Considered the cornerstone of the American governmental system and an article of political faith for the Founding Fathers, the concept ‘separation of powers’ nevertheless has few rivals for ambiguity. There are wide differences of opinion as to what the Framers intended by the expression. We are told that they embraced the doctrine of Montesquieu, but there is a good deal of doubt as to what he meant and whether they borrowed from him in the first place. Moreover, the question remains: how should one apply a principle from 1787 to the issues of today?.

A difficulty which faces students of American thought about foreign affairs is the relation between general principles and views of the world on the one hand and attitudes to specific issues of policy on the other. Since the pioneering work of Robert E. Osgood, historians have emphasized the important distinction between those whose primary concern is the protection of American national interests within the existing system of power politics, and those who seek above all to reform the international order in accordance with American liberal ideals. In recent years much attention has been paid to the influence of economic considerations, particularly the desire to promote American foreign trade. However, the relative weight attached to national security, liberal idealism and American economic interests overseas by individual Americans does not entirely account for their differing attitudes to particular questions. For in crucial debates, such as those over the Philippines and the League of Nations, each of these considerations was invoked by some on both sides of the argument. To some extent, the older and more superficial distinction between ‘isolationism’ and ‘anti-isolationism’, while concealing the variety of premises upon which either position could be founded, provides a better basis for predicting the readiness of Americans to favour particular foreign enterprises or commitments. Yet adherence even to these broad traditions has been far from consistent. Thus, while it would be natural to assume that the imperialists of 1898–1900 were more likely than their opponents to favour American intervention in the First World War, it is not clear that this was the case.

Historians of the British response to the American Civil War must be grateful to Dr D. P. Crook for reminding them of the danger of searching too keenly for partisan alignments. It is interesting to find that the ‘little journals’, with their relative freedom from external pressures, offered an appraisal of the secession crisis and the outbreak of war that was reasonably objective. It might, however, be useful to point out that similar views were to be found in the editorial columns of the provincial press, rising to the zenith of its influence in English political life and representing opinion whose intelligence may be debatable, but whose significance was certainly no less than that of the eight journals examined by Dr Crook and whose influence on government policy was perhaps stronger.

The American nation is presently caught in the throes of its third conservation movement. It is generally considered that the first American conservation movement in the United States took place during the period 1890–1920, with particular emphasis upon the first decade of the twentieth century, and the second was associated with the New Deal and subsequent policies of Franklin Roosevelt in the period 1933–43. The aim of this paper is to compare the development and the underlying philosophies of the present conservation movement in the United States with the growth and guiding principles of its two predecessors, and to follow this analysis through with a somewhat more normative examination of various implications for public policy which come to light.

Whitman has often been thought of in the context of modern Symbolism. His conception of poetry as an indefinite art, his general tendency to treat the world of objects in terms of his subjective vision, and the extensive use he made of poetic symbols to present that vision are the aspects that have readily invited comparison with the aesthetics of Symbolism. In his sensibility, of course, Whitman is quite unlike the French Symbolists or their successors in the twentieth century who have taken over some of their characteristic attitudes. But the resemblances, too, in terms of aesthetic belief and method have been mentioned so frequently that an impression prevails among scholars that Whitman, like Poe, was in some ways a forerunner of the Symbolists. Thus, in Symbolism and American Literature, Charles Feidelson attempts to connect Whitman with modern Symbolism. He speaks of ‘the thoroughgoing symbolism of [Whitman's] poetic attitude’ (p. 21) and studies him as part of a dominant Symbolist tradition in American literature, in which Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville are the other great names. Following a suggestion by Edmund Wilson in his Axel's Castle, Feidelson maintains that, in their typical preoccupations, these writers were closer to ‘the symbolistic aesthetic that produced modern literature’ than to Romanticism (p. 4). But ‘Symbolism’, whether the term is understood in the French sense or in the somewhat wider sense defined by Feidelson, hardly seems to fit Whitman because of certain fundamental differences in his conception of poetry as well as his vision of reality.

In their manual based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary discuss the signs of the ‘Third Bardo’ existence in a psychedelic experience in the vocabulary of Ken Kesey's fiction:

Where Tibetans saw demons and beasts of prey, a Westerner may see impersonal machinery grinding, or depersonalizing and controlling devices of different futuristic varieties. Visions of world destruction and hallucinations of being engulfed by destructive powers, and sounds of the mind-controlling apparatus of the ‘combine's fog machinery’, of the gears which move.

In his two novels, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, Kesey has described that sense of the disintegration and death and ultimate rebirth of the ego which lies at the heart of the LSD ‘trip’. Both books are literary metaphors for psychedelic experiences.

Fifty-three years before Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, Kate Chopin went beyond simple allegory to create something which critics, until only very recently, have been unable to define. In 1936 Arthur Hobson Quinn wrote that the basic fault of The Awakening ‘lies in Edna's utter selfishness, which deprives her of sympathy. The standards are Continental rather than Creole, and the novel belongs rather among studies of morbid psychology than local color’. Quinn's superficial view of the heroine leads him to the limiting moral position from which any clear view of the work as a whole is obscured. Edmund Wilson's evaluation, as it is taken from Patriotic Gore and quoted in Kenneth Eble's introduction, seems to me to reveal both Wilson's apparent frustration at being unable to categorize the novel and his almost intuitive grasp of what may be the most important factor in explaining the work's effectiveness.