So many books and articles have been written during the past several years about Argentina that there would seem to be little reason, at the present time, for adding another weight to the already over-burdened press. There is a phase, however, of Argentine development both of the past and of the present which has not received a great deal of consideration, and that is the relationship between Church and State in the republic of the South. Circumstances of the past help to explain conditions of the present. North Americans are inclined to judge of ecclesiastical conditions in Latin America according to a North American background. Such judgments cannot be correct because the background has been different. Perhaps then it will be an aid to clear thinking and just appraisal to try to throw a bit of light upon Argentina's ecclesiastical past that we may better understand Argentina's ecclesiastical present.

Machiavelli was a man of the Italian Renaissance; yet Mazzini shows no trace of Machiavellian thought, and Mussolini's attempt to revive Machiavelli in his homeland failed lamentably and ignominiously. Italy lacked the power and the hardness of character which Machiavellianism presupposes. Piedmont was an imitation Prussia, but only an imitation Prussia. Machiavelli's ideas bore real fruit in nineteenth century Germany. The German inclination to force ideas in the “free realm of the mind” to their logical and absurd conclusions without regard for the limitations of reality and common sense, combined with Prussia's power and hardness of character to implant Machiavellianism firmly in Germany. While German statesmen like Frederick II and Bismarck were its ablest disciples, its noblest teacher and prophet was Heinrich von Treitschke.

“Expansion is everything,” said Cecil Rhodes and fell into despair; for he saw every night overhead “vast worlds which we can never reach,” part of the universe to which he could not expand. He had discovered the moving principle of the new, the imperialist era; and yet, at the same moment, he recognized in a flash of wisdom its inherent insanity and contradiction of human conditions. Naturally, neither insight nor sadness prevented him from expanding. He had no use for his flash of wisdom that had led him far beyond his normal capacities which were those of an ambitious businessman with a marked tendency towards megalomania.

In America, as elsewhere, Catholic effort to reform the modern economic order antedates by some years Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII's masterly encyclical on the condition of labor, issued in May, 1891. For a full generation Catholics in France and Germany had been organizing to ameliorate social conditions, and in all industrialized lands the more progressive members of the Church insisted that a sincere attempt to apply Christianity to the social order must be made without delay. The reformers, nevertheless, needed aid and encouragement from the Pope, preferably a reasoned analysis of the industrial situation showing the desirability and means of bettering labor's condition. Everywhere, the few Catholics who championed labor's cause in the Church's name met unyielding resistance from highly placed Catholics intent on protecting vested interests or sincere in thinking that social reform meant social convulsion. As for American Catholics, if their leaders, ecclesiastics for the most part, had not, in many instances or to a conspicuous degree, deferred to great wealth, as a group they had seen in the struggling labor movement little more than a revolutionary uprising, a projection on these shores of the Socialist and Anarchist movements of the Old World.

History has again been playing one of its tricks that end in tragedy. This time the victim is the Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, unspeakably sacred to his loyal subjects. In our age any emperor would be a controversial character; Hirohito is doubly so. In fact we have been witnessing the beginning of controversy and argument concerning him. We may not see the end of it for a long time to come. The process is already well along. What it may become later we can only surmise. The stage is set, the plot unraveling, the finale may be tragic.

The war which Great Britain entered in 1939 has now been won by the United Nations. But for the first of the great partners of the Alliance the costs have been tremendous. Of the £4 billions in overseas investments which Britain possessed before the war, only about £2 billions remain—most of the rest were spent in meeting charges of war goods which had to be purchased during the period of Cash and Carry. Not only has this important source of British income been lost but during the same period Britain built up an external debt of £3½ billions. Britain's great merchant fleet, which lost about 11 million tons by enemy action during the war, has by a prodigious effort recovered 2/3 of its 1937 level of 17½ million gross tons. But the quality of many of the ships is unsatisfactory and at the same time the United States has developed a merchant fleet several times larger than Britain's. In the competition to carry the world's shrunken international trade, Britain will be at a greater disadvantage than it has ever been during the present century. In other invisible exports also she faces serious difficulties; for example, the overseas business of British insurance companies which contributed £12 to £15 million annually to the balance of trade is threatened with restrictions in capitalistic countries and extermination in collectivistic ones. The British export trade which in 1938 contributed about £450 million to the national income and on which Britain depends to a greater extent than any other great country for the maintenance of its standard of living (the fourth highest in the world,) has shrunk by 1944 to 55% in value and 31% in volume of the 1938 level.