When Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party, was appointed by the second all-Russian Soviet Congress as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in November 1917, neither he nor his adversaries believed that the new regime would last very long. Trotski tells how a conservative Russian officer helped to defend Petrograd against the advancing troops of the counter-revolution because he hated liberals and democrats and did not believe that the Bolsheviks could stay in power. And Lenin was very proud when he could announce that the Bolshevik regime had lasted longer than the abortive Parisian Commune of 1871.

No minority group in the United States is probably as formless and yet at the same time as rigid as the American membership of the Roman Catholic Church. The rigidity of the Catholic organization arises from the fact that there has never been a real heresy during the three centuries and more of Catholic life within the boundaries of the present United States. Even the so-called heresy of Americanism existed more in the minds of European theologians than in the Catholics of the new world. There have been divergencies among American Catholics on such questions as the application of Gregory XVI's condemnation of the slave trade, the timeliness of die declaration of papal infallibility or the extent of the papal condemnation of secret societies, but there has been no difference on the essential doctrines involved in these disputes.

The current trend toward conservatism in American politics is most pronounced in the field of labor relations. This should occasion no surprise in view of the well-known fact that legislation in behalf of labor was die essential and constant element in New Deal liberalism. In keeping with the “American way” of swinging the political pendulum periodically from liberalism to conservatism and back again, the present Congress enacted the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations Act with the aim of curbing the power of union labor so succesfully enhanced by the New Deal. The bitter controversy attending die passage of die Act and the unrelenting and all but unanimous opposition of organized labor and many of its friends to die continuance of the law underscore die paramount importance of labor questions in the country's maturing economy. Other phases of labor legislation are indirectly involved in the present reaction: health insurance, and increased coverage and more generous benefits under the Social Security and Fair Labor Standards Acts. Though diese supplements are badly needed, they fail to arouse general enthusiasm in the climate of opinion that now prevails.

It seems impossible to sort out where all the many strands in British life are leading just now, or to forecast the political future of the country. Too much depends on outside influences. There is the world-wide question of the future of relations between America and Russia. There is the question of what way continental Europe will turn in the next year or two. There is the appalling complication of the economic crisis. The political situation at home and abroad is still a fluid one.

Some American readers may have read a “London Letter” by Arthur Koesder to the Partisan Review which appeared some months ago. Koestler, with all his ability for penetrating and destructive criticism, called England an island of “virtue and gloom.” This is an impression many people now get when they compare England with continental countries in many ways far worse off, such as France or Italy.

International politics, like nature, is a system of processes. There are no simple causes and effects of historical developments. The record of the past tends to determine the present — until circumstance intervenes. Peoples, like individuals, are at the mercy of what is called chance, and an apparently meaningless combination of circumstances may frustrate the culmination of long-developed tendencies. Tendency is conservative of past forms, and circumstance may appear formless, but their balanced interplay is the source of novel forms. It is only within the frame of reference of these three terms — tendency, circumstance and novelty — that forecasting future developments can derive its warrant from an exact science of prediction. The basic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is the central issue of world politics. Sir Halford Mackinder's celebrated theorem — the juxtaposition of the continental empire of Eurasia and the Oceanic Powers, and the contest over the vast rimland interposed be-between the “heartland” and the littoral of Eurasia — is today as brilliant a summation of the world strategic problem as it was forty years ago when it was first propounded.

Ever since the liberation of Greece over a century ago, the central issues in Greek public life have been the political unification of all Greek-speaking peoples, questions of domestic, social and economic policy, and the elaboration of a satisfactory constitutional regime.

Since Greece received at the time of its liberation only a small share of the lands which it considered to be Greek, its foreign policy has always had this goal: the unification under the political sovereignty of the national state of all the territories in the Eastern Mediterranean region where Greek-speaking inhabitants predominate. By the acquisition of the Ionian Islands in 1863, Thessaly in 1881, and Crete, die Aegean Islands, Southern Epirus and Southern Macedonia in 1913, the greater part of this task had been accomplished on the eve of the first World War.

The rationalist is the acknowledged enemy of the spirit. The enmity is notably murderous when the object is the mind that has been scripturalized, the mind that draws its sources of value and discernment and power out of the energy of the Old and New Testaments, the mind that, refusing to show cause or prove or analyze, delivers judgment and damnation with the utmost conviction, the conviction of prophetic vision, of spiritual intuition. The system-maker, inveterately hunting after a coherent method or formulation, will find none; rather he may be expected to find only a violent assertiveness indifferent to all pattern and organization. So he may cry, “Fraud!” or “Fool!” Or if he, in his pure objectivity, has to respect the visionary's evident belief in his task, he may, subsequently, summon the psycho-analyst, who, at a loss for any other explanation, may attribute the whole outpouring of the prophet's soul to a neurotic condition. But this is, I think, a cheap evasion of the responsibility of any serious examiner.