The mind of Franklin Roosevelt was young and spacious. There was a lot of room in it, room for imagination, room for the freshness of ideas and room for the future. He was not content to live by formulas or under the pressure of the routine and the antiquated. He was never deluded by the lies and phrases which try to conceal reality and deaden truth. He saw our dangers and our weaknesses and he pioneered to save us from them. For, among our various statesmen, he was a pioneer in the establishing of social and economic responsibility. He believed in the notion of community within our own nation and beyond in the entire world. From the moment of his taking office he revealed his own sense of responsibility towards the whole people, not to any single class or group. And he instructed—sometimes bitterly—the people of power and fortune so that they would recognize their obligations towards the less powerful and the less fortunate members of society. With grimness and reluctance this teaching was often received. Nevertheless it was instructive and it was inescapable. No man could fail to learn the great lesson—that he was not to be alone and self-concerned, that he was rather to be conscious of his responsible membership with other men in an American community.

The full measurement of our late president must wait for the passage of time, but the continuation of his influence upon current politics must depend upon the immediate evaluations of his character and his greatness. Today's evaluation, despite the loyalty evoked by war time and the charitableness expected at death, must be colored by political feeling, personal prejudices, and previous attitudes towards his policies. Yet, all observers agree that he was the central figure of twelve momentous years of our history. In the fact of his death in wartime service he has been compared to Abraham Lincoln, and, like Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed strong attributes of power to meet emergencies. But in his character, in his general policies, in his background, and, I think, sometimes in his own opinion of himself, Roosevelt can much better be compared with Thomas Jefferson.

At his death Franklin Roosevelt's domestic program had long been subordinated to the demands of war, and the toils of establishing a world peace settlement were still to be faced. The relief, recovery and reform measures of the New Deal had been put into effect before the end of the second Roosevelt Administration, several years before he formally abandoned Doctor New Deal. Thereafter, the President's attention was overwhelmingly devoted to preparations for the defense of America, to the maintenance of possible allies, and to the even more difficult task of winning popular and congressional support for these and further measures. In a speech at Chicago, during the campaign of 1944, Roosevelt returned to the theme of social security, but it is hard to believe that even he in all his enormous confidence and vitality could have expected to live through the labors of war and a peace settlement to fight the battles of another New Deal.

Social justice is that form of justice which impels men to promote the common good; that is, the welfare of the community as such, as a unified entity, and also the common good as comprising the welfare of all members of society. This was the meaning attached to the term by Pope Pius XI. In Atheistic Communism he declared: “It is impossible to care for the social organism and the good of society as a unit unless each single part and each individual member… is supplied with all that is necessary for the exercise of his social functions.”

This question may be answered by “yes” or “no,” according to one's point of view. Mussolini's Fascism—that of the black shirts, of banners bearing the skull and bones emblem, of the so-called Roman salute, of parades, punitive expeditions with muskets, clubs and castor oil, of the East African Empire and the Albanian Kingdom—may be called dead, even buried. But the Fascism that ante-dates Mussolini, the Fascism of all times and all countries—that brand of Fascism never dies. It adapts itself, instead, to all climates and all temperatures; it dresses according to the fashion, disguises itself and hides. That brand of Fascism has not died because it is deathless.

The best description of Adolf Hitler's character can be found in Jacob Burckhardt's Historical Fragments. In these lecture notes, published after his death, the great Swiss historian devotes a few pages to Mohammed as founder of Islam. I do not know whether these pages do justice to the Prophet of the Mohammedans, but I think that they are very important for the understanding of the mentality and the historical role of the Führer. “Mohammed is in his very personality fanatical, that is his fundamental force. His fanaticism is that of a radical simplifier, and so far he is completely genuine. His fanaticism is of a most tenacious kind, and his victory is one of the greatest victories of the doctrinaire attitude and of triviality.” “His paltry preaching alone would have obtained only moderate and transitory success, but he continually presented to his bands concrete aims … plunder of caravans, conquests in Arabia, with the accompanying booty. The Holy War against the outside world follows, as something self-evident. The World Empire is simply a conclusion.” Burckhardt points out that the Arabs, the henchmen of Mohammed, were not barbarians. They were an ingenious people, with many spiritual traditions; Mohammed's success among them was based upon a longing for unification, for an “extreme simplification.” Mohammed utilized parts of the most various traditions. Therefore, “everybody found something reminiscent of his previous beliefs in the preaching of Mohammed.”

History consists of the general and the particular. The existence of the general is the reason why history repeats itself. In the annals of the past it is surprising to find, time and again, that what is often considered as modern and unique has happened before. Closer study reveals that men, when confronted with a similar set of circumstances have reacted, throughout recorded history, in patterns revealing a marked degree of similarity. If we are to gain a measure of rational control over an otherwise frequently anti-rational—and therefore anti-human—world, it is essential that we know these patterns. They show that men so often do what they do not want to do; they are caught in a chain of circumstances which they could have broken only if they had realized what the last link would be while they were forging the first or were permitting events to forge it for them.

If We are to discuss race and culture contacts in North Africa, we must first appraise the historico-geographical conditions under which such contacts have taken place. It seems significant then that the Arab geographers called what is now Italian, French, and Spanish North Africa, Djesiret el Maghreb, that is the Island of the West. On a closer look, North Africa is indeed an island, separated, as it is, from the European North by the Mediterranean Sea, from Egypt and the Near East by the Libyan desert, and from the Negro country of the Sudan by the desert belt of the Sahara. To the West, it borders on the open Ocean. Within this so-bounded island, however, there is no unity. There are wild mountain ranges and fertile valleys, wind-swept plateaus, and the dry steppe regions which fade out into the immensity of the desert; but a core of integration, a central landscape, as it were, is lacking. As a result of these geographical conditions, there has been sufficient isolation for ancient customs and particular creeds to be preserved, but there has been not enough concentrated political power to enable the peoples of North Africa to fend off frequent invasion and the ever recurring play of outside intervention.

Let us begin with a frank acknowledgment: the American fondness for new structural forms is both virtue and fault politically. Since our proneness to frequent alteration of governmental structures engenders a certain self-distrust, we place upon our actions the restraint found in our tortuous constitutional amending process. Still hankering for change, however, and finding the amending process too rigid, we bend and twist the meaning of the fundamental law with amazing casuistry. The defect as well as the virtue of this practis obvious. On the one hand we change a structure before it has been thoroughly tested, having mistakenly hoped, in the first place, to achieve complete reform by structure and law alone. On the other hand, no one can deny that this willingness to change and experiment with new forms and institutions has contributed to governmental and political progress. City manager government, popular initiation of legislation, direct nomination of party candidates, the organization, control and operation of regional areas like the T.V.A. and the Port of New York Authority, and many recent creations in governmental structure and operations— all these, despite certain difficulties and weaknesses, have contributed to the general advancement of the theory and practice of government. Disappointment, of course, has often followed reform. Too much has been promised, and performance has fallen short of expectations. Bitter disillusionment has often brought reaction. And yet, no one can seriously maintain that in the long run we have not progressed. It is true that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pressure for regulation and control of utilities did not result in a wholesale reform of big business and its practices. Yet, while big business might have been forced to adopt methods less brutal and less careless of the public interest, it was at least kept from returning to its older “public-be-damned” attitude. If some few reforms have been totally ineffective, most of them have been a decided improvement on the older, less efficient, less popularly responsive systems which they replaced.

It Is in their acknowledgment of the soul and of the plight of the modern soul that the books to be considered here are united. From writers living and writing within the life of the Church, such acknowledgment is, of course, not surprising. But the rediscovery of the soul and of the spiritual world and power by writers who are not members of the Church is perhaps a phenomenon of the age. The modern mind, in the tangle of darkness and evil and chaos, hunts steadfastly after spiritual values, for, at least, a spiritual sense. The long-running tendency to deny the life of the soul of man or to act as if it did not exist is pulled up short in these writers. Here the existence of spiritual reality is admitted and even exulted in, although the nature of a real spirituality is not, in every instance, thoroughly or profoundly understood.