WHEN the parliamentary bodies, the national assemblies of Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania convene, the mace, the wig, the Hansard, the speakership denote an endowment from the former colonial mentor and Mother of Parliaments, England. Front benches are reserved for the Ministers of Government. Oppositions, such as they are in many of the newly emergent African states of British vintage, face one another or, in one-party states, dissent is heard from the back benches. Inheritance of British parliamentary forms by youthful African states has been extensive. The substance of the democratic bequest from Britain as accepted and practiced by these and other new nations is quite another question. For African statesmen are quickly developing their ideals, adapting the colonial bequests to their own needs.

In Marx's writings there is a notion of “nature” as applied to man, which is not the notion ordinarily imputed to Marx. This notion is a more fundamental one and offers the possibility of a fresh analysis of certain aspects of Marx's theory on man and society. Up to now it has not been exploited by Marx's American commentators.

THE “third world” of the developing and, for the most part, newly independent nations is, for Communists of all brands and allegiances, both a crucial arena of political competition against the “imperialists” and the center of their hopes for new victories. Yet there are important differences in the way Moscow and Peking view these opportunities. The Soviet leadership believes that the many poor and ambitious countries will, later if not sooner, decide that Communism offers them the best prospects for raising their status in the world. Chinese Communist propaganda, on the other hand, calls for an ever more militant struggle of “national liberation” to expel the “imperialists” from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and to unite the developing countries under Peking's leadership. Thus, in addition to being a principal focus of Communist hopes and efforts, the question of the “correct” policy toward the third world has unleashed deep-set rivalries and antagonisms between and within ruling and nonruling Communist parties alike.

PARNELL was a rare political genius. The quality of that genius was never more clearly revealed than in those exciting days after he had been deposed as leader of the Irish Party on December 6, 1890, in the House of Commons by the majority of his colleagues. Three days later he returned to Ireland to appeal their decision to the Irish people. Within two weeks he had secured to himself all the effective levers of political power in the country, and his bewildered opponents found themselves without funds, newspapers, or Party organization. He then coolly, from a position of maximum strength, opened negotiations for a surrender he never intended to honor. His strategy was simply to give the various factions among his opponents enough time to fall to quarreling among themselves, and his tactic during the negotiations was to drive wedges at every opportunity. The success of his plan depended on the inability of his opponents to sink their differences. Given the ambitions, needs and temperaments of his opponents, this wager on factionalism must have hardly seemed like a risk at all. In the last analysis, however, Parnell did not have much choice. Since the combination against him was bigger and stronger than he was, if he could not persuade them to turn on each other, he must in the end be overwhelmed.