With the passing of Don Luigi Sturzo, in the depth of the Roman summer, a presence and a power passed from among us and with its passing brought to a close an era in the history of the Christian spirit.

In memorializing a life so filled with achievement, it is a temptation to fix attention upon action and event. This would be a mistake. It is far more important to fix the image of the person, for it is from the person, as originative center, that the achievement flows. The sentiment which, before all others, the presence of Don Sturzo awakened was awe. Not the awe of invested power of rank and status, of resource and influence, though these he attained in a measure and in a measure spurned. Rather, it was awe of the living and almost limitless spiritual élan which the human person can enclose and a frail body incorporate. This spiritual power was in him a compressed flame, and an unsheathed sword. Inevitably, with time and continued acquaintance, this first sentiment was succeeded by another, which can only be called love. Again, however, not the love of man toward man, strong and ennobling as that might be, but the love which only the charity of Christ, having taken residence in a man, can inspire. For Don Sturzo lived by the charity of Christ alone. It was in him the oil which fed the flame and the hand which unsheathed the sword.

The age of the amateur in politics is over according to Dean Acheson. Up until the eighteenth century it was possible, owing to the nature and development of the arts and sciences, for a gifted amateur to hold his own with the experts in many fields, but in the twentieth century the amateur is no longer capable of mastering more highly specialized fields of knowledge. The expansion of knowledge has been so great that no amateur can hope to vie in competence with an expert in a given field. This point of view, while somewhat general and a priori, would arouse little opposition among philosophers and historians of ideas. Congress, according to Acheson, is composed primarily of amateurs, and collectively, it represents the point of view of the untrained and unspecialized. It is an eighteenth-century conception which has survived into the twentieth. If we make Acheson's argument explicit—which he diplomatically declines to do—we get the following: amateurs are not competent to formulate public policy under modern conditions. Congress is a collection of amateurs. Therefore, it follows, that Congress is not competent to formulate public policy. The executive branch, on the other hand, attracts the specialist, depends upon him, and uses him extensively. Congress, because of its situation, that is, its deficiency in specialized knowledge and because of its position as a competing power with the executive, is constantly trying to frustrate the executive. A fundamental problem for American democracy, according to Acheson, is to discover which tasks are suitable for the experts (the executive) and which for the amateurs (Congress) and to facilitate the appropriate performance of each accordingly.

The earliest and most brutal offshoot of Western political absolutism was the colonial imperialism which followed in the wake of Columbus, Magellan, and the other heroes of the Age of Discovery. Characteristically, Western man is wont to regard this epoch as a glorious chapter in his history, as a splendid testimonial to his insatiable quest for knowledge and to his urge to explore the farthest and most remote corners of the planet. But the quest for knowledge and the urge to explore were far from being the only or the most active ingredients in imperialism. Greed, sadism, and lust for power spilled into every corner of the earth whose inhabitants were unable to offer effective resistance to the firearms and cavalry of the new overseers.

The formation of the Irish Home Rule movement was a significant factor in influencing subsequent Irish and British history. Irish Federalism produced a political party that often controlled the balance of power in the House of Commons; split the Liberal party on the question of Irish self-government, a prelude to its eventual collapse; secured extensive agrarian reform for Irish tenant farmers, the first serious blow to traditional property rights in the British Isles; and was instrumental in destroying the political power of the House of Lords.

WoodrowWilson continues to arouse remarkably sharp and sustained controversy among those concerned with the recent revival of interest in the problem of ethics in foreign policy. Much of this debate is joined over the apparent antithesis between ethical demands for amicable cooperation among states and a compulsion to adopt antagonistic policies in order to survive in the rough and tumble of international politics. One side in this debate regards Wilson as the exemplar of sane views; the other attacks him as the chief symbol of naive misunderstanding.

It is a strange quirk of intellectual history that essays in the comprehensive interpretation of history seem to have become fashionable in inverse proportion to the decline of system-building in philosophy. Given this tendency, however, it is not surprising that philosophical historians have again focussed their attention upon America and that new systematic interpretations of American development have come to light. One such interpretation returns to the theories of one of the most praised but most neglected students of American society: Alexis de Tocqueville. According to this view the crucial fact in American history is the absence of a European ancien régime. The leading exponent of the “back to de Tocqueville” movement adverts to what might be called “the storybook truth about American history: that America was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World.” If this view is correct, “then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the nonexistence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.” But in this sense of the term, “liberal” America was not the only “liberal” community, for America was not the only country which created a frontier existence free of many of the restraints of the old European society. Australia developed a comparable frontier life, and it had no entrenched aristocracy of the European sort.