On October 1, 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, having conquered the major portion of the Chinese mainland by the force of its “People's Army of Liberation,” established, in the old imperial city of Peiping, a new regime called the “Central People's Government” of the “People's Republic of China.” For more than three years, ninety-eight per cent of the Chinese people have lived under this Communist dictatorship represented as a “People's Democracy.” Nor at the moment are there any visible signs that their condition may soon be altered. On the contrary, the Chinese Communists have proved themselves the adept disciples of their Russian mentors, capable of consolidating their rule with Soviet determination, thoroughness, and severity.

According to widely held beliefs the Presidential election of 1952 was unique in American political history. Observers have pointed out that it was the weariest, most expensive, most intensively and bitterly fought campaign to date. Observers also emphasized that it was a personal victory for General Dwight D. Eisenhower of landslide proportions that exploded such political theories as prosperity favoring the “ins.” It is further held that “Ike” swept the electorate off its feet because he appeared as a hero and father symbol, and that his success in the South is the beginning of a real two party system in that section. These observations must be placed against a background of historical and statistical facts, before they are translated into pleasant assumptions.

In the years preceding the Great Famine the people of Ireland were separated in space and spirit by the divisive workings of history and geography and by the survival of ancient local customs that were feudal and in some instances, tribal in origin. In 1825, according to a contemporary observer, there were “different districts in Ireland almost as unlike each other as any two countries in Europe.” A thousand light years and more separated the Georgian splendor of Dublin from the rude Gaelic society of the West. And in all the provinces there were pockets where distinctive local cultures stubbornly endured; like the baronies of Bargy and Forth, in the extreme southeast corner of Wexford, whose inhabitants clung to a Chaucerian dialect until the middle of the century, or the fishing village of Claddagh, outside the city of Galway, where the people maintained a severe aloofness, marrying among themselves and ignoring outsiders.

The factors that caused the Roman authorities to insist on a Plenary Council of the American Bishops in 1884 have not been sufficiently explained. Perhaps the role of the American prelates in opposing the opportuneness of the definition of the doctrine of infallibility had some influence. Undoubtedly the reports of the bishops in their ad limina visits to Rome did little to subdue any fears that may have arisen. The frequent appeals of recalcitrant clergymen against their bishops were going directly to Rome because there was no intermediate court. The Instruction of 1878 makes this quite clear. Rome had shown its dissatisfaction with the condition of Catholic education by its interrogatory and its Instruction of 1875. The renewed condemnation of the Fenians had some American effects; and the renewed condemnation of the Masons with applications to certain other American social organizations indicated that all was not well in the social conditions of Catholics in the United States. Had the prelates in Rome understood American democracy and American conditions they would have had to have been much better informed than most Europeans in the nineteenth century. America was to Europe a land of great physical possibility, but a land without any great culture or religious accomplishments. Even European liberals did not understand the manhood suffrage of American democracy. The Catholic leaders of southern Europe, so generally aligned with conservative and monarchist parties, could have little understanding of American democracy in the religious sphere. In Rome where the hierarchical arrangement had not been fully dissociated from monarchical government and where Roman law with its insistence on the union of Church and State was the basis of most political thought, even the most sympathetic seemed to have some misgivings about the manifest loyalty of the American Catholics to the Holy See.

French social Catholicism—by which we mean the sum of all the efforts of Catholics in France to fight against the material and moral misery that the industrial revolution and economic liberalism inflicted upon the workers — has followed two general tendencies, one aristocratic and the other democratic.

The first, developed in the legitimist world of the Restoration, gave rise to a rightist Catholic social tradition which placed all its confidence in the authority of the upper classes and in the virtue of institutions. The second, which recruited its partisans from among the lower bourgeoisie and among the intellectuals, gave rise to a leftist tradition, that of Christian democracy, and placed its trust in popular liberty.

Almost every period of crisis and decision in American history has produced writers on political affairs who have championed a “realistic” approach to the study of human and social problems. Convinced that successful political action must proceed from man “as he is,” such writers have been persistently and profoundly suspicious of theories which, they believe, are based either upon faulty assessments of the actual nature of the individual or upon visionary estimates of his potentialities. It is the opinion of these analysts that the nature of man is irrevocably fixed in its partially depraved and partially irrational career—a constant, as it were, among the myriad imponderables entering into the social equation. Thus it has long been a significant part of their method to attempt to discover in the experience of the past a coherent theory of limits applicable to contemporary political society. Eager to profit from the experience of other generations with the perennial problems of government and politics, they have generally displayed little tolerance toward those who would flaunt rationally grounded political experiment in the face of the practical lessons of history. Such combination of pessimistic analysis and resort to the experience of the past—Political Realism —has played a crucial role in the history of political thought in America.

For the purpose of this survey, a population transfer is defined as the organized removal of an ethnic group from its country of residence and its subsequent resettlement in territory under the sovereignty of its ethnic homeland in which the whole is a stateconducted operation based sometimes on international agreement between two states concerned and at other times arising from unilateral action by the state of departure, with or without international sanction.

The following considerations have grown out of a study of the origins, the elements and the functioning of that novel form of government and domination which we have come to call totalitarian. Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination. Present totalitarian governments have developed from one-party systems; whenever these became truly totalitarian, they started to operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict its course of action.

The key to the problem of the expulsion of the Germans from Hungary* was the Potsdam Conference, where the representatives of the three major Allies declared “that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken.” Thus the three major Allies assimilated the problem of the Germans in Hungary with the problems of Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia, although in reality the situation in Hungary differed greatly from that in the other two countries. The terms of the Potsdam decision might have been suitable for the Polish and Czechoslovak situations, but were most misleading when applied to Hungary.

A Quarter of a century has passed since the western world acquired and developed some familiarity with Russian philosophy. The names of Chaadayev, Kireyevsky, Khomiakov and Solovyov are not unknown. The success of the late lamented Nicolas Berdyaev, not only in Europe but also in America and even in the far East, was in large measure due to the fact that his thought continued the tradition created by his Russian predecessors. Ontology, irrationalism, personalism, theohuman nostalgia—such are the themes and attitudes in which lies the originality of this current of ideas.

The examination and evaluation of Bismarck's statesmanship has been resumed with much vigor in Germany. The topic has always — and naturally — been a favorite of German historians. Yet the current discussion differs from previous examinations of Bismarck's policies. It is concerned not so much with a factual analysis of these policies as with their overall significance and validity.

A Few words may be in order at the outset to explain why I have chosen the title “Power and Morals and the Founding Fathers.” I believe that we can learn much from an inquiry into the basic thought and character of the first statesmen of the Republic that may help us in meeting the crisis of a divided world today. And such an inquiry can be most effectively pursued by a consideration of their views on power and morals.

Prussian Conservatism was not an ideology comparable to those which have breathed into every crevice of twentieth century totalitarian states. It was not really an ideology at all, if that term is understood to mean a system of thought enforced by the state so as to give every human act a political meaning. The Prussian conservatives, conditioned by an aristocratic disdain for a political rationale, were unable to agree on a uniform principle of political conduct. Shades of meaning, based largely on the balance struck between religion and political realism, persisted in coloring the conservative temperament. Yet by the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, Prussian conservatism had become a coherent body of thought distinct from liberalism, democracy, or socialism. Its historical importance became assured, when, at Bismarck's hands, Prussian conservatism entered wholeheartedly into the making of what the liberal historian, Erich Eyck, has called “German constitutionalism,” that is a system of politics respectful of authority, but equally disdainful of democracy and absolutism, in which the practical conduct of government may be guided by moral principles in an irrational world.

When Marx, in 1849, took up permanent residence in London, he devoted himself once more—and with great thoroughness—to the study of the classical economists. And he accepted, along with many other ideas of Adam Smith, Richard Jones, and John Suart Mill, their conviction that, outside and independent of the Western world, there existed a specific institutional conformation, which they called Asiatic or Oriental society.

In the Iliad the constitutional order of the Achaean army still functions. Nevertheless, the strain under which it works, as well as the critical situation in which the fateful decision for battle is taken, are symptoms of a general malaise; and they forebode disaster. A clearer view of this state of disease and doom, however, is today hampered by a haze of misconceptions. We have not yet overcome the eighteenth century conceits of the early, “naive” poetry of Homer, of the voice of nature and the “dewey freshness” that characterizes the youth of a people; and the fact that Homer became the educator of Hellas still inspires the idea that in his work we see Hellenic culture dawning. Hence, at the risk of becoming repetitious, it must be pointed out that Hellenic culture was a Greek recovery after a darkness of catastrophic intensity, that Homer was a pre-Hellenic poet and thinker, that in his work we savor the last ripeness of a dying civilization, and that he could become the educator of Hellas because under the raw and primitive conditions of its growth this Hellas was in dire need of guidance by an old, experienced and subtle educator. The well-diagnosed freshness of Homer is the freshness of the great observer, thinker and imaginative artist; it is not the freshness of the culture which he describes. In this respect one might compare Homer with Plato. It would be a grievous error to draw from the greatness of Plato conclusions with regard to the health of Athenian political culture. The work of Homer, like Plato's, rather distilled the quintessence of a fading grandeur and thus preserved it for transmission to posterity.

The vast majority of all human beings alive on earth is affected in some measure by the totalitarian mass movements of our time. Whether men are members, supporters, fellow-travellers, naive connivers, actual or potential victims, whether they are under the domination of a totalitarian government, or whether they are still free to organize their defenses against the disaster, the relation to the movements has become an intimate part of their spiritual, intellectual, economic, and physical existence. The putrefaction of Western civilization, as it were, has released a cadaveric poison spreading its infection through the body of humanity. What no religious founder, no philosopher, no imperial conqueror of the past has achieved — to create a community of mankind by creating a common concern for all men — has now been realized through the community of suffering under the earthwide expansion of Western foulness.

Progress, Maine said, is rare in the procession of history; but it is real. Therefore—though never active in affairs of party — he commenced as a moderate Liberal under the influence of Burke's mind, endeavoring to promote cautious reform, reconciling old interests with new energies, preparing society for necessary change, preserving what is best in the ancient order. His Indian career displayed this influence of Burke, this respect for native custom and culture, this calm devotion to a society that is a spirit or a living thing, not a mere mechanical contrivance. Writers on politics who imply that Burke and his school opposed change per se err gravely. Beneficial change is the Providential instrument of social preservation, said Burke, a conservative force; but we must not fall into the vulgar error of thinking that all change is useful reform. The world experiences both improvement and decay; the latter tendency is the easier path, although ruinous at last; and statesmen must train themselves and the people to distinguish healthy change from processes of dissolution. When Henry Maine became convinced that the drift of change in Western society was retrogressive, then, like the astute representative of Burke's school that he was, he became a conservative. Lord Acton, in 1882, was startled and grieved to find Maine using “Toryism” as a term of commendation

On October 6, 1929, but three days after Gustav Stresemann's untimely death, Hermann Oncken made a first attempt to see him in historical perspective: “Suddenly all of us, friend and enemy alike, feel that there is a vacuum in the political life of the nation. … Suddenly one senses that a chapter has ended.” Oncken showed the changes which Germany had undergone since that dark day in August 1923 when Stresemann had taken over the chancellorship in an atmosphere of despair, and he praised the greatness of his accomplishment. Analyzing the sources of his success, he stressed his openmindedness and flexibility, his sense of timing, the suggestive power of his oratory, his indomitable optimism, and his willingness to fight for his convictions. But, above all, he admired his ability to go beyong the traditional political realism of Bismarck and to lead German statesmanship onward into an idealistic sphere. He cited as evidence Stresemann's programmatic words spoken on the September day of 1926 when Germany entered the League of Nations: “The man who serves humanity best, is he who, rooted in his own nation, develops his spiritual and intellectual gifts to their fullest extent and thus, growing beyond the confines of his own country, contributes to the whole of mankind.”