The educated American of the middle nineteenth century who took an inventory of his knowledge of the world found himself much more poorly informed on Asia than on Europe. The reason for this is manifest. America's relations with Asia were fragmented and peripheral, trade alone being a major concern. Interaction with Europe proceeded on an entirely different plane: For the New World, Europe was an inexhaustible source of population increase and personal contacts, of monies for economic growth, and of technological, artistic, and educational inspiration.

I Believe that much historical data can be assembled to support the following propositions:

(1) The trend of power politics is toward a bipolar world, and such a world tends toward increasing rivalry, suspicion, and tension between the two leading states, making them develop into garrison states in a continuous relationship of cold or hot war.

(2) A state actively preparing for war in time of peace tends to become over-centralized, intolerant, and aggressive; to encourage other states to gang up against it; and, when war eventuates, to win the first battles but to lose the war.

The United States is at present creditor to the world. Since the war more than $25 billion has been put into various foreign aid programs. Government loans, military assistance, ECA assistance have combined in a great assault on world problems. Yet, great as has been the government-to-government assistance extended by the United States, and substantial as has been aid given by such organs of American policy as the Export-Import Bank not only to foreign governments but to private business, it is not only conceded but argued by government officials as well as private business that a job remains to be done which cannot be done in this way. For the doing of that job, private enterprise and private capital investment are needed. In testimony on various aspects of the Point IV program over the course of the last year, this necessity has been stressed no less by government than by business witnesses.

The Stalinists consider parliaments to be only schools for extra-parliamentary means of struggle. Were the Czechoslovak democratic leaders aware of this attitude while cooperating with the Communists both in the Parliament and Government of Czechoslovakia after 1945? If they were, what countermeasures did they devise? Even if the daily political fight over party or local issues necessarily narrowed their horizon, responsible democratic leaders had a fairly accurate picture of the situation even in 1945, when the Communists, thanks to the presence of the Red Army, could have seized power. The democrats' awareness of danger and their decision as to countermeasures were, however, influenced by many hopes and illusions, some justifiable in view of the international situation at the end of the war.

In a recent article in Le Monde, a military writer remarked that ‘A country has the army it merits.”1 The expression is an old one. For a hundred years at least, French politicians and French military personnel have been quoting one another to the effect that the army is but the reflection of the state. But in a democracy, the strength of an army is not so much a question of merit as one of desire, desire as expressed by the people through the votes of their representatives. Certainly, it has little or nothing to do with international necessity.