Recently, Mr. Nehru, in one of his more censorious moods, complained of the manner in which words lose their meaning in cold war terminology. Such a complaint might well have provoked the reply that Mr. Nehru is as much a sinner as sinned against, and that the varying descriptions of India's foreign policy display a degree of slipperiness equal with that of “free world,” “peace,” and “democracy” — the “masked words” he mentioned. Ironically, it was the cold war which engendered the connotations that have given neutralism its chameleon cloak. And while popular usage readily applies the term to India, Indian spokesmen provide implicit support for the firm contention of those who insist that neutralism is essentially “a subjective term.” No doubt Indian equivocation, which is far from unique, is easily explicable. For a language attuned to the compulsions and contingencies of political life is often unavoidably ambiguous; and the political “isms,” which so proliferate today, seem to act as semantic vortices, blurring and engrossing the meaning of words of more ancient lineage.

It is a strange quirk of intellectual history that essays in the comprehensive interpretation of history seem to have become fashionable in inverse proportion to the decline of system-building in philosophy. Given this tendency, however, it is not surprising that philosophical historians have again focussed their attention upon America and that new systematic interpretations of American development have come to light. One such interpretation returns to the theories of one of the most praised but most neglected students of American society: Alexis de Tocqueville. According to this view the crucial fact in American history is the absence of a European ancien régime. The leading exponent of the “back to de Tocqueville” movement adverts to what might be called “the storybook truth about American history: that America was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World.” If this view is correct, “then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the nonexistence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.” But in this sense of the term, “liberal” America was not the only “liberal” community, for America was not the only country which created a frontier existence free of many of the restraints of the old European society. Australia developed a comparable frontier life, and it had no entrenched aristocracy of the European sort.

Current United States publications accord fulsome praise to the policies recently adopted by Chile. Under President Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez the “string-bean republic” not only enjoys an administration of honesty and integrity, but is judged by many to be on the road to solving its major problems through the application of two of our most cherished principles: political democracy and free-enterprise capitalism. That Chile has chosen the patterns of the United States and is seeking economic reform within the framework of classically liberal democracy is taken as an indication that United States - Chilean relations are now characterized by firm and fundamental rapport. There is hope also that as Chilean formulas come to prevail in other Latin American republics, a new era of inter-American friendship and understanding will emerge.

Racialism maintains that the hereditary character of physiological and psychological traits of groups of persons explains and consequently determines the historical and cultural fate of these groups. Nature predominates over nurture, whether nature is conceived in terms of biology or human spirit or in terms of both. The inherited characteristics of body and soul defy human manipulation to the extent that if you counteract the laws of racial uniqueness, the deterioration of group capacities will be inevitable. The effects of breaking the laws of racial causality attest to their validity; so do the results of the intentional effort to keep the race pure or improve it by opposite cross-breeding.