On the political scene of the postwar world, the opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union has been the dominant fact. The unfolding of this opposition has been, and will be, to a large extent, determined by the relative strength of the two parties: the closer it is to equality, the easier could it develop into a shooting war. If it so develops, die same relationship of strength will become one of the major determinants of victory.

What is the relative strength of the central foes? In this paper, the strength of the United States will be taken for granted. Contrariwise, the strength of the Soviet Union will be treated as an unknown magnitude to be found on the basis of evidence available.

The American party system has been under attack almost continuously since it took definite form in the time of Andrew Jackson. The criticism has always been dircted at the same point: America's political pluralism, the distinctively American organization of government by compromise of interests, pressure groups and sections. And the aim of the critics from Thaddeus Stevens to Henry Wallace has always been to substitute for this “unprincipled” pluralism a government based as in Europe on “ideologies” and “principles.” But never before—at least not since the Civil War years—has the crisis been as acute as in this last decade; for the political problems which dominate our national life today: foreign policy and industrial policy, are precisely the problems which interest and pressure-group compromise is least equipped to handle. And while the crisis symptoms: a left-wing Thirl Party and the threatened split-off of the Southern Wing, are more alarming in the Democratic Party, the Republicans are hardly much better off. The 1940 boom for the “idealist” Wilkie and the continued inability to attract a substantial portion of the labor vote, are definite signs that the Republican Party too is under severe ideological pressure.

It is not within the purpose of this paper to appraise the historical significance which the Council of Trent held for the consolidation of Catholic doctrine on all the points of dogmatic and sacramental theology that had been put into question by the religious innovators. Nor shall we examine the role which its measures of canonical legislation played in the great process of spiritual and disciplinary renewal which eventually determined the position of the Catholic Church in the modern world. We propose rather to turn our attention to the great goal which the Council did not reach: the restoration of the one Respublica Christiana, of the Catholic unity which prior to the sixteenth century had been the only conceivable form of Christian religious existence. To the eye of the historian, it is true, the rift in Western Christendom appears quite obviously prepared by the developments of two centuries preceding Luther's challenge. The exile of Avignon; the great schism; the constitutional unrest of the conciliar epoch of Constance and Basel; the political realism by which Renaissance popes had sought above all to consolidate their position as Italian territorial rulers; the growth of the national states and national sovereignties; the ferment of humanistic ideologies—they all were alarming and distressing symptoms of the radical disintegration of mediaeval unity.

This year the scholarly world celebrates the four hundredth birthday of Francis Suarez, perhaps the brightest star in the scholarly heavens of Spain's Siglo de Oro and the greatest master of the second flowering of Scholasticism, a flowering which began with the works of Francis de Vittoria. Suarez' life is that of the teacher, the prodigious writer, and of the religious, devoted to students, to study, and to the religious life as a member of the then still young Societas Jesu. In contradistinction to Saint Robert Bellarmine, he published only a few controversial books in the theological and political disputes of his time. His reputation was established by his exhaustive, systematic representation of the Philosophia Perennls and of Theology.

Although at the end of the seventeenth century men were shifting their political terminology from the spiritual to the secular, from God to nature, they still invoked the absolutes of history, law, and scripture. They did not lightly overturn their monarch, but when the necessity for such action arose they sought absolution in concepts which the most rigorous and learned mediaeval theologian would have understood. They appealed to the law of nature but they meant the law of God; and the shift involved no betrayal of absolute standards, no withdrawal from the same ethical doctrines that had nourished their forebears. The time was soon to come when secular phrases expressed a secular outlook, but in 1689 they continued to cover the religious convictions of centuries. As soon as the bars were down and men grappled in hectic controversy, the secular side of their politics diminished and the ethical and spiritual aspects became pronounced.

The popular uprising of the March Days of 1848 in Berlin, superficially viewed, remained an episode, and the men who were fighting for progress along various lines failed, and were bound to fail, in their aims. The German revolution, said Friedrich Engels in his instructive articles of 1851–52 (which he published in America above the signature of Karl Marx), was a necessity, but its temporary suppression was similarly unavoidable. We shall still have to substantiate this, but must turn our gaze first upon the Berlin revolution, and upon the positive comment which it may offer for our contemporary historical situation. Yet for this too it is necessary to search somewhat deeper.

We must set before ourselves today more sharply than before, the problem of critical alternatives in the history of Germany, in order to gain a deeper insight into the infinitely complex web of her dark destiny. The natural task of Germany in the nineteenth century was not only to achieve unification, but also to trasmute the existing authoritarian state (Obrigkeitsstadt) into commonwealth (Gemeinschaftsstaat). To that end, the monarchial-authoritarian structure had to be made elastic—if possible, through peaceful reform—so that the result would be an active and effective participation of all strata of society in the life of the state.