The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union has prevented the United Nations from becoming the international government of the great powers which the Charter intended it to be. That conflict has paralyzed the Security Council as an agency of international government. In the few instances when it has been able to act as an agency of international government, it has been able to do so either, as in the beginning of the Korean War, by the accidental and temporary absence of the Soviet Union or, as on the Indonesian issue, by a fortuitous and exceptional coincidence of interests.

However distasteful it may be, nuclear weapons of the fission and fusion types have come to stay. Henceforth, they will be as much a part of human existence as rain and snow, morality and crime, the telephone and the airplane, pacifism and aggressiveness, freedom and tyranny, stupidity and wisdom. It is unlikely that this new invention can be undone except through the destruction of civilization itself. On the contrary, nucleonics sooner or later will provide the foundation of industrial civilization all over the globe. Given the anticipated increase in consumption of our energy resources, it appears that nuclear fuels, on a large scale, will have to be made available to industry within the life span of the present generation. Otherwise economic decline (and hence political catastrophe) must come about as the result of the gradual depletion of oil and coal deposits, the concurrent price rise of mineral fuels, the lack of a mineral energy basis in many countries, the rapidly rising demand for industrial goods, and the uninterrupted increase of population.

The history of the secularization of modern culture has yet to be written, and the reasons for this are easy enough to understand. For on the one hand, the mind of the secularized majority has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner, while on the other, the religious minority has been forced into an attitude of negative opposition which is no less unfavorable to dispassionate study. Nevertheless, it is emphatically a problem which requires an historical approach. The process of secularization was a historical movement no less than the Reformation, a minority movement which was gradually transmitted to wider circles until it eventually won the key positions of social and intellectual influence through which it dominated European society. This movement, which was already known as the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the accompanying ideology, which later acquired the name of Liberalism, have long been studied by historians chiefly in Germany and France, though in a somewhat piecemeal fashion; but their work has not hitherto been fully assimilated by educated opinion in England and America. Here the tendency has been to concentrate attention on political and economic change, and above all on the American and French revolutions. But we have not paid enough attention to the intellectual revolution that had already taken place before there was any question of a political one. Yet it is this intellectual revolution that is responsible for the secularization of Western culture. This intellectual movement, like most of the movements that have changed the world, was religious in origin, although it was anti-religious in its results. It owed its dynamism to the resistance of a religious minority and its diffusion to the illjudged and unjust, though sincere, action of religious orthodoxy. It is indeed, the supreme example in history of the way in which religious persecution and repression defeats its own object and serves the cause it is attempting to destroy.

Among the preparatory prayers of the Mass, there are these words from Psalm 42: “Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy.” However inadequately accomplished, the purpose of this essay is to affirm and distinguish our cause as Catholic minds and human beings from the nation and from the world that are not holy—to affirm the strength and meaning of the world of the Church for our varied worlds of living and working. As Christopher Dawson points out in a remarkable essay, there is, even in the modern world, “a tradition of sacred culture which it has been the mission of the Church to nourish and preserve”—and to nourish and preserve it even in the nation that is not holy. “However secularized our modern civilization may become,” Dawson continues, “this sacred tradition [this sacred life] remains like a river in the desert, and a genuine religious education can still use it to irrigate the thirsty lands and to change the face of the world with the promise of a new life. The great obstacle is the failure of Christians themselves to understand the depth of that tradition and the inexhaustible possibilities of new life that it contains.”

In 1815 the rulers and political leaders of Europe—men who had known the terror of witnessing the violent destruction of their social and political institutions—finished their work at the Congress of Vienna, work designed to prevent the resurgence of revolutionary threats. State and Church—and on the continent this meant the Catholic Church—cooperated in this conservative and reactionary task. The task was doomed, for the vision of a free, equal and fraternal society throbbed with all the more compelling radiance in the world of privilege and inequality which the Congress of Vienna restored. Later industrial changes propelled the revolutionary tide, and waves of liberalism and socialism beat against the old order, menacing not only the governments of Europe but the Church. To those captivated by the vision of a better or perfect society on earth, conservative Catholic admiration for the past and reverence for the order and treasures of the present seemed peculiarly obscurantist, obstinate blindness to the cause of progress.

Modern totalitarianism combines appeals to both nationalism and internationalism. Of course this statement applies with much greater force to Soviet than to Nazi totalitarianism. The latter was primarily a national movement, but with international ideological overtones, and with some elements of an international elite cadre and even of an international mass following. Soviet communism began as a faction of the Russian affiliate of international social democracy, and then acquired the territorial base which has given it the national characteristics it now possesses.

One of the striking facts about the present religious situation in the United States is the notable growth of religious bodies and the marked increase in religious affiliation on the part of the American people. In 1900, 36 per cent of the American people were reported as religiously affiliated; by 1930, the figure had risen to 47 per cent; and by 1950, to 57 per cent. In the quarter of a century from 1926 to 1950, the population of the United States rose 28.6 per cent; church membership, however, jumped nearly 60 per cent. The annual gain in church membership since 1940 has been some two per cent, the most rapid in all our history. Allowing for the notorious imprecision of statistics on religion, it may still be asserted with considerable confidence that there is today among the American people a greater tendency than ever before to regard themselves as affirmatively religious and to identify themselves with religious institutions. The actual religious significance of this tendency is not easy to assess; certainly it would be rash to infer from the statistics any conclusions as to the actual faith of the masses of the American people. There are too many cultural and sociological factors involved, and “religion” means too many different things to different people, to make any such inference at all possible. But I do not think it can be denied that there is today a growing tendency towards religious identification among Americans. Even those Americans who avow no particular church affiiliation would, in the great majority, regard themselves as “religious” in some sense. Again, merely as a cultural fact, it may be asserted that Supreme Court Justice Douglas' recent dictum (speaking forthe court in the New York released time case, 1952), “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” just about describes the view the American people, by and large, take of themselves.

We are living at a time when events move more rapidly than in the past. It is therefore very difficult, even in an article for a review, to sum up the situation, and still more difficult to see even a short distance into the future. This is true for any country, even for those, like the United States and the Soviet Union, which have greater autonomy and greater power in the bipolar world in which we live. But it is probably in the case of France that the task is most difficult of all, for in this country the general problems are complicated by a particular kind of crisis growing out of internal conditions. As I write these lines, it is impossible for me to have the slightest idea as to what French foreign policy will be when the article is published.

America demands bold lines and strong personalities in its public men. It might almost be said that unless a man lends himself to caricature, he will not be included in the company of American political greats. James Madison has accordingly suffered unduly at the hands of American historians, and he has suffered even more in being denied an appropriate place in the affections of the American people. For my own part, I should like to confess that I took for granted the prevailing attitude about Madison, as in every way the junior lieutenant to Jefferson, when I first began my studies of the American philosopher-statesman. It was a genuine experience, then, gradually to come to realize that this gentle and modest man was not the pure scholar who had wandered into politics, there to be given favors of office by the great Republican leader with whom he was closely associated. He was, as I have attempted to demonstrate in a previous work, in every way a full collaborator with Jefferson in forming the Republican party and in developing that Republican ideology which is still unmatched in the modern theory of democracy. He was also the amalgamator of all the essential elements in the Republican tradition, conceived in the broad sense: for he achieved, in his thought and character, a total balance among Jefferson's ideals for the pursuit of happiness, Hamilton's understanding of strategic means, and Adams' realization of the need to check power with power.

A friend of mine has the misfortune of owning a number of stone cottages. I say “misfortune” because the cottages are in Scotland, and their rents are fixed at the level of 1914. The cottages were built long before 1914—some of them are eighteenth-century work, with their pantiled roofs and trick rubble walls and irregular little windows; but they are good to look upon still, with their white door-sills and their little gardens along the path to the road. The law compels my friend to keep them in tolerable repair, if they are tenanted, and to pay most of what rent he receives either to local authorities or to the Exchequer, in the form of rates and income-taxes. But the rent of each cottage amounts to a mere five shillings a week—seventy cents, at the present rate of exchange. This is not particularly depressing to my friend, for the rents of his farms are fixed at levels no higher than they were during the Napoleonic wars, let alone the First World War. The cottages are a cause of expense to him, of course, rather than a source of income; but persons of his station are now resigned to being ruined, and for some of his cottages he asks no rent at all, letting them to old people who can afford to pay next to nothing. Some of his tenants, however, are better off, according to their lights, than my friend himself: they have risen in the economic scale while he has descended. His income is still much greater than theirs, but his expenses are much greater, and his responsibilities. These tenants now have better wages and shorter hours than ever they did before; they can afford their little luxuries, extending sometimes to television-sets. Some of them have come to look upon rent as a luxury—for, after all, many of their neighbors are the recipients of my friend's charity, paying nothing for their cottages. Accordingly, my friend's agent occasionally has his difficulties when he goes from door to door, on Mondays, collecting five shillings here and five shillings there. One morning the agent knocked at the door of a tenant who was in good health and employed at good wages. The tenant came to the door and announced that he had decided to pay no more rent; he could not afford it; prices were high, and he could use that five shillings himself.

The biographers of Alexander Hamilton have been almost unanimous in absolving him from any complicity in the enactment and enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798. Most of them deny that he supported those now discredited laws and portray him as a defender of civil liberties who stood against the whole Federalist party. One writer asserts that by passing the laws the Federalists “mutinied” against Hamilton's recommendation of moderation. In the only thorough study of the acts, John C. Miller concludes that they “were passed by Congress against the advice of Alexander Hamilton.” Praising him as one not easily “led into error by the anxiety or the excitement of stirring and perilous times,” an early biographer describes the Federalist leader's position as “sensible and moderate.” Two of Jefferson's most widely read biographers credit Hamilton with opposing the law, and Albert J. Beveridge pictures him as an earlier and stronger opponent of the bills than Jefferson.

Jefferson made the pursuit of happiness central to his philosophy of man and society and in so doing he envisaged a dynamic balance between power and morals. This is aptly summed up by Madison, after the death of his best friend, when he was besieged with requests for “inside” information about Jefferson. On one such occasion, he called attention to the fertility of Jefferson's genius, the vast extent and variety of his acquirements, and “the philosophic impress left on every subject which he touched.” But he sensed that he had omitted the essence of that life of spirit and morality which had characterized his dear friend, and so he hastened to add: “Nor was he less distinguished from an early and uniform devotion to the cause of liberty, and systematic preference of a form of Government squared in the strictest degree to the equal rights of man.”

The theorist's attempt to interpret man's relation to man in civil society inevitably grows from and reflects his deeper conception of man's relation to the universe and to God. Consequently, the ultimate meaning and significance of a political theory can be ascertained only by establishing the precise way in which the theorist's world view has been spelled out in his view of the state. In the case of Orestes A. Brownson this is especially true. In the course of his movement from Transcendentalism to Catholicism he elaborated a metaphysic distinctively his: it summarizes his own intellectual history, his basic thought prior even to his theology, for it is the rationale of his acceptance of the Catholic Church. Our thesis with regard to Brownson's political thought is first, that this same metaphysic constitutes the premises on which he elaborates his political theory and, secondly, that the solution he offers to the ultimate problem raised by that theory is theological since ultimately his basic metaphysic gets completed by his theology. Our task is to indicate how this metaphysic and theology determine the fundamental conceptions of his specifically political thought.

In any study of the dissemination of ideologies, Marxism must claim a special place for two reasons. First, Marxism is both more precise and more all-embracing than any rival ideology, and its advocates claim not only that it is a “good” ideology but that it is the only correct ideology. Second, Marxism has been revised, by people who call themselves Marxists, in a way that would have astonished its founder.

Literature was never central to Brownson's interests; indeed at times it was something he tolerated somewhat impatiently.* He wrote about it regularly, however, and during his career filled over a thousand closely packed octavo pages on the subject. He could even use the cant of the journalist reviewer with professional facility. Of a novel called Thorneberry Abbey, for instance, he says, “It has one or two literary faults … efforts at fine writing, and wearisome descriptions of natural scenery, which … only interrupt the narrative.” With variations in the details, this kind of formal gesture is repeated almost every time he reviews a novel. Moreover, the passage on Thorneberry Abbey appears towards the very end of a long review, introduced by the following candid admission: “But we have forgotten the little book before us.” What precedes the remark is not primarily a literary discussion but rather a warning to Catholics against the dangers of unwary compromises with Protestantism. What follows the remark is literary in a perfunctory and conventional way and is quickly dropped in favor of more polemic discussion. Although this procedure is not true of every piece of criticism by Brownson, something like it happens often enough to make it characteristic. When he was accused of such irrelevance later in life, he defended himself vigorously: “The book introduced is regarded as little more than an occasion or a text for an original discussion of some questions which the author wishes to treat.… Books are worthy of no great consideration for their own sake, and literature itself is never respectable as an end, and is valuable only as a means to an end.” In spite of this method, however, Brownson raised important critical questions and left a substantial amount of literary material.

“Slavic Studies”—the very expression implies their comparative aspect and raises the question: what enables us to refer to Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Lusatian Sorbs, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Russians by the single all-encompassing term, the “Slavic” peoples? What is their common denominator?

It is indisputable that the Slavic peoples are to be defined basically as Slavic-speaking peoples. If speech is the point of departure, the problem becomes primarily a linguistic one. Since the pioneering work of the Czech Abbé Dobrovský (1753–1829), comparative linguistics has proved the existence of a common ancestral language for all the living Slavic languages and has largely reconstructed the sound pattern, grammatical framework and lexical stock of this Common (or Primitive) Slavic language. The problem of where and by whom this Common Slavic language was spoken is being gradually solved by persistent efforts to synchronize the findings of comparative linguistics, toponymy, and archeology. The archeologists' data are like a motion picture without its sound track; whereas the linguists have the sound track without the film. Thus, interdepartmental teamwork becomes indispensable.

Even before they had fully secured representative government with universal suffrage and frequent elections, the most ardent English democrats had already grown quite sensitive to the drawbacks of democracy. By the middle of the nineteenth century a number of them had become seriously disturbed about the difficulty of combining popular government with efficient government. They believed that ordinary men should rule but were learning that only extraordinary men could rule well. They opposed government by an aristocracy because it sacrificed the good of all to the interests of a few but they were discovering that the people could disregard or violate the common good as easily as the aristocracy. The defects of democracy became a heavier burden still for English socialists at the end of the century. Convinced that government should take over control of economic life, and persuaded by its achievements in other realms that modem science was the most efficient means of control, they wanted the real work of governing to be done by scientific experts; yet the democratic tendencies of both the English and the socialist traditions obliged them to favor constitutional forms that would preserve the principle, or at least the appearance, of government by the people.

The well known series which under the editorship of Mr. Sumner Welles studies the relations between America and other nations does not yet include a volume on the United States and Poland. It is no secret that the book about Poland by Samuel L. Sharp which Harvard University Press has recently published, was originally supposed to fill that gap. Why this proved unadvisable is easy to discover for any reader. Nevertheless, half of the introduction deals with “the limits of our (that is, the American) Polish problem” and two of the six chapters including the author's conclusions remained dedicated to American-Polish relations in the past, the present, and the future.

On the first of October, 1949, the Chinese Communists* climaxed their military success by establishing on the mainland a new revolutionary government, the “Chinese People's Republic.” While this government included a number of splinter parties, it was—and is—undisguisedly dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. The new rulers, who quickly destroyed the old system of political control, are today drastically reorganizing the country's social and economic relations. And they are planning to go far beyond the changes accomplished to date.

The elections for the German “Bundestag” (Parliament—Lower House) of September 6, 1953 guarantees a democratic development for the free part of the German nation. However, the real significance of these elections transcends the German borders. For months there had been a stagnation in foreign policy which, since the spring of 1953 and especially since Churchill's speech of May 11, 1953, paralyzed all efforts to create the European Defense Community and a political unity. This was due to uncertainty as to the outcome of the German elections. However, since the overwhelming majority of the 49 million people of the Federal Republic voted for the policies of Adenauer, this situation has been terminated