We who are a part of the civilization that has developed in Europe since the eleventh century and in America since the sixteenth, are living in a world many times richer in material comforts than any before in history. We are living in a world where people are more confused about the nature of the moral and the intellectual virtues than they have been since the Dark Ages, possibly since the last century of the Roman Empire. Few are capable of recognizing those who practice these virtues. It is fashionable to deny that there can be any firm criteria for judging between good and bad private conduct, between good and bad philosophy or art, teaching or statesmanship.

There is great significance in the recent renaming of the Siegfried line, Germany's line of fortifications in the West. By the will of the Fuehrer, the western fortification is now called Limes. The new name is obviously intended to imply something very specific, otherwise it would not have been chosen.

“Limes”, a Latin word meaning “borderline”, is a word of great significance in Roman as well as German history. The term was first used by the Roman conquerors to signify the line of fortifications which, after many setbacks, they built around the northernmost reaches of their realm. The Roman Limes enclosed what today is die greater part of Bavaria, the rest of Southern Germany, Switzerland and the Rhinelands. Started under the Roman Emperor Domitian in 83 A.D. and finished in the Second Century, the fortifications signified that the Roman impetus of expansion had reached its limit. It meant a consolidation of the earlier conquests against Teutonic invasion from the North and East.

The totalitarian state appeared as a state engaged in war. In the World War, for the first time in the twentieth century, the total reserves of national strength were concentrated in one great effort to destroy the enemy. The war was not the concern of the mobilized armies alone. It engaged the whole nation. “It was no longer possible (in the World War) to determine at what point the strength of the civilian population passed into the strength of the army and navy.” The army and the people constituted a single unit and as such they conducted the war. As a unit they faced their threatening opponent, who presented a similar common front. “The fighting ability of the forces at the front was conditioned by the fighting ability of the people at home.”

When a ruler inherits authority he inherits a responsibility for ordering the relations of living people whom he has not created himself, and therefore has not formed with a view to the order that he conceives as most suitable. Moreover he inherits an existing order in which the relations of the members of that society operate. That order, the result of a long historical process, has itself conditioned the people who live within it to suit its requirements, and those people have themselves given to it a certain mode which they, wittingly or unconsciously, have evolved as best suited to give them the conditions that they desire.

The reputation of a lady is seriously endangered if she ‘goes out’ to get a husband instead of waiting for one. Similarly, a bank is not supposed to run after the customers. During the nineteenth century when high standards of bank liquidity were generally accepted, and respectability was one of the essentials of banking success, waiting for the customer became a fundamental principle of banking practice, especially in Great Britain. Of course, ladies did not always live up to Victorian standards even in the Victorian Age; nor did banks, and since 1881 the Bank of England has gone out of its way on more than one occasion. But this was regarded as an irregular behavior, rarely acknowledged in public; the London market referred to the “hidden hand” whose transactions were not given statistical publicity. Since the War, many standards have changed; in 1922 the Federal Reserve System officially introduced the terms “open-market operations” and “open-market policy” which have since attained international circulation and the rank of major, if not fundamental, methods of monetary and credit management.

As professor Friedrich has pointed out in his Foreign Policy in the Making (Norton, New York, 1938) an effective foreign policy presupposes national unity and continuity. President Wilson tasted the bitterness of defeat over his League of Nations because he was an innovator and because he found it impossible to rally the nation behind his plan for American participation in an international peace program. At the present moment President Roosevelt is confronted both inside and outside his party by aggressive dissenters from his foreign policy. Persons and groups posing as the true defenders of the American democratic tradition have demanded the Ludlow referendum on war. They have presented isolationism, neutrality and economic nationalism as the principles of an authentic democratic way of life and have depicted international collaboration against aggressors as autocratic and dictatorial in tendency. The traditional American foreign policy of a “broad neutrality” says former President Hoover in Liberty, April 15, 1939, is being discarded by the present administration for a “vague use of force in association with European democracies.” Others say that President Roosevelt is leading the United States into war in order to assure himself a third term and to perpetuate New Deal “dictatorship.”