How shall we be governed in an atomic war? Who will make the decisions for defense and survival, and what compulsions will support their peremptory execution? What will be the measure of our cherished liberties? In all the vast literature of atomic energy and the atomic bomb there appear no clear answers to these distressing questions.

Several authorities have meditated wisely upon the particular problems of domestic government in the atomic age. Robert E. Cushman has pictured the challenge of atomic energy to our traditional concepts of civil liberty; Arthur Bromage has admonished state and local public administrators to decentralize or die, and Senator Wiley has done the same for the national government; Bernard Brodie and Hanson Baldwin have warned of the inadequacy for atomic warfare of our present defense and mobilization plans. Yet no one seems to have outlined the over-all pattern that the American government would assume in the event of atomic war or indicated the workable adjustments that we might undertake now to prepare our constitutional system for this dreadful contingency. This neglect may well be just another symptom of our apparent decision (arrived at through indecision) to ignore the bomb and, like Mr. Lincoln, “confess plainly” that events control us. Since we refuse to contemplate the horrors of atomic war, we likewise refuse to imagine the sort of government that such a war would force us to adopt.

I Should like to consider in this essay one particular aspect of the present spiritual crisis—namely, contemporary atheism and its inner meaning, Such a topic, the meaning of contemporary atheism, involves very deep and intricate problems. I do not pretend to dogmatize about them; the views that I shall offer are somewhat tentative views, which originate in a desire to look for the hidden spiritual significance of the present agony of the world.

In an introductory part I shall try, first, to analyze briefly the various kinds of atheism we might have to deal with, in order to characterize more accurately contemporary atheism.

The second partof the Summa Theologica of the “Universal Doctor,” Thomas Aquinas, begins with the following sentence: Because man has been created in God's image, now after having spoken of God, the archetype, we must still deal with His image which is man. (Summa Theologica I, II, Prologus.) There is something peculiar about this sentence; its meaning must not be misunderstood. It is stated as a matter of fact but its meaning is not to be taken for granted. This first sentence of Moral Theology expresses a fact which has almost entirely disappeared from the knowledge of Christians of today; namely, die fact that moral doctrine is primarily and above all a doctrine about man; that moral doctrine must plainly reveal the conception of man, and that, therefore, the doctrine of Christian morals must concern the Christian model of man. This fact was a matter of course in' the Christianity of the high Middle Ages. This fundamental conception—which, to be sure, was not definitely taken for granted as the polemical wording shows—compelled Eckhart to say two generations after St. Thomas: people should not think about what they ought to do, they should rather think about what they ought to be.

In a divided world and one in which there is no peace, a nation's military power fixes the extent to which it can hope to influence its own destiny. Only a few years ago, Europe west of the Stettin-Trieste line encompassed four out of seven Great Powers. Today it is militarily and economically prostrate and sapped by political dissent and moral incertitude. The unexampled accumulation of power across the Atlantic and beyond the Iron Curtain turns this weakness into relative impotence. No wonder that many western Europeans have reacted against this striking change in their fortunes by demanding that their several countries recapture jointly what as individual nations they have irretrievably lost.

The problem before us is a formidable one but its elements are simple. Many years ago Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the day when each of the European nations, caught between the mass of Americans and the mass of Russians, would feel itself tragically weak, indeed powerless.

The following pages are based on the last six months of 1948 which the writer spent in England, France and Italy. During this period Marshall aid had begun to bear certain fruit. On the other hand the international situation, already bad at the opening of the period, had deteriorated cumulatively as time passed. The Berlin deadlock, a symbol of the will of East and West, continued as before; and not even the beginning of a solution was reached at the United Nations assembly in Paris in die autumn. All over Europe people were preoccupied widi the economic crisis; but also by the direat of a new war. A military committee composed of Great Britain, France and Benelux was formed in the autumn under the chairmanship of Marshal Montgomery. There remained problems about this committee's effectiveness as well as about the extent to which other proposals for Western union were practicable at present. While in each country in Western Europe common people and politicians are talking more about union than ever before, in practice separatist tendencies in each shrunken western nation are still at work and travel to, or independent contact with, neighboring countries is a far more difficult business today than it was in 1939.

Among the German nationalists of the Napoleonic period none had a stronger influence on the practical manifestations of Germannationalism than Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Father Jahn as he was called. He was born in 1778, in the Mark Brandenburg; in the spirit of a new Prussian nationalism, he wrote in 1799 a book on the promotion of patriotism in the Prussian realm,1 which he opened with the characteristic quotation:

At Easter, 1900, Solovyev published a revised version of his Three Discussions and prefaced it with these words:: “Even in this amended form, I still feel numerous defects in the work. But not less felt is the distant image of pale death which quietly advises me not to put off the publication of this book to an indefinite and unsure date.” He thus proved to be a good prophet even in regard to his own life. A few months later, on the 31st of July, 1900, he died.

The name Coeurderoy, of course, will mean nothing to the reader. It is that of a thoroughly forgotten French revolutionary writer. Nettlau, the bibliographer of anarchism in the nineteenth century, who devoted to him an enthusiastic article in the second issue of the Archives of the History of Socialism (1910) and reedited the three volumes of his diary, Days of Exile, with an extensive biographical introduction (1911), has literally rediscovered him for the reader of the twentieth century.

And yet Coeurderoy was a most unusual personality. Nettlau considers him an outstanding writer, a master of the written word worthy of a place in world literature next to Nietzsche. In the present study we propose to acquaint the reader only with the political aspect of Coeurderoy's thought—his militant social philosophy which, as will be seen, is of strikingly contemporary interest. Not only did his revolutionary vision foreshadow “Leninism,” not only did he discern through the mists of the future the Russian communist upheaval in its European aspect, but he was spiritually a contemporary, as it were, of our own period of history. “Outwardly,”—he wrote,—“I live in our century, but in spirit I belong to the future.”

The recent historical process in Eastern Europe has been the reverse of the evolution in colonial matters. In other parts of the world, former colonies reached a degree of complete independence. In East Europe, formerly independent states acquired the peculiar status of semi-dependent colonies. Nazi Germany applied colonial methods in her dealings with European states and invented various categories of protectorates and semi-dependencies. One of the new categories was that of the countries known as satellite states. This meant that some countries, remaining theoretically sovereign members of the family of nations, lost their independence and particularly their freedom of action in international and domestic affairs. The satellite states were never considered by Germany as equal partners but only as more or less reliable “Hilfs-völker.” Equality and cooperation in international relations was in conceivable to the Nazi mind.

The debate over the nature of American federalism did not end, as is so frequently maintained, with the victory of die North in the Civil War. Indeed, it is inconceivable that a conflict of such proportions could ever; be reconciled as readily in the intellectual sphere as in the military. For at least three decades following the termination of that struggle, scholars, jurists and publicists continued, with a fervor and prolixity rivalling that of the pre-war debates, to explore the issues and constitutional questions associated with nullification, secession and the locus of sovereignty in the American Union. The great bulk of this post-war writing on federalism was the work of the victors and tended, therefore, to express “nationalist” or “dual federalist” interpretations. Despite an atmosphere hostile to the dissemination of theories that continued to view the states as sovereign bodies, defenses of particularism continued to appear. Among these was the treatise on constitutional history produced by Alexander H. Stephens.

Represented by a small, pioneering religious group in the Anglo-American colonies, the Catholic faith was not transplanted in conspicuous degree to the United States until the nineteenth century. Mainly through immigration the Catholic population in the United States rose from a mere 50,000 in 1800 to more than twelve millions a century later. Though many believed that countless Catholics were lost in the transition process—the question has been endlessly debated—few denied the preeminent success of the Catholic Church in handling immigrants. Its swelling membership steadily augmented its influence on most phases of American life, including the social movements which played so large and significant a part in the nation's development during the nineteenth century.

The spring of 1917 in Ireland was a peaceful season in contrast with the year that had preceded. The rising of Easter week of 1916 had failed militarily and the peace it precipitated did not prove effective for either the Irish rebels or their English adversaries. By dint of constant agitation and devious means of communication with relatives and friends at home, the Irish prisoners in English jails began to take an active part in political developments in Ireland. Eamon de Valera, once condemned to death and now a life-term prisoner, wasassembling the forces of the future from behind walls and bars. Irish men and women never before concerned with national affairs ralliedunder the banner of Sinn Fein, the party that was not a party, the cause that was a crusade. Patriots began concentrating their efforts around this unifying force and their aims and aspirations centered around the martyrs of the 1916 rising, both dead and living. With other meansprohibited, the old familiar practice of fighting through Parliamentary channels was resumed, and when word penetrated the walls of Lewes Prison in England in the month of May, 1917, to the effect that a prisoner would be named to stand on the Irish Republican platform for a Parliamentary by-election in County Longford, Ireland, the inmates found ways and means to discuss the situation among themselves. Their leader, Eamon de Valera, at first took the point of view that this would compromise Republican principles.

With the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France, there began one of the most intellectually fruitful periods in French history. The French suddenly had a greater freedom than had been enjoyed for some time, and as Lamartine tells us, “scarcely was the Empire overturned, when people began to think, to write, and to sing again in France. … All that had been hitherto silent now began to speak.” In politics, all sides had powerful spokesmen. But the old regime, suddenly given a new lease on life, seldom before had been favored with such brilliant apologists as Chateaubriand, Bonald, Lamen-nais, and Joseph de Maistre, the prophète du passé. One thing should be made clear. That Maistre's political thought was superior to that of the others of this school, there can be little doubt. But that Maistre was the chief exponent of the reaction during the Restoration is a fact rather falsely assumed of at least open to exceeding doubt.

Is there a clear-cut Soviet concept of satellite states? Apparently not, for, from the official Soviet point of view a satellite state east of the Iron Curtain is an anomaly: ca n'existe pas. The very idea, the Soviets would have us believe, is an aberration, a falsification concocted, to use the Communist jargon, by the “ideological armbearers of the American monopolists and imperialists.” Unfortunately, this stand is not corroborated by facts. It is for us in the Western world as well as for the millions of private, honest citizens in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe that the existence of satellite states behind the Iron Curtain means a most disquieting and indeed a sinister reality.

The term “satellite state” is first of all a question of political semantics. If one consults the records of the United Nations Commission which has just completed its work on the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he can readily appreciate the polarity between our approach and that of the Soviet camp to a whole register of political definitions.

The major war criminals Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, and others were sentenced by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg for certain crimes or groups of crimes which had been formulated prior to the trial in a charter signed in August, 1945, by the representatives of the United States, France, Britain, and Russia. In the Charter of the International Military Tribunal adopted in London three major categories of delinquency had been set up dealing with crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Crimes against peace were to consist of acts such as planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression in violation of international treaties or participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of the foregoing. War crimes were to consist of violations of the laws or customs of war and were to include, among others, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor, ill-treatment of prisoners of war, killing of hostages, and wanton destruction of cities not justified by military necessity. As crimes against humanity were to be considered such acts as exterminations, enslavement, deportation of any civilian population before or during the war or any kind of persecution if the latter had occurred in execution of or in connection with any other crime under the jurisdiction of the tribunal.

Little more than four decades separated the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 from the first World War of 1914–1918. In terms of material welfare, upon which the economists helped to fix attention, these were the most successful decades in history. In 1650 there were apparently something like half a billion inhabitants of this planet. During the forty-five years from 1870 to 1914 nearly half a billion were added. Population increased by almost as large a number in a generation and a half as it had increased during untold generations separating Adam from Newton. In the wealthier countries of Western Europe (Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Germany and France) and in North America, the real income per person gainfully employed has been estimated to have improved seventy-five percent or more, while the hours of work were substantially reduced. In the United States the per capita output of the manufacturing industries grew nearly four times over. Professor Tawney has explained that, “during the greater part of history, the normal condition of the world has been one of scarcity. … But, as a result of the modernization of production and transport, first in Great Britain, then on the continent of Europe and in North America, then in parts of the Far East, mere scarcity ceased, after the middle of the nineteenth century, to be, except in the last, the haunting terror which till recently it had been.”

The unsuccessful European revolutions and successful counter-revolutions of 1848–49 elicited complex and surprisingly little-studied responses in Russia. The court, the bureaucracy and the upholders of the status quo in general reacted much as they had to the great French Revolution of 1789. Their never banished fears of Western revolutionary contagion were fanned anew. This new paroxysm of anxiety was reflected in panicky domestic measures of repression, such as the arrest of a number of members of the relatively harmless Petrashevski discussion group, including the novelist Dostoievski, and in such foreign policy acts as Russian armed intervention against the Hungarian liberal revolution.

“War and battle” are the opening words of the Gorgias, and the declaration of war against the corrupt society is its content. Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, is in Athens as the guest of Callicles, an enlightened politician. It is a day of audience. Gorgias receives visitors and is ready to answer all questions addressed to him. Socrates, accompanied by his pupil Chaerephon, calls at Callicles' house in order to see the great man. The ultimate motif of the battle is not stated explicitly but indicated, as so frequently with Plato, through the form of the dialogue. Gorgias is somewhat exhausted by the stream of visitors and the hours of conversation, and he lets his follower Polus open the discussion; Socrates leaves the opening game to Chaerephon. The battle is engaged as a struggle for the soul of the younger generation. Who will form the future leaders of the polity: the rhetor who teaches the tricks of political success, or the mystic-philosopher who creates the substance in soul and society?

The flood of Roosevelt books sweeps on, bursting the dikes of literary convention. There is nothing to compare with it in all our intellectual history. Frances Perkins, Mike Reilly, Jay Franklin, Louis Adamic, Merriman Smith, Elliott Roosevelt, Henrietta Nesbitt, Robert E. Sherwood (vice Harry Hopkins), and Admiral Mclntire are some of the celebrated members of the inner and outer Roosevelt circle unable to resist the pleas of their consciences or agents to “write a book, just a little book” about the old master. Morgenthau, Byrnes, Farley, Hull, Garner, Ickes, and Stimson have likewise succumbed; the only authentic attraction of most of their Confessions is the author's version of “Life with Roosevelt.” Charles A. Beard, George Morgenstern, John T. Flynn, and others have filed their dissenting opinions. And still the high-water mark is not in sight. The day must surely come, if our forests hold out, when Roosevelt will have a, bibliography as long and detailed as Lincoln's, probably even longer, since the sources will be so much more plentiful and nearer to the surface. Fifty years from now our libraries will be choked with one, two, four, six, and twelve volume “definitive” biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and with countless bright little books bearing transcribed Lincoln titles—The Hidden Roosevelt, The Real Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Man of Letters, The Personal Finances of Franklin D. Roosevelt, They Knew Roosevelt, and The Women in Roosevelt's Life—all contributed by home-grown Roosevelt scholars. We may even have a Franklin D. Roosevelt Quarterly.

The constitutional development of the governments of eastern Europe in modern times has varied with the particular circumstances and personalities of each national group. Yet in its broader aspects this development has revealed a remarkably uniform pattern. The minority peoples of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires met the challenge of alien laws and discriminatory economic conditions in the nineteenth century by adopting as their program the political principles popularized by the French revolution. By the outbreak of World War I, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania had achieved an independent status, and with the exception of the last-named had established a tradition of parliamentary government and the beginnings of a liberal democracy. A new era of opportunities and problems, inaugurated by the victory of the Allies in 1918, saw the creation of the enlarged Yugoslavia and Rumania, and of the new Czecho-slovakia. Two years later, with the stabilization of Russia's western frontier, Finland, the three Baltic states, and Poland were established as independent states. Albania and Bulgaria continued with modest changes of frontier and political outlook, and took their place beside a recalcitrant Hungary and a chastened Greece.