It was in 1948 that Pierre Cot called for French neutrality in the rapidly developing tension between the communist and non-communist power blocs. But after all Cot, an influential prewar figure of the Radical Party's left wing and Air Minister of the Popular Front Government, had emerged from the war as a staunch communist sympathizer and a leader of the pro-communist Union Progressiste. Consequently, his opposition to the policy of a West European defense coalition — the Brussels Pact — hardly seemed surprising. Outside the sphere of direct communist influence, however, few important voices in France opposed the formation of a West European defense system.

During the years 1939–45, a spectacular change occurred in the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government. The pattern of direct persecution was discarded and replaced by a more subtle pattern of ostentatious compromise in combination with indirect pressure. The compromise was publicly demonstrated at the meeting of the National Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (January-February 1945) convoked, by permission of the Soviet government, to elect a new Patriarch in place of the deceased Sergius. The Council was attended by a number of high dignitaries of the non-Russian Orthodox Churches; many of them were flown to the Council in Soviet bombers. At the end of the Council, a gala reception was organized for its members by G. Karpov, the chairman of the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church; during that reception two choirs could be heard, the Patriarch's choir and the Moscow Philharmonic choir sponsored by the Soviet government. The enthroning of the new Patriarch Alexei was filmed and the film displayed in all the movie theaters of the Union.

Not long ago—early in 1954—the world observed a debate at Berlin between diplomats of East and West who offered their alternatives for solving the German problem. The Soviet solution as set forth by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was to use Germans as pawns in a diplomatic maneuver whose object was clearly to wreck Western European integration and to strengthen the Soviet Union. The solution proposed by the Western diplomats, John Foster Dulles, Anthony Eden and George Bidault, was to regard Germans as equals with whom they would negotiate a solution to Germany's problems. The Soviets have used the satellite East German regime to parrot their program and they have groomed it to neutralize Germany or lead it into the Communist camp. The Western diplomats have concluded that in order to obtain a lasting German settlement there must be free elections to establish an all-German government, which would be competent to negotiate about Germany's future and would be free to join the Western Alliance, if it chose to do so.

The body of the Federalists [even] were always, and yet are, essentially democratic in their political notions … willing to hazard the experiment of an … almost unqualified proportion of democracy…. The Federal Constitution was as good, or very nearly as good, as our country could bear; … Our materials for government were all democratic; and whatever the hazard of their combination may be, our Solons and Lycurgeses in the convention had no alternative, nothing to consider, but how to combine them…. We should have succeeded worse if we had trusted our metaphysics more. Experience must be our physician, though his medicines may kill.

Man has to live by values, a fact brought out with a sort of dogged repetition by Tolstoi. To live is to value, no matter what else it may be. So Tolstoi rightly claimed, and he also said that to live as man is to rate things up and down, as good and as evil. It is to know, and to use a measuring rod which we often call a norm or standard. Tolstoi said that we do not know at all what life would be like without this constant valuing and rating of acts and things. If that is so, man is the more or less consciously valuing animal, and the materials for a philosophy of value are at least as old as mankind, though this philosophy becomes evident only in men such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and Kant.

The study of leadership in local government for small- and middle-sized towns is a neglected phase of political science research. For many years scholars have accounted for the urban boss and machine; but its complementary counterpart at the grassroots has been taken for granted. Millions of Americans prefer to live and govern themselves in towns. Their politics warrants analysis not only because it will continue as a vital and characteristic contribution to our way of life but also because it frequently plays a superior rôle in state and national representation than it numerically is entitled to do