AtAbout the time I received my first faculty assignment at Swarthmore College, an obituary notice of an old and admired professor made a deep impression on me. The subject was L. T. Hobhouse, the distinguished English sociologist and lifelong liberal. He had been one of the intellectual pillars upon which the Webbs and a few others had constructed the London School of Economics. I did not know Hobhouse well. But his obituary notice was written by a man I much admired, who was in a way my intellectual father: R. H. Tawney. You perhaps know him as the author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, but he was much better known then as a moral force in the British Labour party. To some of its members Tawney's Acquisitive Society, first published in 1921, seemed to offer a fresh charter of liberty, giving a kind of spiritual sanction, missing in Marxian philosophy, to the struggle to overcome misery and poverty with the help of political action.

The greatly increased interest in Orestes A. Brownson will probably restore him to his real importance in the history of Catholicism in the United States. Classifying him as a philosopher has caused him to be seriously neglected, because Catholic philosophers in the United States, since the revival of the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, have been very contemptuous of American philosophers. As a matter of fact, in his own day, before the Thomist revival, his ontologism bewildered even his admirers. Significantly, Brownson did not call himself a “philosopher” but a “publicist” — a very much neglected title in the United States.

InThePreface to her account of her father's formative years Clara Misch Dilthey wrote, “My father often told me that everything that he had produced was nothing but the execution of thoughts and projects conceived in his youth.” Unlike Dilthey, Tocqueville did not have a child to whom he could confide the story of his intellectual life. Yet, if Tocqueville had had such a daughter, he might have made the same profession of indebtedness to the germinal ideas of his youth.

ItIs one of the ironies of English literary history that World War I, the first great modern war, coincided with what C. Day Lewis calls ‘a period of very low vitality’ for poetry. There were no Edwardian or Georgian figures to match the stature of Tennyson or Browning; the main tendencies of the age were visible not in the genius of one or two master spokesmen but in the talents of a host of minor poets. These poets, reacting to the disintegration of nineteenth-century values and conventions, turned from the contemporary reality to the peace and certainty afforded by the mellow beauties of the English countryside. In the words of their most gifted representative, Rupert Brooke, the Georgians sought ‘to forget/The lies, the truths, and pain …’; poetry became a shelter, an escape, an anodyne, a nostalgic daydream. The first Georgian Poetry anthology (1912), as Vivian de Sola Pinto remarks, ‘is a strange collection to represent English poetry at the moment when Europe was preparing for the First World War and England's stability was being rocked by the constitutional crisis and the impending disruption of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.’ The characteristic qualities of Georgian poetry — its blandness, its decorum, its homogeneity, its simplicity of attitude — all reflect the decline of a once powerful imaginative vision. Lyric poetry had become a mere exercise of sensibility related neither to the modern reality nor to any intellectual or imaginative vision capable of assimilating it.

The Democratic Party platform adopted in Los Angeles, July 1960 promised:

To the non-Communist nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America: We shall create with you working partnerships, based on mutual respect and understanding.

In the Jeffersonian Tradition, we recognize and welcome the irresistible momentum of the world revolution of rising expectations for a better life. We shall identify American policy with its values and objectives.

To this end the new Democratic administration will revamp and refocus the objectives, emphasis, and allocation of our foreign assistance programs.

The proper purpose of these programs is not to buy gratitude or to recruit mercenaries, but to enable the peoples of these awakening, developing nations to make their own free choices.

As they achieve a sense of belonging, of dignity, and of justice, freedom will become meaningful for them, and therefore worth defending.

Where military assistance remains essential for the common defense, we shall see that the requirements are fully met. But as rapidly as security considerations permit, we will replace tanks with tractors, bombers with bulldozers, and tacticians with technicians.

The postwar course of British foreign policy in Southern and Far Eastern Asia was foreshadowed in September and October, 1945. Then, in compliance with a decision of the Potsdam Conference, British forces landed in Java to receive the surrender of the Japanese in the Dutch colonies. Though the British government recognized Dutch sovereignty over the colonies — its leaders had second thoughts after encountering the new Asia in Java. With Japanese support an Indonesian republic had been proclaimed. To enforce strictly the recognition of the Dutch claim would have required forces far more numerous than the British had at their disposal, and there were rumblings in India against the use of British Indian forces in restoring colonial government. Indonesian resistance in some areas revealed an intensity and determination that led the British government to decide that fighting might be formidable and dangerous. Thus, though Britain did not favor the raising of the Indonesian issue in the United Nations, for to do so was to have the United Nations intervene in a colonial dispute, Britain did favor negotiations between the Dutch authorities and the Indonesian leaders. In its first major confrontation with postwar Asian nationalism Britain sought to avoid commitment to serious military action and recognized the necessity of coming to terms with Asian nationalism and its leaders.