The passionate “Biafra Lobby” in the United States is a perfect example of the moral and political pitfalls of organized pleading and pressure on particular international problems The pro Biafra crusade is an improbable conglomeration of the New Left and old right idealists and hierlings American citizens and foreigners churchmen and secularists isolationists and interventionists. Though no clear common concern unites these diverse persons most of them agree that the United States Government should do more than it is now doing to feed starving Biafrans and many of them seem to believe that the U.S. hands-off policy toward the brutal civil war in Nigeria is immoral because it interferes with mercy measures and denies the Biafrans the “right of self-determination.”

Our age, with its many disquietudes, has been peculiarly open to radical critiques in ethics and polities. Peter Brock's account of pacifism, therefore, appears at a time when interest in the subject should be greater than in certain previous periods. We have not had comprehensive studies of the American peace movement since those of Devere Allen and Merle Curti. Brock's very detailed work does not, of course, purport to be an examination of the peace movement as a whole but only of the pacifist stream within it — that tendency which in principle rejects all war, whatever the professed goals, and stresses the notion” of non-violence. Although be treats the theme only down to 1914, some of the seminal issues of pacifist thought and practice in any age — including our own — are illustrated in this massive volume. The extensive bibliography could be a point of departure for many specialized studies.

There are presently 6.7 million students in some 2200 American institutions of higher learning. Their numbers have doubled in the past ten years and will double again in the next ten.

This statistic alone indicates that the university is no longer a shady retreat where scholars and students leisurely engage in the search for truth. The university has become a major power in our societal life. It shares with society in general a frenzied dynamism, the pursuit of immediate objectives, a labyrinthian structure and the lust for prestige. One couldn't imagine a university without, for example, a well-staffed public relations office. The American university today is in almost all senses of the word a new university.