The new administration in Washington has found it can afford to begin devoting attention to the malaise which has been besetting the nation's economy in recent years. More particularly, it is addressing last year's spectacular and unwarranted rise in the world export price of oil.

In a century called “the century of total war” more than 62,000,000 human beings met death in two World Wars. These figures do not include people killed in conflicts such as those in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East. The striking difference between the First and Second World Wars was the number of estimated deaths among noncombatants: 5 per cent in the First and 48 per cent in the Second.

Anything I write may be quickly overrun by new developments—in Cyprus, in Greece and Turkey, at the United Nations in New York and Geneva.

I started to write in a plane flying from New York to Geneva to see Prince Sadruddin, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees; I went on in hurried interludes during a hectic general election in England; I finished on another plane to New York.

In a 1970 decision the United States Supreme Court approved the exemption of church property from city real estate taxes, noting that “separation of church and state” was thereby well served (Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York). The Court stated:

He is very old and he comes from far away. Probably of Iranian origins (Ahriman, ruler in the dominion of darkness), he appears in the Bible as Satan, God's antagonist, seducer and liar. He has had many names—Beelzebub, Abaddon, Diabolos, Lucifer, Deoful—down to the English Devil. He has had a lot to put up with in his long history—the leering intimacies of hysterical witches, the cold hatred of inquisitors, the feverish fantasies of romantic poets, and, last but not least, the supercilious mockery of enlightened intellectuals.