The title of my paper, I hasten to say, is intended to be noncommittal. It does not mean that there has been a marriage between agrarianism and politics, or even anything approaching a love affair. Yet perhaps this explanation is superfluous. It is obvious that there is not a close working-relationship between current politics and the theory of agrarianism. That condition is the subject of my discussion. The politics of agrarianism has not been denned or has been poorly defined. This paper is simply an attempt to locate the source of the difficulty.

For a long, long time I had a picture of Mussolini in my office. I was not a Fascist, not even an Italophile, but for me as for many other Europeans, Mussolini represented a very characteristic type in the evolution of mankind: a beneficent adventurer beginning in anarchy and becoming die saviour of spiritual values. At least I so fancied. The picture was a reproduction of a drawing by Toorop, the Javanese-Dutch artist, who had painted the Italian Dictator without ever seeing him, just as he had painted the face of an apostle or a visionary.

In the treatment of my topic, I shall begin with the human person and go on from there to the question of ownership of material goods. This will be done in the deep conviction, which accords also with the best philosophical tradition of 2,000 years, that the institution of ownership must be theoretically derived and must take its practical cues from the human person, and not vice versa. If there is one supreme characteristic of our modern civilization in this regard, it is the fact that we have turned this matter quite around. Our civilization has given the supreme position to ownership, whether public or private, and has made the person quite subservient in practical life to this supposedly highest of all individual and social values. By modern civilization I mean the general dominant trend of human events in our Western world during the past four centuries or so, which was in some regards a trend away from the general Christian tradition of thought and life that existed progressively for much over a thousand years before what is technically known as the modern era of history began.

IN Declaration of Independence the Fathers of this Republic declared that there are certain self-evident truths and that man is endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights. The idea of natural law and its consequent natural rights was stoutly maintained and to this natural law American Revolutionists appealed against the injustices that a written law would not redress. Above the state and its constitution and written enactments was a higher law of divine origin and purpose. That law was universal, unalterable, and immutable. It was as fixed and certain as die mathematical propositions of the multiplication table or the simple arithmetical statement that two plus two equals four.

Political parties have been subjected to more vigorous criticism than any other institution of modern democracy. It is charged that their divisions split a country artificially. It is further contended that the line-up into the two camps of government and opposition makes it impossible for a country to avail itself of all its political talent, since those belonging to the opposition party are, temporarily at least, unavailable for constructive work, and are instead making every effort to obstruct the government in power. In the United States the point has frequently been made that the two major parties are no longer justified because neither of them contains anything which it could consider characteristic of itself. “The party term Republican isn't definitive any more. It isn't even descriptive. No more so is the party term Democrat. They are labels on empty bottles, signs on untenanted houses, cloaks that cover but do not conceal the skeletons beneath them.” More recently a similar charge has been made by Dr. Mortimer Adler, a writer who brilliantly combines his analysis of the present with a knowledge of the past. He directs attention to the fact that parties, instead of responding to issues, tend to create them. According to Dr. Adler, parties would be justified if they served only the purpose for which they have been created and then dissolved; of course, in reality, they perpetuate their existence. On somewhat similar lines the famous biographer of the modern party organization, Ostrogorski, proceeded from theoretical criticism to practical suggestions. His plan was to replace existing parties by “leagues,” which were to respond to one issue only, and be dissolved as soon as that issue should be settled.

Munich marks the end of an epoch, a “turning point in history,” as Arnold J. Toynbee recently states in a most suggestive article. In fact, these decisive events were foreshadowed long before September 1938, by actions almost necessarily leading the road to Munich. If one can speak of the end of a period, one might better say: Hitler's march into the Rhineland, March 7, 1936, was the real water-shed between two political continents. Indeed what had been said about the World War, that it merely precipitated a development of political and social forces which were moulding the twentieth century, could be repeated of this greatest diplomatic upset of our time too. It had its roots in the history of post-War Europe, and it may be that even the more we win distance from this “water-shed of Munich” the clearer it will become that the currents of history are running in the same old beds and in the same directions as before September, 1938.