From the point of view of technology, of travel, and transportation the world is a much smaller place than it used to be only thirty years ago. This process of physical shrinkage which has been going on for quite some time does not show any signs of slackening. The same is true of communication of ideas, dissemination of knowledge, and the exchange of persons and of works of art and literature.

In the eighteen-nineties there took place in Russia, at a time of rapid industrial advance under the “Witte System,” one of those great debates which seem to catch hold of the basic problems shaping the destiny of generations. In those years a group of narodnik writers led by Vasilii Vorontsov and Nikolai Daniel'son disputed with a young generation of Marxists the future of capitalism in Russia. By capitalism these writers understood the current process of industrialization, which had been started after the Crimean War and had reached such extraordinary proportions by the mid-nineties. In surveying and evaluating the effects of this unprecedented development these writers, both narodnik and Marxist, laid bare an intricate fabric of economic difficulties and hostile emotional responses, which has accompanied, if not altogether determined the course of industrialization in Russia. And not in Russia alone: this great debate had its counterparts in backward countries all over the world. Its echoes are still heard in the discussions of Point Four projects and United Nations publications on the industrialization of underdeveloped areas.

In the turbulent world of William Faulkner's fiction there are two storm centers: the Civil War and World War I. Not that many of his stories or novels are written about these two conflicts. Only two of his longer fictions, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Unvanquished (1938) have a Civil War setting and even these are not confined to the period of the War. Yet almost all of his Yoknapatawpha stories and novels have their roots in this war, or, more accurately, in the ambiguous moral realities which this war dramatizes in Faulkner's mind.

Charles I was charged in the indictment before the High Court of Justice, at the trial before his execution, with entertaining “a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will.” To this end he had “traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present parliament.” It is usual to scoff at this. How could a king commit treason? Indeed he could not. Yet if he had set out to make himself a tyrant this was a grave offense which, though unknown to English law courts, had often been accounted in political theory as deserving death. The issue of treason is therefore without importance: however bad in law, there was certainly no lesser charge on which to bring a king to execution. The important question concerns tyranny.

The germans, usually thorough in their scholarship, have perhaps been nowhere more so than in the exploration of their own country's history. All the more surprising, therefore, is the comparative neglect which has been the fate of one of the most significant figures in all of modem German history: Prince Hardenberg. The title that he held for twelve years would alone be enough to suggest that he was a historical personage of some importance, for he was Chancellor of Prussia, the first man, and (except for two insignificant and ephemeral successors) the only man before Bismarck, to be so designated. (To be exact, Bismarck to begin with was Minister-President of Prussia, and became Chancellor of the Germany that he created.) But there is much more to Hardenberg than his title. His career culminated in those revolutionary decades when not France only but all Europe was at the crossroads, when, having been shaken loose to a greater or lesser degree from the accustomed routine of the ancien rigime, each country was faced with the necessity of either undertaking considerable repairs in the old structure, or venturing in some direction into uncharted political territory. Hardenberg was destined to play an important, in many respects a decisive part in determining Prussia's choice, a choice of which it is nothing more than sober fact to say that it has not ceased to affect European and world politics almost a century and a half later.