Few persons who look at the world thoughtfully are complacent. It is difficult to believe that the balance of power will become more stable. Quite the contrary! A degree of bi-polarity in world politics has been reached which compels each of the opposing groups to bend its efforts to bring the remaining neutrals into its orbit and to augment its power. If the war which each regards as a possibility should come, each wants to be sure that it will not be the loser. The race in atomic weapons and armaments of all kinds is on and experience suggests, as in the rivalries between sections before the American Civil War and the rivalries between alliances before the first World War, that such a race will eventuate in war.

There is no balancer in a bi-polar world, nor are there uncommitted powers which may cast their lot on one side or the other in a crisis. The process of nucleation about the two poles makes prediction of the power potential of each more and more feasible. It becomes increasingly clear to one side that time is with it and to the other that time is against it. Under such circumstances each expects war and it can be anticipated that the side which becomes convinced that time is against it will start the war. Fortunately there are still many unknown variables in the present situation. No precise calculation is yet possible, though it may be in the course of a few years. However, if war comes, there are few who doubt that atomic weapons would be used and that the human race would face disaster.

The question has been raised from time to time by British thinkers whether there ought not to be some central organ of “society,” some social parliament or even some general system of social parliaments, which might be added to the political parliament of the State, and might stand by its side in some sort of relation, either subordinate or coordinate. Such an organ or parliament would function either as an advisory body (or system of advisory bodies), or as a sort of “relief” legislature, parallel to the regular legislature, to ease the burden of legislation by carrying some part of its heavy traffic. Hitherto, so the arguments run, there has been only a single political mirror, the political legislature, which reflects or “represents” the legal association as such (or in other words, the legally organized State). Ought we not also to have another mirror, or a set of mirrors, reflecting some one great aspect of “society” as such, or even several of its different aspects?

The suggestion most commonly made is of a single social mirror, an economic council, or “parliament,” or “sub-parliament,” reflecting the one great aspect of society implied in the adjective “economic.” That suggestion acquired vogue, and even seemed likely to be translated into fact, at the close of the War of 1914–18.

There were no changes in the personnel of the Court while it was in session, but the deaths of Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge during the summer adjournment marked the 1948 term as the last to be dominated by an overwhelmingly preponderant majority of judges appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Justice Murphy's death occurred on July 19, 1949, soon after the adjournment of the Court on June 27. He took his seat on the Court on February 5, 1940, as the successor to Pierce Butler. Justice Rutledge died on September 10. He was the last of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's appointees to the Supreme Court. He was appointed on February 11, 1943, to succeed James F. Byrnes. The passing of these jurists may have been the most significant events as regards constitutional interpretation that occurred during 1948–1949.

From the Countryside to the Cities. Among the many practical problems with which the Chinese Communists have been recently confronted is that of governing large cities and administering policy in urban and metropolitan areas. Only two years ago the major preoccupation of the Chinese Communist Party was with agrarian policy, with emphases on land redistribution, Party reorganization to strengthen the revolution in rural areas, and the construction and maintenance of “rear bases” to support the fighting front. But in the epochal year beginning with the fall of Mukden on November 2, 1948, the directions and emphases of Chinese Communist policy were substantially modified by the new situation created by the rapid capture of all of the seaports, the most important industrial and commercial centers, and nearly all of the provincial capitals of China. To permit the most effective exploitation of this newly-gained strategic momentum, the Party leadership was obliged, on relatively short notice, to find immediate solutions for problems of urban policy that had previously been anticipated as likely to arise in the future.

Urban policy, accordingly, became the urgent question on the agenda of the Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, meeting in Shihchiachuang on March 15–23, 1949.

Soviet leaders have long understood the need for effective administration in the modern state, despite their great interest in questions of theory and matters of policy. Joseph Stalin, in his first report as Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, warned in 1923 that “policy loses its sense and is transformed into a waving of hands,” unless an efficient system for policy-execution exists. Consequently, Stalin and his lieutenants have constructed an extensive and diversified system for this purpose, using many agencies and reaching into every corner of Soviet society. Although the paucity of essential data makes a comprehensive analysis of the entire system virtually impossible at this time, it is noteworthy that recent Soviet materials have thrown some light on the functions and operations of one important segment of that system. This is an agency attached to the highest level of the Communist Party, the “Apparatus” of the Party's Central Committee.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) guides and controls all governmental, economic, social and other organizations in the USSR.

Since 1797, when Representative Smith of South Carolina proposed a constitutional amendment to reform the electoral college, scarcely a Congress has adjourned without the introduction of one or more resolutions on this subject. A plan which is currently receiving attention was introduced in the Senate by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and in the House by Ed Gossett of Texas. The Senate has already passed the so-called Lodge-Gossett proposal by a vote of 64 to 27—three more than the necessary two-thirds. There is actually some chance that the House of Representatives will approve the measure and send it to the states as it enjoys bi-partisan support and has received favorable committee action in the House.

The plan provides for three major changes in the electoral system. First, it would abolish presidential electors but retain the electoral votes of each state as at present. The purpose of this change is to prevent electors from acting on their own judgment. In the past, this matter has seemed relatively unimportant. But the recent election indicated the dangers of an electoral system which allows a determined minority to seize a national party label and appropriate electoral votes as the Thurmond forces did in Alabama and Tennessee.

The only words in the title of this symposium which do not cause difficulty are “of” and “in,” since even Latin America is a “nomer” that many protest is a “misnomer,” for some parts of the region southeast of the U.S.A., and “pathology” and “democracy” can get into water as hot and deep as any that lies under the thin ice over which the social sciences skate. The very lumping together in our discussion of twenty republics varying as they do in Latin America is a procedure of doubtful accuracy, and one which at first encounter arouses the ire of any good nationalist in these countries. The term “pathological” suggests too strongly a complacent superior attitude on our own part that may befit the propagandist or the naive and uninformed man on the street, but not the social scientist. The world does not fall so neatly into the patterns of perfect democracy and the outer darkness as Mr. Churchill has supposed. Can we not accept a certain relativity in these matters and remember the large-sized mote in our own eye?

With the struggle of almost innumerable thinkers to define the direction and goal, we are surely familiar. The writer has no intention of assembling all the definitions available, for if they were all assembled, sociologists might lay the emphasis not upon forms and constitutions so much as upon something broader that earlier theologians would have called men's will and men's love. Since the development of “Mr. Tylor's science,” cultural anthropology, we would be more likely to say that the legal arrangements grow out of and express the culture; that back of them lies a slow secular growth of the idea that personality, the freedom and full development of the individual are ultimate values, not to be sacrificed to the state; that power may be necessary for survival, and that unity or consensus or conformity may be necessary to power, but that something like Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life” is a deeper principle. These things are no sooner said than we realize that we often sin against the ideals we cherish and fear the freedom to which we give lip-service. The practice falls far short of the preaching.