InCanada, more perhaps than in any other country, the 1960's have seen such a quantitative change in higher education that it must be judged a qualitative change as well. A significant number of new universities, including my own York University, Toronto, have come into being, and most recently a system of community colleges has been created to cope with the large number of students who wish to proceed beyond high school but who are unable to obtain university places. In my province of Ontario the number of students attending university has doubled in the past four years. Five years from now it will have doubled again.

Gandhi (1869–1948) is known primarily as the leader who led the national movement for the freedom of India from British rule; he also has an important place in social theory. “The only nonofficial figure,” says Louis Fischer, “comparable to Gandhi in his effect on man's mind is Karl Marx.” His Collected Works, including his speeches, writings, and letters, have appeared in thirty volumes with some forty more scheduled for publication. The more important of his writings from the point of view of social theory are found in two weekly journals which he edited, Young India (1919–32) and Harijan (1933–48); his social and political ideas can also be gleaned from Hind Swaraj (1908) or Indian Home Rule, The Story of My Experiments With Truth (2 vols. 1927, 1929), Delhi Diary (1948), and Satyagraha in South Africa (1950).

It is not surprising that the United States produced a Socialist Party; it would be astonishing if one had not developed. American history is filled with radical and protest parties, ranging through every shade of the political spectrum and sharing the conviction that the major parties did not or would not represent their particular interests.

SoonAfter John F. Kennedy became President, difficult foreign policy decisions had to be made. Even before he assumed the burdens of office, he knew an early judgment would be required concerning United States policies vis-à-vis Laos. Throughout 1960, Communist forces in Laos and their allies won numerous military victories and the Laotian Royal Army was unable to check their advances. The United States and other SEATO members were understandably disturbed. They now had to contemplate a total Communist victory with all its potentially painful and embarrassing consequences. These consequences worried President-elect Kennedy and prior to his inauguration, he and his advisors began systematically examining all their policy alternatives; they found that none were really attractive.

In October, 1936, the King of the Belgians, Leopold III, announced that the small Western European state planned to withdraw from her policy of alignment and adopt a policy which was “exclusively and completely Belgian.” Within six months, by the spring of 1937, Belgium signed an agreement with the French and British that replaced the defunct Locarno Pact and released her from the consultations and commitments involved in the Franco-Belgian Military Accords of 1920. The foreign policy of Belgium was altered to one of “independence” or neutrality and the two major powers of the West formally guaranteed her territorial integrity.

By the spring of 1914 Woodrow Wilson was clearly doing everything in his power to ingratiate the new Democratic Administration with the nation's business groups. He abandoned the Brandeisian spirit of trust-busting as part of his program for corporation control in favor of regulation by commission, a policy more in line with the sentiment among leading businessmen. (Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission established in 1915 soon showed that it would serve as the friend and not the enemy of business.) He directed personal appeals to businessmen both by letter and by informal conversations at the White House, and he made nominations to regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve Board that left no doubt as to his sincerity in attracting business support. One of his choices for the Reserve Board, Thomas D. Jones, was at once a personal friend and a former trustee of Princeton University. But Jones was also a well-known member of the “Zinc Trust” and a director of the International Harvester Company then under indictment as a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Wilson campaigned hard for this appointment against strong Senatorial opposition even within his own party. At the same time, he declared publicly: “It would be particularly unfair to the Democratic Party and the Senate itself to regard it as the enemy of business, big or little.” Wilson was outraged when the Senate Banking Committee rejected his friend. “I believe the judgment and desire of the whole country cry out for a new temper in affairs,” he wrote rather despairingly to Jones. “We have breathed already too long the air of suspicion and distrust.”