Let us think of the human being, not in an abstract and general way, but in the most concrete possible, the most personal fashion. Let us think of this certain old man we have known for years in the country, —this old farmer with his wrinkled face, his keen eyes which have beheld so many harvests and so many earthly horizons, his long habits of patience and suffering, courage, poverty and noble labor, a man perhaps like those parents of a great living American statesman whose photographs appeared some months ago in a particularly moving copy of a weekly magazine. Or let us think of this certain boy or this girl who are our relatives or our friends, whose everyday life we well know, and whose loved appearance, whose soft or husky voice is enough to rejoice our hearts. Let us remember—remember in our heart—a single gesture of the hand, or the smile in the eyes of one we love. What treasures on earth, what masterpieces of art or of science, could pay for the treasures of life, feeling, freedom and memory, of which this gesture, this smile is the fugitive expression? We perceive intuitively, in an indescribable not inescapable flash, that nothing in the world is more precious than one single human being. I am well aware how many difficult questions come to mind at the same time and I shall come back to these difficulties, but for the present I wish only to keep in mind this simple and decisive intuition, by means of which the incomparable value of the human person is revealed to us. Moreover, St. Thomas Aquinas warns us that the Person is what is noblest and most perfect in the whole of nature.

No country within the Western orbit offers to foreign thinkers such an ambiguous and enigmatic aspect as does Germany. There is no end of books and articles wrestling with this problem.

German history presents sufficient justification for the existence of an enigmatic dualism within the nation. To begin with: Germany is that country in Europe through which a line of profound cultural demarcation runs. The Limes Germanicus (cf. my articles in this Review, July and October, 1939) signified the borderline of Roman conquest and Roman cultural penetration. Within this line Mediterranean civilization took undisputed hold both during the Roman Empire and throughout the middle ages, in the latter period mediated by the Church. The lands farther to the East and North became christianized hundreds of years later than the lands around the Danube and Rhine valley. Often the christianization of the East was pushed forward by force of arms. Riehl, Nietzsche, Ricarda Huch and others have remarked that, to all appearances, the christianization of the German North and East was only superficial, a thin veneer over a basically heathen reality; of late H. Rauschning expressed his concern over the quick disappearance of the Christian faith and ethics among the Northern German peasants after Nazism came to power, and the prophets of the “German Faith” today spread the suggestion that the Northern German peasant never was a Christian.

The last four or five decades have been a period of increasing tension and insecurity throughout the world, especially among the Western peoples. Pessimism, cynicism, and despair have gained the ascendancy over most of Europe; uncertainty and lack of confidence over much of the United States. It would be natural for businessmen and for social scientists, who measure civilization mainly in terms of real income or the volume of industrial production, to attribute this tension and discouragement to the slowing down in the rate of industrial progress, to the material crisis of the twentieth century.

The question has repeatedly obtruded itself in the past four years whether the recent legislation intended to prevent employer denial of collective bargaining to employees necessarily leads to a degree of government control over labor representation previously unknown in this country. In facing this question there is no implication that government control over worker organization was intended. The purpose behind the legislation was undoubtedly to prevent interference by employers with the organization of workers and refusal by employers of collective bargaining. Nevertheless, the entrance of the government into the field to prevent employer interference with worker representation has apparently led also to the curtailment of the freedom of the workers in this sphere.