To Understand the extraordinary fortunes of racism, it is necessary first of all to see the paradox in the success of this ideology. Racism has been condemned over and over again by the Church; it has been refuted a thousand times—and without any great difficulty—for never has a theory with scientific pretensions produced such an accumulation of inconsistencies, of manifestly arbitrary affirmations, of fantastic generalizations and of grotesque constructions. In the course of the last few years racism has been guilty of colossal crimes, crimes that must fill with indignation every soul in which there exists the slightest sentiment of justice or of charity. We are today witnessing the defeat of those temporal powers in which it is incarnate. For all that, racism still flourishes, and nothing would be more un warranted than to say that this plague is in decline.

The best description of Adolf Hitler's character can be found in Jacob Burckhardt's Historical Fragments. In these lecture notes, published after his death, the great Swiss historian devotes a few pages to Mohammed as founder of Islam. I do not know whether these pages do justice to the Prophet of the Mohammedans, but I think that they are very important for the understanding of the mentality and the historical role of the Führer. “Mohammed is in his very personality fanatical, that is his fundamental force. His fanaticism is that of a radical simplifier, and so far he is completely genuine. His fanaticism is of a most tenacious kind, and his victory is one of the greatest victories of the doctrinaire attitude and of triviality.” “His paltry preaching alone would have obtained only moderate and transitory success, but he continually presented to his bands concrete aims … plunder of caravans, conquests in Arabia, with the accompanying booty. The Holy War against the outside world follows, as something self-evident. The World Empire is simply a conclusion.” Burckhardt points out that the Arabs, the henchmen of Mohammed, were not barbarians. They were an ingenious people, with many spiritual traditions; Mohammed's success among them was based upon a longing for unification, for an “extreme simplification.” Mohammed utilized parts of the most various traditions. Therefore, “everybody found something reminiscent of his previous beliefs in the preaching of Mohammed.”

An Account of Newman's political thought must explain a paradox. Newman declared that the principal aim of his life was to combat religious liberalism; and however novel may have been his approach to many problems, no charge against the orthodoxy of his theological writings has ever been sustained. Yet Newman was considered dangerously liberal by many. A few years after Newman had been made a Cardinal, Lord Selborne, during an audience with Pope Leo XIII, chanced to mention the name of Newman. The Pope's face brightened. “It was not easy; no, it was not easy. They said he was too liberal; but I was determined to honour the Church by honouring Newman. I have always felt a deep veneration for him. I am proud that it has been given me to honour such a man.” In what sense could it be said of Newman that he was too liberal? A study of his political thinking will, I think, take one far toward an answer to the question.

The war which Great Britain entered in 1939 has now been won by the United Nations. But for the first of the great partners of the Alliance the costs have been tremendous. Of the £4 billions in overseas investments which Britain possessed before the war, only about £2 billions remain—most of the rest were spent in meeting charges of war goods which had to be purchased during the period of Cash and Carry. Not only has this important source of British income been lost but during the same period Britain built up an external debt of £3½ billions. Britain's great merchant fleet, which lost about 11 million tons by enemy action during the war, has by a prodigious effort recovered 2/3 of its 1937 level of 17½ million gross tons. But the quality of many of the ships is unsatisfactory and at the same time the United States has developed a merchant fleet several times larger than Britain's. In the competition to carry the world's shrunken international trade, Britain will be at a greater disadvantage than it has ever been during the present century. In other invisible exports also she faces serious difficulties; for example, the overseas business of British insurance companies which contributed £12 to £15 million annually to the balance of trade is threatened with restrictions in capitalistic countries and extermination in collectivistic ones. The British export trade which in 1938 contributed about £450 million to the national income and on which Britain depends to a greater extent than any other great country for the maintenance of its standard of living (the fourth highest in the world,) has shrunk by 1944 to 55% in value and 31% in volume of the 1938 level.

History consists of the general and the particular. The existence of the general is the reason why history repeats itself. In the annals of the past it is surprising to find, time and again, that what is often considered as modern and unique has happened before. Closer study reveals that men, when confronted with a similar set of circumstances have reacted, throughout recorded history, in patterns revealing a marked degree of similarity. If we are to gain a measure of rational control over an otherwise frequently anti-rational—and therefore anti-human—world, it is essential that we know these patterns. They show that men so often do what they do not want to do; they are caught in a chain of circumstances which they could have broken only if they had realized what the last link would be while they were forging the first or were permitting events to forge it for them.

If We are to discuss race and culture contacts in North Africa, we must first appraise the historico-geographical conditions under which such contacts have taken place. It seems significant then that the Arab geographers called what is now Italian, French, and Spanish North Africa, Djesiret el Maghreb, that is the Island of the West. On a closer look, North Africa is indeed an island, separated, as it is, from the European North by the Mediterranean Sea, from Egypt and the Near East by the Libyan desert, and from the Negro country of the Sudan by the desert belt of the Sahara. To the West, it borders on the open Ocean. Within this so-bounded island, however, there is no unity. There are wild mountain ranges and fertile valleys, wind-swept plateaus, and the dry steppe regions which fade out into the immensity of the desert; but a core of integration, a central landscape, as it were, is lacking. As a result of these geographical conditions, there has been sufficient isolation for ancient customs and particular creeds to be preserved, but there has been not enough concentrated political power to enable the peoples of North Africa to fend off frequent invasion and the ever recurring play of outside intervention.

Let us begin with a frank acknowledgment: the American fondness for new structural forms is both virtue and fault politically. Since our proneness to frequent alteration of governmental structures engenders a certain self-distrust, we place upon our actions the restraint found in our tortuous constitutional amending process. Still hankering for change, however, and finding the amending process too rigid, we bend and twist the meaning of the fundamental law with amazing casuistry. The defect as well as the virtue of this practis obvious. On the one hand we change a structure before it has been thoroughly tested, having mistakenly hoped, in the first place, to achieve complete reform by structure and law alone. On the other hand, no one can deny that this willingness to change and experiment with new forms and institutions has contributed to governmental and political progress. City manager government, popular initiation of legislation, direct nomination of party candidates, the organization, control and operation of regional areas like the T.V.A. and the Port of New York Authority, and many recent creations in governmental structure and operations— all these, despite certain difficulties and weaknesses, have contributed to the general advancement of the theory and practice of government. Disappointment, of course, has often followed reform. Too much has been promised, and performance has fallen short of expectations. Bitter disillusionment has often brought reaction. And yet, no one can seriously maintain that in the long run we have not progressed. It is true that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pressure for regulation and control of utilities did not result in a wholesale reform of big business and its practices. Yet, while big business might have been forced to adopt methods less brutal and less careless of the public interest, it was at least kept from returning to its older “public-be-damned” attitude. If some few reforms have been totally ineffective, most of them have been a decided improvement on the older, less efficient, less popularly responsive systems which they replaced.

It Is in their acknowledgment of the soul and of the plight of the modern soul that the books to be considered here are united. From writers living and writing within the life of the Church, such acknowledgment is, of course, not surprising. But the rediscovery of the soul and of the spiritual world and power by writers who are not members of the Church is perhaps a phenomenon of the age. The modern mind, in the tangle of darkness and evil and chaos, hunts steadfastly after spiritual values, for, at least, a spiritual sense. The long-running tendency to deny the life of the soul of man or to act as if it did not exist is pulled up short in these writers. Here the existence of spiritual reality is admitted and even exulted in, although the nature of a real spirituality is not, in every instance, thoroughly or profoundly understood.