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.

THE ARGUMENT from authority is at least as old as the twelfth century. At that time it was thought a very good argument. The modern age believes it has found some better ones, and likes to think of the argument from authority as a relic, curious, perhaps, but certainly extinct. It is not really so. The argument from authority has still its adherents today, and these adherents, to our great surprise, are proving themselves convincing.

THE appearance in the last decade of such devices for social control as the Government Corporation and the Interstate Authority seems to suggest that the American Federal State system is passing through a critical stage in the course of social metamorphosis. It may be that the Federal State system, succeeding the Confederate system of states, approaches now a Regional system in the course of this metamorphosis. It is at any rate interesting that the Constitutional provision for agreements among the states with the consent of Congress—perhaps the most typical symbol of the old Confederation— is, with the breaking down of the Federal State system, coming strongly into vogue. Where the problems are regional in character and where the jurisdictional framework is not coincidental with the problem area (for example, the Colorado River Valley Problem Area) a regional authority created by concessions of jurisdiction on the part of the several states or on the part of the states and the Federal Government becomes necessary. These considerations determine the manner in which such regional or “sub-national” interests are to be set within “the framework of the American Nation”—a framework, the legal lines of which, in the words of the National Resources Committee, “aggravate the growing points of our national life”.