THE editors of the Review of Politics have asked me to do something that is indicated by the title of this informal essay. It is something that I have long had in mind. Substantially I am asked to assess after the passage of almost twenty years the thesis laid down in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. Ordinarily the biography of a book or of a writer's ideas had better, in good taste, be left to others. But I hope that I may be forgiven some notes on the nature of that work, because of their relevance not only to this return to the subject, but because of their relevance as well to what seems to me to be a general change in scholarly attitude toward a central problem: the place of ethics and the place of science in that study which Aristotle named by one word, Politics. It is peculiarly a pleasure to contribute this revision of a position to a journal devoted to the high cultivation of that Aristotelian conception. The distinction already achieved by the Review of Politics is in itself a witness of the changed temper of contemporary thought to a deep concern with political values.

THE war in Europe and our own declared neutrality make the discussion of this subject particularly timely. Much is being said and written on the question as to what is the best procedure to maintain this neutrality: whether we should retain our embargo on arms or not, and whether if lifted or not, we should demand that cash payments be made by all belligerents who purchase goods from us, and that these goods be transported in vessels sailing under the flags of the nations that purchase them. A point which both parties in the controversy try to make is that if their solution is accepted we shall be less likely drawn into war ourselves. Into the merits of this debate we shall not enter. It is one of practical politics, concerned, not directly with the declaration of neutrality or with its justification, but with maintaining such relations with the belligerents as will best safeguard our national rights and most effectively prevent our being drawn out of our neutral status and into the war on one side or the other. The aim of the present paper is rather to examine the conception of neutrality itself, and under its moral, rather than under its immediately legal aspects. Legal justice is not always synonymous with moral justice, and over-insistence on our legal rights is liable to cause us to forget our moral duties of justice and of charity.

WE STAND at the beginning of events of enormous importance. It is too early to form an opinion as to how these events will develop—whether it will be a long-lasting war or if all will be finished when these lines are published—whether other nations and countries will be involved in the struggle besides those who began it, or in other words whether this war will become really a world catastrophe or if it will be relatively localized—which way Chance will turn and what will be the final result of the war? Trying to answer these questions would be mere guess work, without any sufficient foundation. One thing only one might say with entire certainty: it is not a simple war-like episode the beginning of which we witness, it is an event, or rather a series of events of world importance, a. turning point in European history. And in so far as European Culture has become World Culture, the new European War may be considered as a turning point in the life of the whole world.

Few parts of Bismarck's Thoughts and Recollections have won greater fame than those containing the description of the last meeting between the chancellor and the dying Emperor William I, then nearly 91 years old.

WHEN looking over the immense literature devoted to laborproblems by philosophers, moralists, economists and sociologists, the philosophically-minded reader cannot help being struck by the fact that these writers, for the most part, abstain from defining what they intend to designate by the terms work, labor, worker, and workman. When any definition is given, there is small likelihood that it may meet the elementary requirement of embracing all the defined object and only the defined object. This current deficiency of studies on labor, although worth noting, is not particularly astonishing: everybody knows that the most familiar realities, those with which we are ceaselessly concerned in our daily life, are exceedingly difficult to express in the form of a logically satisfactory definition. In that connection, the so-called Socratic dialogues of Plato are full of profitable lessons. As soon as the persons are asked to define virtues most commonly spoken of, they become entangled in a net of contradictions, and sometimes the dialogue comes to an end without bringing forth any conclusion.

THE ARGUMENT from authority is at least as old as the twelfth century. At that time it was thought a very good argument. The modern age believes it has found some better ones, and likes to think of the argument from authority as a relic, curious, perhaps, but certainly extinct. It is not really so. The argument from authority has still its adherents today, and these adherents, to our great surprise, are proving themselves convincing.

THE appearance in the last decade of such devices for social control as the Government Corporation and the Interstate Authority seems to suggest that the American Federal State system is passing through a critical stage in the course of social metamorphosis. It may be that the Federal State system, succeeding the Confederate system of states, approaches now a Regional system in the course of this metamorphosis. It is at any rate interesting that the Constitutional provision for agreements among the states with the consent of Congress—perhaps the most typical symbol of the old Confederation— is, with the breaking down of the Federal State system, coming strongly into vogue. Where the problems are regional in character and where the jurisdictional framework is not coincidental with the problem area (for example, the Colorado River Valley Problem Area) a regional authority created by concessions of jurisdiction on the part of the several states or on the part of the states and the Federal Government becomes necessary. These considerations determine the manner in which such regional or “sub-national” interests are to be set within “the framework of the American Nation”—a framework, the legal lines of which, in the words of the National Resources Committee, “aggravate the growing points of our national life”.