We Christians of 1937 are the spectators of a terrible drama, a drama which confronts our consciences with agonizing problems. This drama is the disastrous struggle for power between two rival complex ideologies which have come to be known as “Right” and “Left.” Already this conflict is sapping the life-blood of Spain; already it is breeding rancour and hatred of brother for brother throughout the civilized world, and threatens the very foundations of civilization with irreparable disaster.

Elsewhere (in my Lettre sur l’Indépendance) I have sketched some of the characteristic traits which seem to me, as a student of philosophy and of current political trends, to be the distinguishing features of “Right” and “Left.”

To those observations one might add that in concrete experience, which is for the most part in actual fact an experience of misrepresentation (for misrepresentation pertains to man and leaves him only at the price of supreme intellectual discipline—omnis homo mendax), in concrete experience, I say, a particular and typical misrepresentation, closely bound up with the complex question which we are considering, makes its appearance.