My intention here is to make a few reflections on the relations between the Papacy and the Byzantine Empire and Church, mostly from the cultural point of view. I wish to point out how the Popes continued for several centuries—from 1054 to 1453—to keep their attention fixed on the Eastern part of the Roman Empire, even after dissent had developed in the Byzantine clergy: how the Popes helped by their policy to bring about a new convergence of Greek culture with the Latin one, a convergence which gave birth to the Renaissance.

The cultural break between Eastern and Western Europe had its distant origin in the resolution taken by Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of his reign to divide the responsibilities of power. For about a thousand years before 284 A.D., the trend had been to join together die various peoples around the Mediterranean Sea and to amalgamate their individual cvivilizations. Hundreds of years before the rise of Rome, the Greek colonies developed in southern Italy, in Sicily and as far north on the Tyrrhenian Sea as Cumae. The first signs of Greek influence in central Italy were in art: protocorinthian vases appeared as early as the seventh century B.C.; then terracotta works from Greek models in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Greek divinities were received in Rome at the beginning of the sixth century. In die middle of the fifth century, the Law of the Twelve Tables was framed after three commissioners had been sent to Greece to examine the best of Greek legislation.

Any discussion of American occupation policies in Germany must necessarily vary somewhat from a discussion of similar policies in Japan, Korea, Italy. In Japan and Korea one may concentrate on the objectives of the period after hostilities. Many of these objectives have long-range significance. It might seem that one could safely ignore the combat phase in considering the general occupation which the United States is maintaining in Germany. Some, indeed, would go so far as to omit also the program during the months immediately following the capitulation of Germany, maintaining that only longrange items are of importance for World Peace. There is, of course, something to be said for such an approach if one feels that simplification is desirable, and that one can limit the field to be observed as one likes. But in Germany the combat phase, the phase immediately after hostilities, and the long-range phase are so intimately tied together in the military government organization designed by the United States that, in my opinion, it is not feasible to begin with the current phase which is highlighted in the press and which perhaps has the greatest interest for students of political science.

Since the end of military operations Danubian Europe has been undergoing a social and political upheaval in which, paradoxically, both Communism and a resurgent nationalism seem to be powerful elements. The most significant contributing factor in this atmosphere of political unrest is the all-too-direct domination of the Soviet Union whose policies are guided by conflicting motivations and divergent objectives, results of the flexible strategic and economic considerations of the Kremlin.

Hungary today is in the twilight zone of liberated states; her domestic politics are a mirror-like reflection of the fundamental tensions among the world powers. The post-war era has undoubtedly seen hopes for a real moral and economic transformation of the country spurred on by a series of significant, if temporary, liberal reform moves. Fair national elections resulting in a decisive Communist defeat and in an acceptable coalition government based on the Smallholders, a national party neither ultra-conservative nor revoluntionary, a thorough land reform, a reasonably free press, a stabilized currency, and a moderately successful process of industrial nationalization were promising landmarks at the beginning of the road toward reconstruction.

Russian foreign policy is characterized by matchless simplicity of conception and persistence of effort. By comparison the foreign policies of the Great Powers of modern times appear vacillating and ambiguous. There is in the history of Russian foreign policy no counterpart for that Hamlet-like indecision which gripped German expansionism confronted by the fateful choice between a western and eastern “orientation,” of the pull and counter-pull of British Empire commitments and continental interests, and of the contradictions between French colonial aspirations and French European policies.

Russian foreign policy is dominated by the strategic factor; its objectives, under the direction of the Czars and Soviet leaders, have remained the same: attainment of strategic frontiers and, wherever racial affinities re-enforce strategic geography, ethnographic frontiers. The principal theatre of operations is now, as it has been for nearly three centuries, eastern and southeastern Europe, and Russian policy in the Middle and Far East has been largely derivative. Only when Russia was blocked in Europe, on the Baltic and Moldavian Plains, only then did she turn to Asia. Russia exercised pressure on the Asiatic rimlands, especially on Britain's positions in southwestern Asia, in order to obtain concessions in Europe. Russian expansionism, although it harvested rich territorial gains in central and eastern Asia, did not let itself be deflected from its primary goals, to wit, Russia's strategic frontiers in the West. Indeed, it was the Russian advance upon Europe, the diplomatic set-backs of the Congresses of Vienna and Berlin and the military defeats in the Crimean War and World War I, which diverted Russia towards such secondary objectives as the Persian Gulf and the Yellow Sea.

Throughout history, the control of public funds has been considered a cornerstone of political power. If it is true that all societies, from die dawn of civilizations to the present, have been divided into two classes, one that rules and the other that is ruled, it may be expected that the methods of raising and spending government money have been determined by one social group, generally a minority, to the complete or almost complete exclusion of the rest of the population. Such control would be intended to kill two birds with one stone, serving the direct purpose of administering the state and the indirect purpose of strengthening the privileged position of the governing group and thus prolonging their predominance. Yet studies in fiscal sociology are still in tlieir infancy. Because of their casual and hapo hazard character, they are not as yet a match for political sociology. Only during recent decades has a broader and more systematic approach been attempted.

Among the ancients Aristotle is the only thinker who furnishes us with a fully developed philosophical conception of man's relationship to the world about him, and then uses this conception as a basis for the determination of man's life in relationship with nature. Part of this philosophy finds its source in certain conceptions reigning among the ancient Greeks, ideas which he as a product of ancient life and civilization most naturally accepted; but another part of it, and a significant part too, is the result of Aristotle's own insight into human life and its meaning. In such studies we must remember that Aristotle was very critical of much in the Greek city-state; and, as a Macedonian he was more sympathetic with an agrarian economy than with the Ionian city economy. We can never understand Aristotle if we take him to be an Athenian, and assume that his sympathies were with Athenian mercantile democracy. He is not bound down to any one ancient economy and has a critical attitude towards all of them. What he has in mind are certain norms or ideals for human life and its relationship to nature, and on these he bases his whole system of social and economic thought and thus throws light upon the systems of social and economic life historically developed.

Friedrich Meinecke in his recent book on The German Catastrophe quotes a Danish friend and historian as saying to him during the Hitler regime: “You know, that I cannot love Bismarck, but in the present situation I must say: Bismarck belonged to our world.” It would be easy to contrast this nicely balanced statement with innumerable others which, in the last years, indulged in indictments of the founder of the German Reich as a “Nazi forefather” or threw him into the line of descent which is supposed to lead from Frederick IPs attack on Silesia in 1740 to Hitler's attack on Poland in 1939. Thus the myth of the “Iron Chancellor,” of the man “in high dragoon's boots” revived and, amazingly enough, the Nazi trick of appropriating “Prussianism” as epitomized in the pageantry of the so-called “day of Potsdam,” was given full credit by many of their very adversaries. But there were also the voices of those who, in a more careful and responsible way, tried to find out what links may possibly connect the beginnings with the end of the Prusso-German Reich or may point ahead from 1866 and 1871 or from 1879 to the potentialities of the Hitler regime. Meinecke's treatise is one of the finest examples of such conscientious scrutiny carried out by Germans themselves. From whatever angle this question is raised the towering and baffling figure of Bismarck undoubtedly has won a new actuality. And it can easily be understood that in the recent crisis of statesmanship and particularly in view of the disaster which Germany brought upon herself and the world, attention turned back to the man who stands for decisive changes in the external setup as well as in the intellectual and moral, the political and social climate of nineteenth century Europe.