The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union has prevented the United Nations from becoming the international government of the great powers which the Charter intended it to be. That conflict has paralyzed the Security Council as an agency of international government. In the few instances when it has been able to act as an agency of international government, it has been able to do so either, as in the beginning of the Korean War, by the accidental and temporary absence of the Soviet Union or, as on the Indonesian issue, by a fortuitous and exceptional coincidence of interests.

In 1815 the rulers and political leaders of Europe—men who had known the terror of witnessing the violent destruction of their social and political institutions—finished their work at the Congress of Vienna, work designed to prevent the resurgence of revolutionary threats. State and Church—and on the continent this meant the Catholic Church—cooperated in this conservative and reactionary task. The task was doomed, for the vision of a free, equal and fraternal society throbbed with all the more compelling radiance in the world of privilege and inequality which the Congress of Vienna restored. Later industrial changes propelled the revolutionary tide, and waves of liberalism and socialism beat against the old order, menacing not only the governments of Europe but the Church. To those captivated by the vision of a better or perfect society on earth, conservative Catholic admiration for the past and reverence for the order and treasures of the present seemed peculiarly obscurantist, obstinate blindness to the cause of progress.

Jefferson made the pursuit of happiness central to his philosophy of man and society and in so doing he envisaged a dynamic balance between power and morals. This is aptly summed up by Madison, after the death of his best friend, when he was besieged with requests for “inside” information about Jefferson. On one such occasion, he called attention to the fertility of Jefferson's genius, the vast extent and variety of his acquirements, and “the philosophic impress left on every subject which he touched.” But he sensed that he had omitted the essence of that life of spirit and morality which had characterized his dear friend, and so he hastened to add: “Nor was he less distinguished from an early and uniform devotion to the cause of liberty, and systematic preference of a form of Government squared in the strictest degree to the equal rights of man.”

“Slavic Studies”—the very expression implies their comparative aspect and raises the question: what enables us to refer to Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Lusatian Sorbs, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Russians by the single all-encompassing term, the “Slavic” peoples? What is their common denominator?

It is indisputable that the Slavic peoples are to be defined basically as Slavic-speaking peoples. If speech is the point of departure, the problem becomes primarily a linguistic one. Since the pioneering work of the Czech Abbé Dobrovský (1753–1829), comparative linguistics has proved the existence of a common ancestral language for all the living Slavic languages and has largely reconstructed the sound pattern, grammatical framework and lexical stock of this Common (or Primitive) Slavic language. The problem of where and by whom this Common Slavic language was spoken is being gradually solved by persistent efforts to synchronize the findings of comparative linguistics, toponymy, and archeology. The archeologists' data are like a motion picture without its sound track; whereas the linguists have the sound track without the film. Thus, interdepartmental teamwork becomes indispensable.

The well known series which under the editorship of Mr. Sumner Welles studies the relations between America and other nations does not yet include a volume on the United States and Poland. It is no secret that the book about Poland by Samuel L. Sharp which Harvard University Press has recently published, was originally supposed to fill that gap. Why this proved unadvisable is easy to discover for any reader. Nevertheless, half of the introduction deals with “the limits of our (that is, the American) Polish problem” and two of the six chapters including the author's conclusions remained dedicated to American-Polish relations in the past, the present, and the future.