In the context of government, what do we mean by the phrase “a learned man”?* I take it we can mean a variety of things. On the one hand, we can have in mind the specialist, the expert, the man with an intensive and specialized background in a particular field of knowledge. On the other hand, we can have in mind the man with general wisdom, with that feeling for the past and the future which enriches a sense for the present, and with that appreciation for wider loyalties which deepens patriotism to one's country and finds bonds between it and Western culture and links with the universal aspirations of mankind.

Through 1918 Russia's new Bolshevik rulers, amateurs at the business of governing, were exposed to bureaucratic lessons much faster than they could assimilate them. Administrative techniques and organizational models essential for the direction of an empire had to be hurriedly invented or borrowed and rushed into operation; numerous special arrangements had to be devised for those areas where military crises or nationalist and separatist movements demanded immediate attention. During the process of simultaneously ruling and learning, the Moscow center sometimes received sharp lessons from the peripheries of the empire. Leading figures of the Russian Communist Party were often compelled by circumstances and by the hot tempers and loud voices of their colleagues out in the hustings to listen and learn and adapt themselves to the pressures of facts as others saw them. Passionate theoretical debates gave way to quarrels about the most expedient, most efficient method of getting the work accomplished; and the reciprocal adjustments resulting from this conflict between the center and the men working in the peripheral areas established patterns of thought and habits of action that were to become permanent features of the Soviet administrative system.

Anarchism is one of those concepts about which there generally is deep ignorance or profound misunderstanding.* “In the popular mind,” says Bertrand Russell, “an Anarchist is a person who throws bombs and commits other outrages, either because he is more or less insane, or because he uses the pretencse of extreme political opinions as a cloak for criminal proclivities.” Yet in the history of political thought, as well as in the history of social movements, anarchism has played a role which cannot be overlooked.

On the second of May in the year 1808, an event took place in Madrid which was to be of momentous consequence not only in the history of Spain but of revolutionary and Napoleonic France as well. As the last of the Spanish royalty departed from the capital for Bayonne and exile, outraged feelings gave way to an armed uprising against French rule. The revolt was speedily crushed by Murat's troops, but despite the grave restrictions imposed by his order of the day, Spain refused to be quieted. Juan Pérez Villamil, fiscal of the Supreme Council of War, issued a call to arms: “The country is in danger. Madrid is perishing, a victim of French perfidy. Spaniards, hasten to save her. May 2, 1808.” The response was immediate; irregular bands of troops sprang up, mob violence was visited upon those accused of being afrancesados (that is, pro-French), and many officials paid with their lives for their apathy in organizing the resistance. Everywhere was heard the cry of the patriots, “i Viva Fernando VII y mueran los franceses!” A few months later the regular Spanish armies were to administer to the troops of imperial France their first defeat. At last the principle of nationalism, so long a vital force in the success of the French revolution and Napoleon, had been turned against France.

The entire problem of German secret rearmament in the period following World War I is a broad and complex one. But the success of the German military in achieving rearmament in spite of the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles may in part be attributed to the course of politics under the Weimar Republic.

The most important thing to say about Americans and architecture* is that if we value the art of building at all it is usually when it is ancient or exotic or preferably both. This is simply one facet of the general American attitude toward the arts which, if it is changing at all, is changing slowly. Menotti observed some time ago that the typical American father was not very happy if his son asserted that he intended to be a composer. The same uneasiness develops if the son is interested in becoming a ballet dancer, a painter, a poet, an actor, a sculptor, or a physicist, although the sputnik-induced respectability of science and the consequent improvement of the scientist's economic status has, at least for the moment, quieted the parental fears about science as a profession if not as an art. We have to face the fact that at least until very recently the arts and the intellectual pursuits have been peripheral to American life. Calvin Coolidge was true to the current American attitudes when in 1925 he informed the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs that America had no representative contemporary paintings to send. Although there has been some change in the American view of the arts and of artists since then, some increased curiosity about the products, even some improvement in the popular critical taste; although there has been a comparable improvement in the respectability of the artists, the gain has not been great. There may be no country in the civilized world in which the artist is, in the last analysis, held in lower esteem. All this affects what American architecture is, what it has been, and what it is likely to be. For architecture is an art and that must never be forgotten.