ToTheAverage American the experience of continuously rising prices in the midst of a business recession is a puzzling phenomenon. He has generally been led to believe that the operation of the economy is fundamentally subject to impersonal market forces, and that when demand falls market prices willalso fall and thus re-establish the balance between supply and demand. By the same token, this faith in the effectiveness of impersonal market forces has prevented the typical citizen from seeing the practical danger of continued inflation. Many have felt that prices could not continue to rise indefinitely without generating the decline in demand which would bring prices down.

In 1891 W. E. H. Lecky wrote a topical essay in which he observed ”that the kind of interest which belongs to Irish history is curiously different from that which attaches to the history of England and tothat of the great nations of the continent.… It is an invaluable study of morbid anatomy.” Irish history is indeed the study of sickness but of an induced, not a natural sickness. While Lecky's diagnosis for Ireland's malade historiqueleaves much to be desired, he was able to isolate a singularity of Irish history which should command more than the limited attention of interested historians. Irish history since 1691 is more than the tragic chronicle of ”the Pope and the potato,” it is the record of one of the most persistent legislative efforts ever undertaken to change a people. The magnitude of that effort makes the history of the Irish Penal Code a profitable field of study for all students of the behavioral sciences.

InTheSummer of 1958 the Gallup poll revealed that for the first time since 1955 a small majority of the British electorate favored the Conservative party. The narrowness of the margin made it dangerous for the Conservatives to call for a new election. But an election will take place within a year. The Conservatives are hopeful of another victory — a third successive victory over the Labour party, to cap their feat, unprecedented with the modern electorate, of increasing the parliamentary membership of the Government party in 1955. The Labour party, however, has been duly warned and has already rallied to cover its divisions, banishing them temporarily to the unconscious perhaps only to produce political neuroses in the future.