The assumption by the government of the United States of diplomatic relations with the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on November 16, 1933, closed a long and unique chapter in the annals of American diplomacy. Now that this phase has become historic and a new era in Soviet-American relations has been officially inaugurated, it is possible to review and appraise the highly contentious and illucid interval between 1917 and 1933 with some degree of accuracy and finality. The purpose of this discussion is, therefore, to examine the whole period candidly, objectively, dispassionately, by means of an analysis of the attitude of the United States government, as officially expressed in diplomatic documents or the utterances of responsible statesmen in the period since tsardom fell in Russia. It is desirable, however, to relate those statements, and the positions taken, to the historic attitudes of both Russia and the United States in the course of the last one hundred years; for it is only as the policy of the United States is seen in its full historic setting, in relation to the principles of international law long espoused and followed in American diplomatic practice, that the more recent phases of that policy can adequately be judged.

From Aristotle's day to this, the subject-matter of economics has been recognized by political scientists to affect very greatly the institutions with which the latter deal. In our own time, studies like those of Professors Charles A. Beard and Arthur N. Holcombe have carried the great bulk of American political scientists over to a primarily economic interpretation of political history. It is not too much to say that there has been some danger of political scientists conceding too much common ground to the economist's psychology and methods.

The economist, on the other hand, has for some decades at least, both in this country and abroad, had scant patience with political science. He has given even less recognition to the bearing of political factors upon the simple assumptions upon which his economic science too often rested. F. Delaisi characteristically wrote of Political Myths and Economic Realities, without much regard for a test of whether the myths might not be the more powerful realities in terms of survival value. “Politics” was something which, in an annoying and “unscientific” way, occasionally interfered with the operations of man as a profit-making animal. Politics was rarely thought of as a statement of those psychological motives and controlling social institutions which corrected or conditioned at every stage the jejune motivation and the mechanical equations upon which most economic generalizations rested.

The world as Aristotle and his contemporaries saw it was already a spent world. Its original creativeness had flowered during the sixth and fifth centuries in an outburst of discovery and invention in political and social as well as in literary fields. By the middle of the fourth century, it was the turn of the philosopher to take the results of the discoveries, and synthesize and publicize them in such a way that all the Greek communities should be enabled to work out the combination of forms of society and government best suited to their needs. The study made by Aristotle of the states of his own day maintained its authority across empire and into nationalism, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, up to the threshold of our own modern capitalistic civilization. From that time, however, a new era of inventions seems to have erected an insurmountable barrier between the old and the new, and the relevance of earlier thought for modern problems is called in question.

The extent and variety of governmental action in the United States in 1933 invite the observer to search out those developments which are a continuation of the old, those which are novel, and those which may be termed transitional. Hence he becomes the central figure in Mr. Chesterton's game of “Bury the Prophet.”

National Governmental Functions. The shrinkage of state and local incomes from the yield of the general property taxes and the limited yields from other forms of taxation as the depression deepened left the national government as the most available instrument through which collective action could be taken.

In spite of the effort to “conserve the past,” there were signs by the end of 1932 that the French body politic was undergoing more than passing tension and strain. By that time the impact of economic depression, slow in reaching France, had, in popular parlance, reached “crisis” proportions; and while crisis is a label which Frenchmen are prone to accord promiscuously to each and every change of ministries, it was gradually coming to connote something analogous in seriousness to the monetary disturbances which culminated in the near-collapse of 1925–26.

Among the institutional elements of civic cohesion, the civil service—national, state, and local—has stood out for generations as one of the most influential forces in German life. Though never the actual “governor of Germany,” it was universally rec-ognized as the instrument of government. Its devotion and efficiency were not only highly regarded by the community, but also looked upon by foreign observers as Germany's greatest contribution in the field of political organization and as an encouraging example for the whole world.

Largely in response to the urgings of the newly elected Democratic governor of Iowa, Clyde L. Herring, the forty-fifth general assembly early in its session passed the necessary legislation to make possible a survey of state and local government in Iowa by the Brookings Institute for Government Research. The survey was begun early in February, 1933; and by the end of July, it was possible to file the report with the interim committee of the legislature which had the matter in hand. This report was published by the state in January, 1934, as a paper-covered volume of 650 closely printed pages.

Following a day of parliamentary skirmishing during which the behavior of the majority sometimes recalled the parliamentary tactics of the illustrious American Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Thomas B. Reed, the Polish Sejm, on January 26, adopted an entirely new constitution for Poland. The bill providing for this action had been introduced in the Sejm by Marshal Pilsudski's parliamentary allies, the government bloc, toward the end of 1933, but they had consistently failed to secure a majority of two-thirds demanded for amendments by the existing constitution. On the 26th, however, opposition deputies, in protest against the threats of the government bloc to alter the usual procedure as well as against the bloc's attempt to dragoon them into acceptance of the bill, withdrew in a body.