In the nineteenth century, when many people were optimistic in their views of human nature, and confident that the course of progress was going to be continued into an indefinite future, there were one or two prophets who feared and foretold that the twentieth century would see great wars of peoples, popular military dictatorships and the harnessing of the machines of industry to the science of warfare. It is interesting to note that, without knowing whether one country or another was going to emerge as the chief offender, and without basing his prediction upon any view that Germany was likely to present a special problem to the European continent, a writer could still feel assured, a generation beforehand, that this age of terrible warfare was coming. He could see, in other words, that, apart from the emergence of a special criminal, the developments in the situation itself were driving mankind into an era of conflict. In the midst of battle, while we are all of us in fighting mood, we see only the sins of the enemy and fail to reflect on those predicaments and dilemmas which so often develop and which underlie the great conflicts between masses of human beings. And though these conflicts could hardly have taken place if all men were perfect saints, we often forget that many of the inhuman struggles that have divided the human race would hardly have occurred if the situation had been one of completely righteous men confronted by undiluted and unmitigated crime. Given the ordinary amount of cupidity and wilfulness in human beings, unmanageable situations are likely to develop and some of them may almost be guaranteed to end in terrible conflict. While there is battle and hatred men have eyes for nothing save the fact that the enemy is the cause of all the troubles; but long, long afterwards, when all passion has been spent, the historian often sees that it was a conflict between one half-right that was perhaps too wilful, and another half-right that was perhaps too proud; and behind even this he discerns that it was a terrible predicament, which had the effect of putting men so at cross-purposes with one another. This predicament is the thing which it is the purpose of this paper to examine; and first of all I propose to try to show how the historian comes to discover its existence.

There was a time, not many years in the past, when it was taken for granted that Americans had little interest in problems much beyond their borders. No one seriously argues this to be so today. But while we have mastered our disinclination to think of problems that are distant in space we have still a strong aversion to problems that are distant in time. So far as it is ever permissible to generalize on questions of national temper — and it is not an exercise to my taste — we are still a rather short-sighted people. The Congress of the United States, which in this as in other respects is an only slightly distorted mirror of national character, can and does rise to emergencies. It has rarely shown capacity to foresee and to forestall crises. I should guess that it has not done so because the American people are not inclined to foresee and to forestall trouble.

Following military collapse both in 1918 and in 1945 Germany presented two economic phenomena indicative of the destruction of economic life. In the twenties an open inflation occurred. For a relatively short time German money lost its value and purchasing power. This period of a completely open inflation was limited by a currency reform of a particular kind. Instead of cancelling the money in circulation the volume of money was increased by introducing a new stable money, the so-called Rentenmark. At the same time, the old money in circulation had been devaluated at the rate of one billionth of its face value. This controlled monetary experiment as well as the preceding huge inflation have found a place in the history of money. On account of the undoubted success of the devaluation experiment in 1923, the opinion seems to prevail that a devaluation is the best, if not the only way to reform the currency.

The thinking of Left Wing Labourites on foreign policy since 1945 reveals the frustration, and, withal, the persistence of Utopian hopes in a period of particularly rapid and alarming change on the world stage.

The victory of the British Labour Party in the elections of July, 1945 opened up to Left Wing Labourites intoxicating vistas of permanent peace and socialist brotherhood. The moment of triumph was ironically favorable to the fervor of Socialist Utopian hopes. Fascist military power in Europe had been crushed, and thb feat had been accomplished by the combined endeavors of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. Russia, so long the Janus of the socialists, socialist state and enemy of socialists, appeared to be ready for cooperation. Labourites gladly abandoned their “red-baiting” suspicions, and looked for the building of a socialist Europe, aided by the Resistance parties, whose work was generally exaggerated and, just as generally, claimed for socialism. Problems of economic reconstruction were of a magnitude to encourage believers in planning that the capitalist world would itself become socialist in its solutions; and the apparently imminent liquidation of old colonial empires made the radiance of freedom's dawn even more dazzling.

The revolutions of 1640 and 1789 were carried forward with a positive enthusiasm for freedom. The drama and the failure of each revolution were dominated by this fact; each revolution provided the stage for long-drawn-out struggles to write a constitution. Each produced a crop of such constitutions; and eventually a dictator emerged to carry out by force the authority that could not be arranged by cooperation. But the lesson of the struggle for constitutional freedom was not lost; the idea of the rights of man was not dead. In England, in France, this impulse produced constitutional systems in the course of the next generation; and these systems remained.

Two principal facts dominate the history of Moscow in the second half of the fifteenth century: the winning of independence, and religious emancipation. On the one hand, Moscow shook off the secular yoke of the Tartars and became a State; on the other hand, the Russian Church withdrew from the guardianship of the mother Byzantine Church. Religious aspirations and the awakening of a national consciousness were then intimately bound together and strengthened each other by the interplay of their mutual influences. But, while the Moscow principality was consolidating itself and realizing its desire for political autonomy, the religious situation remained indecisive for a much longer time. The Russian soul felt itself abandoned and ill at ease with the ecclesiastical independence that came to it with the fall of Byzantium. Opposing currents divided popular opinion, and diverse influences sometimes had the most unexpected consequences. We have tried to unravel some of these currents and some of these influences in the pages that follow.