TheProblem of the origins and development of the office of Reich President in the Weimar Republic is of interest for several reasons, possibly the principal one being its relation to the general problem of Hitler's accession to power. It will be recalledthat Hitler came to power initially as Chancellor in a “Presidial” cabinet, that is, one responsible to the President rather than to the Reichstag and governing bythe use of the President's emergency powers. I propose to discuss here the role of the President of the Reich, as conceived of by the constitutional framers, in the light of the emergence of the Presidial cabinet.

Decline can be defined as the disruption of an established order, and if so defined, does not exclude the possibility of the simultaneous rise of new order. The “Decline of the West,” Spengler's term, is substantiated in the history of Western civilization, though not according to Spengler's theory, in the successive disruption of the community of belief, Christendom, through the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century, of the community of reason, or the Concert of Europe, as it was afterwards named, through the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and of the community of fear, the balance of power, through the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. A revolution, in every instance, is the overthrow of an established order. Whether the new order, if any, was better than the established order does not matter in deciding whether or not there has been a decline. Whether, for example, during the decline of the West there has been the rise of a scientific and technological community that has spread from the West to the world, giving substance to the slogan ”One World,” does not alter the fact that there has been a gradual disintegration of the established order in the West itself.

TheBattleLines in the evolution controversy had been clearly drawn by the year 1890. In scientific circles a few die-hards, like the German zoologist, Virchow, were making a last ditch fight against the increasingly popular Darwinian concept. American scientists, however, were virtually unanimous in their acceptance of evolution now that the restraining hand of Louis Aggassiz had been lifted. Among the theologians too might be found liberals who embraced the new theory; such influential Protestant preachers as Henry Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott announced that they were “enthusiastic evolutionists.” Most Protestant leaders did not share this enthusiasm. They remained skeptical of evolution's scientific merits, suspicious of its philosophical implications, and fearful of its theological effects. Perhaps the most common Protestant technique was to denounce Darwinism as a threat to Christianity. Thus, as matters stood, America was in the midst of a struggle between a school of evolutionists, many of whom espoused unchristian or antichristian philosophies, and another group of anti-evolutionists who denied the scientific validity of evolution and objected to its theological implications. The evolutionists seemed to be gaining in strength and numbers.

Diplomacy in the broadest sense is the conduct of foreign relations between politically independent entities through bilateral negotiations, multilateral conferences, or through the forum of multilateral organizations. Although modern means of transportation and communication have greatly diminished the importance of distances and boundaries, for a long time to come man will continue to live in separate political units called states. And in the foreseeable future, inter-state relations will be handled through foreign policy, the executive agents of which are diplomats.

Three topics follow one another in the opening chapter of the twelfth volume of the old Cambridge Modern History (1910), the one proudly entitled, “The Latest Age.” The table of contents identifies them as: the spread of democracy in Europe; the heavy burden of armaments; and the continental preponderance of Germany. The author (Stanley Leathes) expressed no alarm over the threat to European stability of such incompatible developments. Instead, he chose to comment that “The Latest Age” had been prosaic and dull, as if to suggest that Europe had solved its main political problems, and that an era of unbroken progress beckoned to an enlightened humanity.

TheInk used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence barely had time to dry before Americans began talking about a national literature. Debate was initiated which went on actively for 75 years — and indeed is still occasionally revived. From the first, two aspects of the subject were considered, two steps were recognized as necessary. The first was the problem of definition: what should be the materials of an American literature and what should be the spirit and purpose of American writers. The second was, of course, the actual creation of a body of literary work which should be recognizably and worthily American.

InTheFolklore of our national past the Federalist Period is often thought of as a golden age of demigods, who were almost infallible. The noisy dissent from the program of the Federalist administrations has been regarded as only a temporary deviation from the true American tradition.

The most frequently read accounts of the period — especially in college textbooks and other short works of synthesis — have generally tended to reduce the political events of that age to a chapter in the history of the “Age of Reason” and have thereby done some damage to our understanding. Casual readers of the story of this age seem to finish their reading with a mental summary in which the emphasis is on the intellect and logic — in short, on reason. An excellent example of this image as it occurs in the lore of even the learned is a recent comment on Senator J. William Fulbright by Senator Paul Douglas: “He's a child of the eighteenth century, a throwback to that age of enlightenment, trust in reason, temperate argument, and slightly aristocratic tendencies. That, I think, explains why he seems a little aloof, a little different from the rest.”