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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Charter of San Francisco is the modest end-product of the mightiest collective literary effort in history. Fifty delegations, comprising literally thousands of principal and subordinate personnel, labored feverishly for two months to achieve agreement on a constitution for the new world security organization.1 In contrast, the Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted by one of the commissions of the Peace Conference of Paris, on which there sat two representatives of each of the five major powers and one representative from each of nine of the secondary powers. This group of nineteen men met fifteen times.2

The very broad participation of the smaller powers in the San Francisco Conference is obviously not to be explained in terms of their growing influence in world politics. Although the number of prospective permanent seat-holders in die Council of the proposed world organization was the same at Paris and at San Francisco, there had been in the intervening quarter-century a reduction rather than an increase in the number of powers of greatest influence.

When Monsignor John A. Ryan died in late summer, millions of people in America and elsewhere mourned the passing of the most creative moral theologian in the present age. Here was a man who nearly a half century ago set himself a highly beneficent and constructive task; here was a man who by continuous, grinding effort reached the journey's end with the great task largely completed. Such success comes to few men, whatever their fields of interest; in the field of labor and industrial ethics only Monsignor Ryan can be said to have measurably attained it. Although by no means the first in the modern world to urge the primacy of Christian ethics in industry and trade— in fact he was a late comer—he excelled all his predecessors and contemporaries in one vital respect: the ability to combine economics and ethics into a virtually new science of social justice.