The American settlement has created a very interesting situation in domestic English politics—a situation in which there are bound to be developments, mough no one can yet say what they will be. It is still very arguable whether the decision of the nation to return to party politics immediately after the German collapse was a wise one. There are arguments in favour of a National Government and arguments against one. An advantage of party politics is certainly that an effective opposition has an important part to play in keeping die Government up to the mark. The absence of such an Opposition in war-time does not so much matter, for then we have the enemy to perform this function of pace maker. But a National Government in peace-time certainly runs the danger of contracting fatty degeneration of the heart.

The United Nations is a transitional organization. It includes in its structure aspects of several types of world organization. The privileged position of the great powers suggests that it is a world empire governed by these powers.

The broad principles stated in the preamble and the first two articles providing for pacific settlements of disputes, forbidding aggressive wars, requiring cooperation in suppressing such war, encouraging international cooperation, and protecting the domestic jurisdiction of all states suggests that the United Nations may rely primarily on moral principles. The fact that there are five great powers, each with a veto vote on the use of sanctions, suggests that the success of the organization depends upon maintaining a balance of power among these states. Finally, the provisions concerning human rights and cooperation for human welfare through the Economic and Social Council, together with the important position given the International Court of Justice, look in the direction of world federation.

The Charter of San Francisco is the modest end-product of the mightiest collective literary effort in history. Fifty delegations, comprising literally thousands of principal and subordinate personnel, labored feverishly for two months to achieve agreement on a constitution for the new world security organization.1 In contrast, the Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted by one of the commissions of the Peace Conference of Paris, on which there sat two representatives of each of the five major powers and one representative from each of nine of the secondary powers. This group of nineteen men met fifteen times.2

The very broad participation of the smaller powers in the San Francisco Conference is obviously not to be explained in terms of their growing influence in world politics. Although the number of prospective permanent seat-holders in die Council of the proposed world organization was the same at Paris and at San Francisco, there had been in the intervening quarter-century a reduction rather than an increase in the number of powers of greatest influence.

When the Potsdam declarations were made public, Anne O'Hare McCormick (in her column in the New York Times of August 4, 1945) commented: “The scale and novelty of the great experiment is breathtaking. Stalin, Truman and Attlee may be remembered longer than the original Big Three, the war-leaders, because their names are affixed to this document.”

The general public, on this side of the Atlantic, is as yet hardly aware of the full implications of the Potsdam declarations. The economic consequences of Potsdam have been widely debated in Britain, but they have received little attention in this country. Yet, the plan decided upon in the former city of the Prussian kings is due almost entirely to American initiative. In the words of Raymond Daniell:

As early as November 1943, in conversations with German refugees at Istanbul, I encountered again and again the question, asked with amazement: how was it possible in Hitler's Germany for me to publish such independent views on historical-political questions, as I had expressed in my writings and addresses, without suffering political persecution? After I was released from prison by the Russians at the end of April 1945, foreigners frequently asked me the same question. I shall attempt to give an answer, based simply on my own personal experience.

In November, 1944, I had been arrested by the Gestapo, not because of any statement I had made in my addresses, university lectures, or writings, but because of my friendship with Dr. Gördeler and my participation in conferences about a political-theological memoir dealing with the future reorganization of German and European politics. The Gestapo officials who arrested me all wore an SD (Security Service) on the sleeves of their uniforms.

When Monsignor John A. Ryan died in late summer, millions of people in America and elsewhere mourned the passing of the most creative moral theologian in the present age. Here was a man who nearly a half century ago set himself a highly beneficent and constructive task; here was a man who by continuous, grinding effort reached the journey's end with the great task largely completed. Such success comes to few men, whatever their fields of interest; in the field of labor and industrial ethics only Monsignor Ryan can be said to have measurably attained it. Although by no means the first in the modern world to urge the primacy of Christian ethics in industry and trade— in fact he was a late comer—he excelled all his predecessors and contemporaries in one vital respect: the ability to combine economics and ethics into a virtually new science of social justice.

On some later occasion, I hope to discuss in detail the various problems of German-Polish relations which Professor Hans Rothfels raised in his article “Frontiers and Mass Migrations in Eastern Central Europe” (The Review of Politics, January 1946).

Immediately, however, I should like to clear up the misunderstandings which might arise in connection with two quotations which Professor Rothfels took out of the context of my own publications.

1. Recalling that in 1226 the duke of Mazovia called upon the help of the Teutonic Order, and stressing that he did it “apparently in despair,” Professor Rothfels adds the following footnote (p. 43, n . 43) :

“En désespoir de cause,” as Professor O. Halecki puts it correctly (La Pologne de 963 à 1914, Paris, 1933, p. 47). Other Polish historians have tried to minimize this fact.

1. Regarding the “Mazovian call for help” the question under dispute is not whether or not the duke understood “Poland's real interests” or showed “political foresight.” It is rather the question what his actual situation was or what he thought it to be. While St. Zajaczkowski maintains that the duke was “not in despair” (Kwartalnik Historyczny, XLVIII, 4, p. 843; quoted from a German translation) and while St. Ketrzynski calls the duke “allegedly desperate” and a “benefactor” of the Teutonic Order (ibid. p. 801), it still seems to me that Professor Halecki is more correct in admitting, that the “duke himself acted in despair.” I did not intend to do him injustice by stating a difference from “other” (I did not say “the” other) Polish historians.