A medieval schoolman, in a disputation with an opponent, would sometimes pause and say distingue. The making of proper distinctions, however, is no easy task. Man is impatient; he wants to arrive at a conclusion immediately, and he frequently decides with a troubled heart before having given the brain its chance to clarify the issue. On the other hand, if we do take the time “to distinguish,” usually half of the battle is won.

When w. s. Gilbert composed this piece of doggerel verse he was scarcely over-simplifying the issue. The Party System had taken its place smoothly within the Victorian Compromise, providing for a change of personalities rather than a change of principles. Not even Mr. Gladstone or Lord Salisbury could go on being Prime Minister for ever, and the mere machinery of government called for a contrast of character as well as a reconsideration of policy. The mimic battles of the great Parliamentary decades responded, adequately enough on the whole, to a dual need—to the human tendencyto differ and the human aspiration to agree. They were the safety valves of our disputes—keeping them, like private jokes, within the family. But when danger threatened, they did not disturb our unanimity.

In his address at the 200th convocation of the University of Chicago, June 11, 1940, President Hutchins invited American youth to reexamine the principles which make life worth living.

This enterprise is most urgently necessary in removing the intellectual unpreparedness of the nation. Far worse than the military and economic deficiencies in equipment and armament are the spiritual dissensions among the various groups of our time. In the universal conflict those nations will prevail whose unity results from spontaneous and free devotion to values which are recognized as worth living and dying for. We can reintegrate the nation, when we succeed in breaking the continuous secularization which, parallel to the rapid industrialization after the Civil War, is undermining the ethos of American life. The ethos which made this commonwealth great, was the fighting spirit of enlightenment. The backbone of the political principles of the Constitution, is the spirit of the Christian Law of Nature; that means political freedom as the fullfilment of the rules of the Almighty. This unity between the three spheres: nature, man and God was discarded by the process of secularization. The ethics of enlightenment shifted to the demand for universal comfort and for good living. The attitude of a boundless optimism prevailed which considered history an unending process of perfection. It was thought that this state of continuous improvement would result from the scientific organization of social and political institutions; their progress would eliminate eventually what the less scientific past had ascribed to the finiteness and sinfulness of man.

Theoreticians have always stood in the vanguard of revolutions with programs which were designed to chart the course for nascent political régimes. When the Third Reich was officially ushered in, enthusiastic exponents of a corporative state (Ständestaat) or corporative organization (ständischer Aufbau) were at hand to act as engineers for an uncharted future—in fact, a future which occasionally offered faint glimpses of perpetuity. Some of the corporative “soap bubbles,” as Max Weber once termed them, quickly burst while others remained intact. Some of the bubble-blowers were swept on by the revolutionary forces or they gathered by the wayside to appraise the residue of their theories. In any case, the period from 1933 to the outbreak of the present war has been sufficient to allow for a survey of the corporative developments in Germany in the light of their theoretical background and institutional expression.

This article may be considered as a continuation of such preceding studies as have been published by the author on the question of the constitutional order in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. But this time the author has deemed it expedient to change the method adopted in his former writings, in studying Soviet constitutional law. Had the old method been applied, it would have been sufficient to give a juridical analysis of the principal event in the development of Soviet constitutional law in the course of these last years, which was the promulgation of the latest Constitution, of June 11th, 1936, and also the constitutions which were elaborated on a similar basis and promulgated in the different Republics forming part of the U.S.S.R. But it will scarcely be found adequate to apply strictly juridical methods to such political bodies of a recent type where the text of the constitution and, in general, all written law, very often serve only propaganda purposes, intended to disguise the real relations existing between the rulers and the ruled.

The one question on which our American humanists have never come to anything like agreement is the religious question. They have some common understanding on the nature of will and of the higher will, and on the subordinate relationship of intellect to will, on the need of discipline, and on the inevitability of degrees in society. But they remain of several minds on religion. More went what is called Anglican though he stayed in this country; T. S. Eliot went Anglican and also anglophile, at least till more recent times. No one knows just what Babbitt religiously was; some have said liberal Protestant, some have said his higher will is divine and sometimes his own words allow this interpretation, and some have said he is remote first and last from Christianity but is an oriental saint.