TenYears after Bismarck's creation of the Reich, a Swabian philosopher, Karl Christian Planck, bitterly regretted in his posthumous Testament of a German, that “our people has now entered, similar therein to the Jewish people, its period of selfish national messianism.” Like an Old Testament prophet, he regarded the German nation-state armed to the teeth as a perversion of the true Germany. “If such a universalist people, situated in the heart of Europe, forms in sharp contrast to its preceding history a centralist nation-state and sets before its neighbor nations an example of increased armament, what can result in an age of acute nationalism but total conflict?” Planck foresaw the war of 1914, but he hoped that out of it a reformation of Germany would come. He was too optimistic; the defeat of 1918 brought no reformation but an intensification of the trends of the Bismarckian Reich. With German scholarship leading the march to the abyss, the gulf between Germany and the West grew wider during the Weimar Reich. Thus the catastrophe of 1933 came about, and this in turn led to the war of 1939. The developments after that war, however, fulfilled Planck's hope for a reformation of Germany, for the rise of a new spirit.

InThe last days of its life, the 85th Congress gave its approval to the joint United States-Euratom research and power reactor program, in the legislation known as the Euratom Cooperation Act of 1958. This law provides that the United States will assist the European Atomic Community in attaining its goal of a total installed capacity of approximately 1 million kilowatts of electricity by December 31, 1963, by bringing into operation power plants using nuclear reactors. In addition, the legislation authorizes an initial appropriation of $3,000,000 for a cooperative research and development program, and provides for sale or lease to the Community of fissionable uranium 235 and one kilogram of plutonium. This law was implemented by the agreement for cooperation containing provisions for financing, which entered into force on February 18, 1959. This legislation marked the high point of American collaboration with the latest institution of the European Community. As such, it is a logical point of departure for recapitulating the current status of that Community and its relations with the United States.

The contemporary British Liberal Party sturdily refuses to die. For nearly three decades family allegiances, traditional loyalties, and youthful hopes have preserved for it a dwindling minority status. The Liberals have sought to persuade the electorate with fresh faces and fresh ideas. Still drawing upon the nonconformist tradition they have offered the electorate only a chance to protest and not a possible government. This opportunity to protest against the Leviathan parties, Labour and Conservative, has been a major source of its occasional resurgence in by-elections. The Liberal Party is in many respects the victim of its success. Liberalism, broader than the Party, in pervading British society and parties, could not without drastic alteration become the distinguishing creed of a party. The proponents of change, the sectarian and radical Liberals, were divided, and their estate has been taken over by diverse heirs. Some of the views of Richard Cobden and John Bright became anachronistic, and others were enacted into law which Tories and Labour have preserved. Other elements of radicalism were associated with the Conservative and Labour Parties. Historically the interests attached to the Liberal Party did not cohere well. Even the moments of past liberal greatness, the periods of Gladstone's and Lloyd George's leadership, do not provide a sturdy base of future hope. These inspiring periods, indeed, seem to indicate that to be a dominant national force the Liberal Party requires leaders of unusual and towering genius who strain the bonds of party.

Anarchy is rarely or never upheld with consistency. In the pedagogy of Rousseau, there is a set purpose to let the child be guided by natural necessity rather than by human command, and to let him learn from the experience of physical facts rather than by obedience. “Keep the child solely dependent on things; you will have followed the order of Nature in the process of his upbringing. Never oppose to his unreasonable wishes any but physical obstacles or punishments resulting from the actions themselves — he will remember these punishments in similar situations. It is enough to prevent him from doing evil without forbidding him to do it …” (Emile, II). Remarkably, the theory that the method of authority is a poor substitute for the pedagogical power of nature has been accepted, in varying degree of enthusiasm or reluctance, by most schools of pedagogy and has demonstrated lasting power. Yet the authority of parents and tutors is present throughout pedagogical theories, even when it is passed over in silence. Childhood is the domain where the suppression of all authority is obviously impossible. The most radical constructs of anarchy, as soon as they rise above the level of idle rhetoric, admit of qualifications so far at least as the immature part of mankind is concerned. Anti-authoritarian theorists, with few exceptions if any, do not mean that authority should disappear or that it can ever cease to be a factor of major importance in human affairs. What thinkers opposed to authority generally mean is that authority can never be vindicated except by such deficiencies as are found in children, in the feeble-minded, the emotionally unstable, the criminally inclined, the illiterate, and the historically primitive.

InSpite of a continued gradual increase of American-Soviet contacts, the official Soviet image of the United States in 1959 was shaped, as before, largely by a combination of preconcert tion and contrivance. The massive Soviet machinery of communication continued to present to the peoples of the Soviet Union a picture of America based less on empirical judgment than on the application to changing circumstances of unchanging attitudes. As in the past, the Kremlin's image of America and of the West in general appeared to be as much an instrument for the manipulation of foreign and Soviet public opinion as it was a reflection of Moscow's appraisal of international political forces. The official doctrine of irreconcilable struggle between Soviet “socialism” and Western “capitalism” held undiminished significance for the rationalization and legitimization of Kremlin power and policy.

Recently, Mr. Nehru, in one of his more censorious moods, complained of the manner in which words lose their meaning in cold war terminology. Such a complaint might well have provoked the reply that Mr. Nehru is as much a sinner as sinned against, and that the varying descriptions of India's foreign policy display a degree of slipperiness equal with that of “free world,” “peace,” and “democracy” — the “masked words” he mentioned. Ironically, it was the cold war which engendered the connotations that have given neutralism its chameleon cloak. And while popular usage readily applies the term to India, Indian spokesmen provide implicit support for the firm contention of those who insist that neutralism is essentially “a subjective term.” No doubt Indian equivocation, which is far from unique, is easily explicable. For a language attuned to the compulsions and contingencies of political life is often unavoidably ambiguous; and the political “isms,” which so proliferate today, seem to act as semantic vortices, blurring and engrossing the meaning of words of more ancient lineage.