“What then does Dr. Newman mean?” The question was Charles Kingsley's, the title of his maladroit little pamphlet which provoked from Newman the stunning thunderbolt of the Apologia. That was in 1864, but the same question, free of Kingsley's tone of baffled and outraged masculinity, had been asked many times before that date. Indeed, suspicion of Newman's gorgeously serpentine prose, and so of the man himself, ran like a dark thread through Newman's Anglican and Catholic careers. Typical was the censure in 1841 of Newman's Tract Ninety by the University of Oxford's Board of Heads of Houses, which declared the tract “evaded rather than explained the sense of the Thirty-nine Articles and reconciled subscription to them with the adoption of errors which they were designed to counteract.” And 18 years later, when Newman, now a Catholic, published an article called “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” an English bishop formally denounced it in Rome as “sophistical and dishonest,” while the premier English Catholic theologian termed it “the most alarming phenomenon of our times.”

In the “metaphysical squabbles” that Bertrand de Jouvenel has said characterize much of American political science, none has been more bitter and perplexing than the controversy surrounding the work of Leo Strauss. To the extent that one can speak of a revival of classical political philosophy in this country, the credit for it assuredly belongs to the influence of Strauss's profound scholarship. Nonetheless there is common agreement among fairminded reviewers of Strauss's writings that a “calculated obscurity” hides his message. “He does not wish to tell us, in bold propositional terms, what is on his mind,” says Robert McShea. Granted that “Strauss indulges in the … game of esoteric silences,” that his real views are often “camouflaged,” we must see these devices for what Lee McDonald suggests they are: devices to persuade the reader to “a special way of reading the ‘classics’”; they are not primarily concerned with “specific details of interpretation.”

As everyone knows, the failure of the German revolution of 1848 was the loss of a great opportunity.* If the revolution had succeeded, German unification might have been consummated on a popular basis, rather than through Bismarckian authoritarianism. The result could have been a German nation-state more closely in step with the liberal-democratic age that was dawning in western Europe. Subsequent German and European history might then have been much happier than it actually turned out to be. For, by thwarting liberalism and delaying democracy, the collapse of this revolution helped to make Germany the European problem child she has been in this century.

Historians have long argued that an intimate connection exists between the failure of Europe's liberal and, in France at least, radical agitation of 1848 and the spread of pessimistic values during the following two decades. György Lukacs, in The Destruction of Reason, has treated this point at some length. He ascribes the rising popularity throughout the 1850's of Arthur Schopenhauer, the most systematic and erudite interpreter of pessimistic thought, to “a purely bourgeois form of irrationalism.” The defeat of the revolutions of 1848 had left many Germans politically frustrated. What resulted was an “ideologically altered situation” in which Schopenhauer “suddenly grew famous and supplanted Feuerbach as the ideological leader of the (German) bourgeoisie.” Moreover, French capitalists, frightened by the workers' revolt that took place in Paris during June, 1848, helped to give pessimism its “international effect.” Indeed they knew its world despair for what it actually was, “an indirect apology” for their own economic interests.

To determine that the course being followed at one point in time is a road to war and that one being followed at another point is a path to peace is a hazardous undertaking. It is especially so when, as in the case presented here, the two leading figures in the successive periods of British foreign policy were both outspoken advocates of peace. Still it seems reasonable to attribute to one policy a greater affinity for those elements which contributed to the coming of a war. Since the First World War included the dimension of British participation from a very early stage, her contributions to the prerequisites of that war are worth reexamining.

King Hsuan of Ch'u said to his ministers: “I have heard that the people in the north fear Chao Hsi-hsu. Why is this?” None of his ministers could answer. Then Chiang I said: “The tiger feeds on the hundred beasts. One day the tiger caught a fox. The fox said: ‘Your honor dare not eat me. God has made me the strongest of the animals, and were you to eat me, you would violate the law of God. If you don't believe me, let me walk before you. Follow along, and you will see that none of the animals dare do anything but run away when they see me coming.’ The tiger agreed, and walked behind the fox; and, indeed, the other beasts all fled. The tiger did not realize that it was he the hundred beasts feared, but thought it was the fox. Now the king controls 5,000 square miles of territory and has a million men under arms. But all of this has been entrusted to Chao Hsi-hsu. The northerners fear Hsi-hsu, but what they really fear are the king's armed men—just as the hundred beasts feared the tiger.”