WHEN a new constitution was promised to the Irish people a few years ago, Eamon de Valera, then President of Saorstat Eireann and now Prime Minister of Eire, told his people that it would be written as if England were a million miles away. Apart from the passing phases of Anglo-Irish relations, he wished to remove his constitutional plans from the limitations of contemporary events, to unshackle his mind from the here and the now. How far he succeeded in this effort will be known only in the twenty-first century or the twenty-second. Then, if the new Bunreacht na hEireannhas withstood the slings and arrows of Irish fortunes, de Valera and his advisers will be found to have written not only for their own time but for times to come as they intended.

ALL human society so far as it is Unitas ordinisanswers the same requirements, namely to constitute unity out of plurality under a (formal or unformal) leadership. Wherever one of these criteria is absent, only an aggregation of individuals may ensue; never society.

All human society, therefore, has a constitution whether written or not. This constitution determines who belongs to the society in question, how far its competence reaches, to what ends it is established, how the will of such society is to be formed and executed.

All human society exists in the full stream of life; hence it is never frozen or static. On the other hand, human inertia and vested interests exert their strength by trying to fix the constitution of such society and to keep it, in whole or part, in a given status. Hence, there arises the difference between the real and the written constitution—a difference which both the Conservative von Radowitz and the Socialist Lassalle noticed. It prompted Radowitz’ famous dictum: “A government can efficiently and gloriously rule with any constitution as long as such government wields true authority. Without this authority, rule under any constitution will be bad.”

AMERICAN historians are naturally interested in the question of historical scholarship in the land from which we received the seminar founded by Leopold von Ranke and many other outstanding contributions to historiography of both men and methods; the country to which so many of our scholars owe much of their training in historical research, either through their own work in German universities or through their German-trained American teachers.

IN DISCUSSIONS concerning such problems as labor-time, leisure, unemployment and thefuture of industrial society, it can be noticed that a number of persons become entangled in a net of confusions and sophisms by failing to consider the finalities of work in the right order. In short, we observe that men profit by working because work provides them with the commodities they need; they profit by working, on the other hand, because labor activities secure a sound training of the mind together with a salutary discipline of the appetites. Thus, two lines of results can be ascribed to labor activity. We maintain that they cannot have the same significance in terms of finality. Harmful confusions are to be feared unless we keep in mind their subordination to one another. We have seen, in a previous study, that labor-activity belongs to the category of transitive activities in the strict sense of the word. It consists in a production, in a casual flow, in the emanation of a term, in the bringing into existence of an effect. Moreover, it is essentially, at least in the primary form of manual work, the production of a term exterior to the acting individual. However profoundly the worker may be affected, in his person, by the work he exercises, it is quite clear that the termswhich defines laboractivity is not its immanent, but its exterior result.

IN A FAMOUS dialogue between the Athenian ambassadors and the Council of the small island of Melos, Thucydides has given the classical statement of the “right” of the stronger. “The brave Milesians soon see that they cannot appeal to the Athenians' sense of justice, because the Athenians recognize no standard but their own political advantage…By making the Athenians justify the right of the stronger through the law of nature, and transform God from the guardian of justice into the pattern of all earthly authority and force, Thucydides gives the realistic policy of Athens the depth and validity of a philosophical doctrine.” The Dutch, in the days of Peter Breughel, used to say: “the big fish devour the little fish” to which Spinoza added “by natural right.” That is the doctrine of the “state,”as inherited from the Greeks. Similar situations still haunt us. Did the Russians by natural right seek to destroy Finnish independence?