Scholarly histories of the origins of the First World War began to appear within a few years of the close of hostilities. A dozen years later, the magisterial studies by Sidney B. Fay and Bernadotte E. Schmitt had appeared in this country, and comparable works had been completed by European scholars. It is now eighteen years since V E Day, but no studies comparable to Fay or Schmitt have appeared. In part this contrast is explained by the slowness with which the diplomatic papers concerning the years from 1919 to 1939 are being made available. Far more important, however, is the fact that scholars do not believe that a history of the origins of the Second World War can be written with substantial completeness from diplomatic records. In their studies of the years before 1914, Fay and Schmitt did consider subjects like nationalism and imperialism, but the thread that holds their story together is the history of negotiations between governments, and in particular the history of the European alliance system.

C. p. snow suggests that it is a short way to the grave for individual human beings, but the life of society can be made immortal. Many of the groups to which we belong, of which we are conscious, and to which we feel a sense of allegiance, such as our nation and our class, may indeed survive for centuries or longer. There is, however, one group to which we belong that need not fear immortality: our generation. If, as has sometimes been argued, it is the sense of a common destiny which unites all Frenchmen and all Germans, all members of the working class and of the middle class, surely no shared destiny is more fundamental than that of members of the same generation. These members have in common, not necessarily language or income, but the agonies and triumphs of life itself. If the ability to communicate helps to define membership in a group, surely our generation exists both as an objective reality and, in human motivations, even more important, as a personal commitment. This ability to communicate is shared by our generation, but at the same time we are cut off from other generations. Some things we can share only with others of our own age. Even if, by some quirk of fate, we should wish to evade our destiny as members of a generation, we cannot. Anyone who tries to escape from his generation is faced with cold hard reality: “You belong to it, too.… You came along at the same time. You can't get away from it. You're a part of it whether you want to be or not.”

In his monumental encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII addressed himself to men of all religions and political allegiance. This historic message contained a forceful plea for world peace and for a public authority of world-wide jurisdiction, capable of working for the universal common good. Although Pope John recognized the merits of the United Nations and other intergovernmental agencies, he advocated the establishment of public authority “in a position to operate in an effective manner on a world-wide basis.” He emphasized that in our time “the universal common good poses problems of world-wide dimensions, which cannot be adequately tackled or solved except by the efforts of public authority endowed with a wideness of powers, structure and means of the same proportions.”

The period in American politics from Rutherford B. Hayes to William McKinley has been kicked and scuffed among historians until there is little left of its reputation. “No period so thoroughly ordinary has been known in American politics since Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of power in American society,” wrote Henry Adams. “One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years from 1870 to 1895 and find little but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.” The impulse to spring to the aid of the underdog has brought forth champions of the cultural, literary, and technological achievements of the Gilded Age, but none to defend its political record. “Even among the most powerful men of that generation,” said Adams, speaking of the politicians, there was “none who had a good word for it.” Most historians believe that at no other time in American history was the moral and intellectual tone of political life so uniformly low nor were political contests so preoccupied with patronage.