RomanCatholicism in the United States has produced able leaders among its clergy and laymen during the first decades of the twentieth century, but most of them seem to lack the lustre and verve of the Catholic leaders during the waning decades of the nineteenth century. The lay leadership which produced John Gilmary Shea, William J. Onahan, Henry F. Brownson, Patrick V. Hickey and Henry Spaunhorst had strong backing from such clergymen as James Cardinal Gibbons, John Ireland, John J. Keane, Bernard McQuaid, and Michael A. Corrigan. But the intellectual leader of American Catholicism during the late nineteenth century was John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Pepria, and the twentieth century Catholicism has not produced his counterpart.

In the nineteenth century, when many people were optimistic in their views of human nature, and confident that the course of progress was going to be continued into an indefinite future, there were one or two prophets who feared and foretold that the twentieth century would see great wars of peoples, popular military dictatorships and the harnessing of the machines of industry to the science of warfare. It is interesting to note that, without knowing whether one country or another was going to emerge as the chief offender, and without basing his prediction upon any view that Germany was likely to present a special problem to the European continent, a writer could still feel assured, a generation beforehand, that this age of terrible warfare was coming. He could see, in other words, that, apart from the emergence of a special criminal, the developments in the situation itself were driving mankind into an era of conflict. In the midst of battle, while we are all of us in fighting mood, we see only the sins of the enemy and fail to reflect on those predicaments and dilemmas which so often develop and which underlie the great conflicts between masses of human beings. And though these conflicts could hardly have taken place if all men were perfect saints, we often forget that many of the inhuman struggles that have divided the human race would hardly have occurred if the situation had been one of completely righteous men confronted by undiluted and unmitigated crime. Given the ordinary amount of cupidity and wilfulness in human beings, unmanageable situations are likely to develop and some of them may almost be guaranteed to end in terrible conflict. While there is battle and hatred men have eyes for nothing save the fact that the enemy is the cause of all the troubles; but long, long afterwards, when all passion has been spent, the historian often sees that it was a conflict between one half-right that was perhaps too wilful, and another half-right that was perhaps too proud; and behind even this he discerns that it was a terrible predicament, which had the effect of putting men so at cross-purposes with one another. This predicament is the thing which it is the purpose of this paper to examine; and first of all I propose to try to show how the historian comes to discover its existence.

My intention is: to try to face a certain central social problem in its connection with the concept of leisure. And I hope that a solution of that problem, or at least some ways towards a solution, may become more clear and visible. This is a rather modest purpose (because problems are still not solved when a solution has become visible or even when some ways of a solution have become more clear than before).

I shall not consider the social problem from a formally sociological point of view or from a formally political point of view, but from a philosophical point of view. It shall not be spoken of in such a way that the field of vision is completely filled with it. The point-of-view does not lie so close to the concrete phenomena that our attention is occupied and consumed by their immediate impact. Philosophical consideration means that a certain subject is considered within the horizon of the total and universal reality; it belongs to the essence and nature of a really philosophical question, that not only this question itself comes into play, but that—onsidering, meditating this question—one is obliged to bring into play the totality of the world, even God and the world. In such a view the discussion loses perhaps some actual interest for the politician or for an immediately-involved man. But on the other hand, it might be that deeper possibilities of a solution become perceivable, just because the totality of the real world, especially the totality of human nature, comes into the range of vision. It might be, too, that there are social and political problems which, from the mere viewpoint of sociology and politics, cannot be solved. And perhaps this possibility is relevant to our present case. I would like to formulate the claim very modestly. In question is a sort of attempt, a proposal, to view the problem from a new and familiar standpoint. There may result an insight into the social problem—which possibly can become useful within the sphere of politics.

The Marxian idea of the great proletarian revolution that will end the pre-history of mankind and inaugurate its true history sprang into public effectiveness through the Communist Manifesto. Well known as is the progress of this idea after its formulation and publication of 1848, we know comparatively little about the process of its formation in the preceding decade. The main cause of this unsatisfactory state must be sought in the fact that the materials for a study of the genesis of he idea have been completely available only since 1932. In the meantime, the monographic literature on the subject has clarified many details; but a comprehensive study is still a desideratum.

The attack on natural right in the name of history takes in most cases the following form: natural right claims to be a right that is discernible by human reason and is universally acknowledged; but history (including anthropology) teaches us that no such right exists; instead of the supposed uniformity we find an indefinite variety of notions of right or justice. Or, in other words, there cannot be natural right if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows us that all principles of justice are mutable. One cannot understand the meaning of the attack on natural right in the name of history, before one has realized the utter irrelevance of this argument. In the first place, “consent of all mankind” is by no means a necessary condition of the existence of natural right. Some of the greatest natural right teachers have argued that, precisely if natural right is rational, its discovery presupposes the cultivation of reason, and therefore natural right will not be known universally: one ought not even to expect any real knowledge of natural right among savages. In other words by proving diat there is no principle of justice diat has not been denied somewhere or at some time, one has not yet proven that any given denial was justified or reasonable. Furthermore, it has always been known that different notions of justice obtain at different times and in different nations. It is absurd to claim diat the discovery of a still greater number of such notions by modern students has in any way affected the fundamental issue.

There was a time, not many years in the past, when it was taken for granted that Americans had little interest in problems much beyond their borders. No one seriously argues this to be so today. But while we have mastered our disinclination to think of problems that are distant in space we have still a strong aversion to problems that are distant in time. So far as it is ever permissible to generalize on questions of national temper — and it is not an exercise to my taste — we are still a rather short-sighted people. The Congress of the United States, which in this as in other respects is an only slightly distorted mirror of national character, can and does rise to emergencies. It has rarely shown capacity to foresee and to forestall crises. I should guess that it has not done so because the American people are not inclined to foresee and to forestall trouble.

Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India; the former was originally the hardly conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt at the same time to be hopelessly their inferiors and in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.

ItIs incumbent on the advocate of World Government to show first that it is desirable, and secondly that it is possible. Initially, he has to prove that it is in accord, rather than incompatible, with the dominant ethical traditions of humanity. Because largely by reason of industrialism the values of Western civilization are profoundly influential in the world today, he must indicate its special relevance as a culmination of the Western tradition. He must then demonstrate that the psychological and sociological needs of contemporary man can best be satisfied by such government, and that men's wants and feelings are not irrevocably opposed to it. Similarly, he must make it clear that, whatever be the superficial oppositions, established folkways and mores do not constitute an insuperable barrier to its achievement. Finally, it is incumbent on him to point out how the constitutional and governmental issues raised in its establishment may be met.

Following military collapse both in 1918 and in 1945 Germany presented two economic phenomena indicative of the destruction of economic life. In the twenties an open inflation occurred. For a relatively short time German money lost its value and purchasing power. This period of a completely open inflation was limited by a currency reform of a particular kind. Instead of cancelling the money in circulation the volume of money was increased by introducing a new stable money, the so-called Rentenmark. At the same time, the old money in circulation had been devaluated at the rate of one billionth of its face value. This controlled monetary experiment as well as the preceding huge inflation have found a place in the history of money. On account of the undoubted success of the devaluation experiment in 1923, the opinion seems to prevail that a devaluation is the best, if not the only way to reform the currency.

The problem of Church-State relations—if under Church is understood the Church universal in its Catholic form—may be answered without too much difficulty on a high abstract level. But on the contingent level of concrete historical development the problem becomes not only highly involved, but almost inexhaustible. For every growth in the Church's doctrine, (for example, the decrees of the Vatican Council and every deeper-going change in the other partner's constitutional forms or in its philosophical and ethical justification or a change in its aims to greater comprehensive competencies) poses a new problem. No wonder, therefore, that in our era of restlessness, of dynamic social changes, of conflicting ideologies fighting for the baffled minds of the masses, of wavering traditions decomposed by the acid of nihilist skepticism, the Church-State problem arises in a new intensity and urgency. The external signs are there for everyone to see: the fury of a Hitler against the “Black International,” the violent persecution of the Church in die satellite countries of the Russian orbit, and the complete subjugation of the Orthodox Church not to a “Christian” Czar but to die confessedly adieistic Politburo. In minor degree the problem is also bothering the people of the United States. A secularist outlook, indeed, may slur over the reality and intensity of the true problem. For the secularized outlook die Church in her essence—and even more so the churches and the sects—is not different in genere from odier numerous private organizations for die furtherance of more or less rational aims and longings in a constitutionally pluralist society. The secularist will, therefore, recognize only one pragmatic rule: tolerance unless the public order and the competency of the police power is directly concerned. Public order includes all too often for the secularist his reform ideas and his social ideals based on a relativist pragmatism in ethics and thus makes him highly sensitive to die criticism by a Church which bases ethics on revelation and on competencies which die secularist can only consider as unfounded and arrogant. Only if the Church remains in the private sphere of private individuals and stays in this “free” sphere where the secularist will tolerate any mass-idiosyncracies, only dius will he condescendingly tolerate the Church. His attitude may be explained to a degree by the fact of an exceedingly strong religious individualism and a subjective and emotional spiritualism, inimical to form and tradition (indigenous to this country and resulting in the easy dissolution of doctrinal unity into a multiplicity of sects). This spiritualist “formlessness” of religion, here, makes the emphasis on organically grown and established forms and on the objective institutions of religious life, so characteristic of the Catholic Church, a somewhat strange and suspicious thing. Yet there is no avoiding the nature and self-understanding of the Church, if the problem of Church and State should be approached. Otherwise the term “Church” would stand only for utterly private opinions by very private individuals in that sphere of irrational feeling and unscientific imagination which for the secularist agnostic is religion. And it is clear that upon such suppositions it would follow that the political authority has exclusive and plenary competency to judge about the compatibility of such a religion with the policy and the public order of the state. The consequence of such thinking is the abolition of the Church-State problem by the complete elimination of the Church.

Romanticism though in its beginning little concerned with politics or the state, prepared the rise of German nationalism after 1800. It was an aesthetic revolution, a resort to imagination, almost feminine in its sensibility; it was poetry more deeply indebted to the spirit of music than the poetry of the eighteenth century had been, rich in emotional depth, more potent in magic evocation. But German romanticism was and wished to be more than poetry. It was an interpretation of life, nature and history—and this philosophic character distinguished it from romanticism in other lands. It was sharply opposed to the rationalism of the eighteenth century; it mobilized the fascination of the past to fight against the principles of 1789. In that indirect way romanticism came to concern itself with political and social life and with the state. It never developed a program for a modern German nation-state, but with its emphasis on the peculiarity of the German mind it helped the growth of a consciousness of German uniqueness.

Peace in the Near East is essential to the State of Israel, to the Arab people and to the Western world. Peace, as distinguished from an armistice, cannot be imposed from the outside, it can only be the result of negotiations, of mutual compromise and eventual agreement between Jews and Arabs.

The Jewish settlement in Palestine may become a very important factor in the development of the Near East, but it will always remain a comparatively small island in an Arab sea. Even in the event of maximum immigration over a long period of years the reservoir of prospective citizens of Israel is limited to roughly two million, a figure that could be substantially increased only by catastrophic events in the United States or the Soviet Union. Since, however, (apart from the improbability of such a turn of events) the State of Israel owes its very existence to these two world powers, and since failure to achieve a genuine Jewish-Arab understanding will necessarily make its survival even more dependent upon continued sympathy and support of one or the other, a Jewish catastrophe in the two great surviving centers of world Jewry would lead almost immediately to a catastrophe in Israel.

Just as the Russo-Yugoslav dispute was reaching its climax, and before the meeting of the Cominform, which issued a detailed condemnation of the Yugoslav Party, a plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party took place. What happened at this plenum of June 3, 1948 is known to us, not directly but from many accounts given at the August 31—September 3 plenum. At the June meeting Secretary General of the Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Poland Gomulka-Wieslaw, (Wieslaw was the party name of Gomulka during the war and it is used throughout the debate), delivered the main report, ostensibly an “historical analysis” of the character of the Polish working class movement. In his speech Gomulka took as the basis of Polish Socialism the tradition of the fervently nationalistic Polish Socialist Party, and condemned the internationalist and Pro-Russian Social Democratic Party of Poland, and by implication as well the pre-1938 Polish Communist Party of which the Workers' Party was supposed to be a continuation in everything but name.

The principal obstacle to the success of Edouard Drumont's campaign against the Jews in France following the enormous success of La France juive in 1886 was his inability to elaborate a program which could tie effectively “the revolutionary worker and the conservative Christian.” Antisemitism served as a binding force, but Drumont was not so successful in his use of that weapon as Hitler later was in Germany. Most French Socialists by 1891 or 1892 had clearly rejected antisemitism, and by 1892 as well many conservatives had become frightened by the apparent radical aims of the antisemitic campaign. Even those Catholics who were still supporters of Drumont when Captain Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 were followers of Drumont only because no other party or group could attract them.

On January 19, 1950 the People's Republic of China established “a regional coalition Government” in Northwest China, embracing the five provinces of Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Chinghai, and Sinkiang. This region is of special importance to China because of its strategic position at the nexus of Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Pan-Islamic interests meet. The political orientation of the people in this area is of fundamental concern to the government of China.

Moslem communities are scattered throughout China, but the largest concentration of these is in China's Northwest. In this region under the present jurisdiction of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee, having its seat of government at Sian, appear to be about half of China's Moslems. Within the region they represent something less than half the total population of about 23 million. The place of the Moslem communities in the Northwest Region determines in part its character and strength, for without the cooperation and loyalty of its Moslem groups, the region is politically weak and a constant strategic danger to Chinese authority and integrity in Central Asia.

The thinking of Left Wing Labourites on foreign policy since 1945 reveals the frustration, and, withal, the persistence of Utopian hopes in a period of particularly rapid and alarming change on the world stage.

The victory of the British Labour Party in the elections of July, 1945 opened up to Left Wing Labourites intoxicating vistas of permanent peace and socialist brotherhood. The moment of triumph was ironically favorable to the fervor of Socialist Utopian hopes. Fascist military power in Europe had been crushed, and thb feat had been accomplished by the combined endeavors of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. Russia, so long the Janus of the socialists, socialist state and enemy of socialists, appeared to be ready for cooperation. Labourites gladly abandoned their “red-baiting” suspicions, and looked for the building of a socialist Europe, aided by the Resistance parties, whose work was generally exaggerated and, just as generally, claimed for socialism. Problems of economic reconstruction were of a magnitude to encourage believers in planning that the capitalist world would itself become socialist in its solutions; and the apparently imminent liquidation of old colonial empires made the radiance of freedom's dawn even more dazzling.

Unless you are prepared on the one hand to say, “I will fight in every case on behalf of peace, which is one and indivisible,” or on the other hand to say, “I will only fight when I am myself the victim of attack”mdash;unless you are prepared to take one of those two positions there is an inevitable no-man's land of uncertainty lying between which is quite incapable, as I think, of antecedent definition.

—Viscount Halifax in the House of Lords, March 3, 1937.

American wartime policy regarding Russia continues to be disputed heatedly. In these controversies the genesis of Soviet-American relations in World War II, although it obviously played a key role in shaping both the victorious anti-Axis alliance and the uneasy peace that followed, has so far been neglected. To throw light on the initial rapprochement, this paper is presented as a survey of the half-year period in 1941 between the German attack on Russia and the Japanese attack on the United States.

Sumner Welles, Under Secretary of State in 1941, records that “the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly during the period of the German-Soviet agreement, had been practically non-existent.” The Soviet invasion of Finland, sharply resented by American public opinion, served to exacerbate relations further. Only after the German attack of June 22, 1941, did the two great powers draw together.

The party structure in Belgium has always reflected not merely the graduation of opinions from the extreme right to the extreme left, but also the linguistic and religious differences of a nation divided into French and Flemish speaking people, and into Catholic believers and freethinkers. The latter distinction still remains the most important one. Thus, the parties continue, as during the nineteenth century, to be classified into “right” and “left” according to whether they have a religious or an agnostic character. The “right” is considered identical with the Catholic Party, and the “left” with the Liberal, Socialist, and Communist Parties. It is also true that the Catholic Party is considered politically conservative, and the “left,” taken as a whole, progressive. And since the “right” has an absolute majority in Flanders and the “left” in Wallonia (the French speaking region), it can be said that, very broadly, the religious, political, and linguistic groupings tend to place Catholics, conservatives, and Flemings against freethinkers, progressives, and Walloons.

The revolutions of 1640 and 1789 were carried forward with a positive enthusiasm for freedom. The drama and the failure of each revolution were dominated by this fact; each revolution provided the stage for long-drawn-out struggles to write a constitution. Each produced a crop of such constitutions; and eventually a dictator emerged to carry out by force the authority that could not be arranged by cooperation. But the lesson of the struggle for constitutional freedom was not lost; the idea of the rights of man was not dead. In England, in France, this impulse produced constitutional systems in the course of the next generation; and these systems remained.