The factors that caused the Roman authorities to insist on a Plenary Council of the American Bishops in 1884 have not been sufficiently explained. Perhaps the role of the American prelates in opposing the opportuneness of the definition of the doctrine of infallibility had some influence. Undoubtedly the reports of the bishops in their ad limina visits to Rome did little to subdue any fears that may have arisen. The frequent appeals of recalcitrant clergymen against their bishops were going directly to Rome because there was no intermediate court. The Instruction of 1878 makes this quite clear. Rome had shown its dissatisfaction with the condition of Catholic education by its interrogatory and its Instruction of 1875. The renewed condemnation of the Fenians had some American effects; and the renewed condemnation of the Masons with applications to certain other American social organizations indicated that all was not well in the social conditions of Catholics in the United States. Had the prelates in Rome understood American democracy and American conditions they would have had to have been much better informed than most Europeans in the nineteenth century. America was to Europe a land of great physical possibility, but a land without any great culture or religious accomplishments. Even European liberals did not understand the manhood suffrage of American democracy. The Catholic leaders of southern Europe, so generally aligned with conservative and monarchist parties, could have little understanding of American democracy in the religious sphere. In Rome where the hierarchical arrangement had not been fully dissociated from monarchical government and where Roman law with its insistence on the union of Church and State was the basis of most political thought, even the most sympathetic seemed to have some misgivings about the manifest loyalty of the American Catholics to the Holy See.

The following considerations have grown out of a study of the origins, the elements and the functioning of that novel form of government and domination which we have come to call totalitarian. Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination. Present totalitarian governments have developed from one-party systems; whenever these became truly totalitarian, they started to operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict its course of action.

A Quarter of a century has passed since the western world acquired and developed some familiarity with Russian philosophy. The names of Chaadayev, Kireyevsky, Khomiakov and Solovyov are not unknown. The success of the late lamented Nicolas Berdyaev, not only in Europe but also in America and even in the far East, was in large measure due to the fact that his thought continued the tradition created by his Russian predecessors. Ontology, irrationalism, personalism, theohuman nostalgia—such are the themes and attitudes in which lies the originality of this current of ideas.

When Marx, in 1849, took up permanent residence in London, he devoted himself once more—and with great thoroughness—to the study of the classical economists. And he accepted, along with many other ideas of Adam Smith, Richard Jones, and John Suart Mill, their conviction that, outside and independent of the Western world, there existed a specific institutional conformation, which they called Asiatic or Oriental society.

On October 6, 1929, but three days after Gustav Stresemann's untimely death, Hermann Oncken made a first attempt to see him in historical perspective: “Suddenly all of us, friend and enemy alike, feel that there is a vacuum in the political life of the nation. … Suddenly one senses that a chapter has ended.” Oncken showed the changes which Germany had undergone since that dark day in August 1923 when Stresemann had taken over the chancellorship in an atmosphere of despair, and he praised the greatness of his accomplishment. Analyzing the sources of his success, he stressed his openmindedness and flexibility, his sense of timing, the suggestive power of his oratory, his indomitable optimism, and his willingness to fight for his convictions. But, above all, he admired his ability to go beyong the traditional political realism of Bismarck and to lead German statesmanship onward into an idealistic sphere. He cited as evidence Stresemann's programmatic words spoken on the September day of 1926 when Germany entered the League of Nations: “The man who serves humanity best, is he who, rooted in his own nation, develops his spiritual and intellectual gifts to their fullest extent and thus, growing beyond the confines of his own country, contributes to the whole of mankind.”

Maitland once observed that, in the Middle Ages, “Law was the point where life and logic met.” This aphorism of the master must serve as my apology for including in one essay two topics so diverse, according to some opinions, as abstract political theory and concrete constitutional problems. It may be that the mediaeval jurists can provide a link between the two spheres, for their reflections on mediaeval government were not mere philosophical abstractions. They were rooted in real life. An essential ingredient of the jurists' raw material was a practical experience of the workings of mediaeval society. It is not surprising, therefore, that eminent historians on both sides of the Atlantic have called attention to the need for legal studies as a basis for further advance in mediaeval constitutional research, and that, in recent years, we have heard a great deal about the importance of feudal law and folk law, of Roman law and English common law in the formation of mediaeval ideas and institutions. My task will be to state briefly the case for the canonists.