undoubtedly expedient, and, not less undoubtedly, the kernel of his apprehensions is to be found in the region indicated by the title of my essay.

At the present time it is not easy to say anything on the German problem which is startlingly new to the initiate in this field. It is all the more difficult for anyone who has written a book on this subject.1 The best I can do here is to draw attention once more to some central aspects of the German problem on which, incidentally, world public opinion still seems to be generally wrong and where it is particularly difficult to pierce the thick crust of preconceived, though by no means incomprehensible, ideas. Passions the world" over have not yet abated; wounds opened by the Nazi monster are, at best, just beginning to close. The memory of our fears is still fresh, so fresh indeed, that only the more far-sighted men understand the senselessness of looking transfixed into this gigantic shell-hole which still goes under the name of Germany while, just behind it, another of the terribles simplificateurs is heaping up the dynamite for a new experiment of this kind.