Recently I received in the mail an advertising brochure for the History of Childhood Quarterly, a publication committed to the assumptions and objectives of psychohistory. I read psychohistory before I knew there was such a thing, particularly in the fascinating studies of Luther and Gandhi by Erik Erickson, and certainly before I was aware that the subject was such a controversial one among historians, who are perhaps now wondering: Do the insights of depth psychology reveal hitherto hidden causes of historic events, or do they represent a dangerous intrusion of a discipline that is imprecise enough when working with living subjects, let alone long dead ones? Was the Jewish doctor who poisoned Hitler's mother while operating on her for breast cancer a causative factor in Hitler's later decision to remove the Jewish cancer from German culture? Was Nixon's vi gorous prosecution of the war in Vietnam connected with his childhood worries about being a sissy? Was President John F. Kennedy affected as Chief Executive by his unconscious belief that his parents didn't really love him?

Laurence Birns's fine article, “Chile: A Bloody Fall” (Worldview, November, 1973), came to my attention after I returned from a few weeks' visit to Cuba, a visit that coincided with the fall of Allende. The overthrow of Allende drew enormous response.

“Fidel, Allende, el pueblo les defiende”— Fidel, Allende, the people will defend you—shouted some 500,000 Cubans who jammed the Plaza of the Revolution on the afternoon of September 28 in Havana. A bold-colored outdoor mosaic locates Chile's martyr catty-corner to the Che Guevara monument and just in front of that of Cuba's liberator, José Marti. Allende's finger is pointing skyward in one of his favorite gestures. The inscription below reads: “The forces of fascism will not crush the Chilean people.”

Upon careful examination it is clear the responses essentially support the purposes of the “Survey of Freedom.” Both Quigley and Goulet appear to believe that political and civil rights are valuable social assets and that their suppression is seldom justified. Major disagreement comes from their belief that I should take more seriously other factors that relate to “freedom.”

On Tuesday, March 12, 1974, a special kind of birthday party was held at Plaza Square, opposite the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The celebrants—Hal Prince, Carol Channing, Julie Harris, Hermione Gingold, Paddy Chayefsky, Geraldine Fitzgerald, to name a few—resembled a delegation from a “Who's Who” of the arts. The guest of honor, conspicuously absent, was Valery Panov. Probably one of the world's greatest dancers, he is known best in this country for his David-and- Goliath struggle with the Soviet authorities, a struggle which has cost him most of what he values in life.

The new administration in Washington has found it can afford to begin devoting attention to the malaise which has been besetting the nation's economy in recent years. More particularly, it is addressing last year's spectacular and unwarranted rise in the world export price of oil.

Thanks to England's 1944 Butler Education Act, in the immediate postwar years a generation of gifted working-class youngsters like Martin Burgess Green (b. 1927), Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart made their way from the English provinces to Oxford and Cambridge. Green, author of The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (Basic Books; 395 pp.; $12.50), was one such scholarship boy—one of the “école de Butler,” as the ever kindly Evelyn Waugh would put it—who in 1945 went to Cambridge and read English, and who experienced the university's pervasive ethos of gentlemanliness as a form of domestic colonialism. He soon entered the circle of Downing College's brilliant F.R. Leavis, editor of the influential literary quarterly Scrutiny.

Americans are no longer so sure as they once were about what is meant by “the free world.” As Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded us when he came in out of the cold, however, the distinction between free and unfree is not entirely obscured. Though he does not like everything he sees in the democratic nations, he immediately experienced the differences in the quality of freedom. There are discernible differences that make it possible to speak of “free,” “partially free,” and “not free” nations. Every nation is’ in fact marked by a “mix” of civil and political liberties granted, threatened, or withheld from its citizens. The obvious pitfall for the serious analyst of freedom is to weave complex criteria into a simplistic scheme by which one country is pronounced “free” and another “not free.” The determination of who is and who is not free is more complicated than that. A serious survey of freedom is a matter of weighing each nation against the scales of freedom in other nations. When it comes to human freedom] no nation has finally “arrived.” “Comparative” is the key word.

Jerusalem—Nov. 9. On Israel's statesponsored radio network, her only one, the hourly news is preceded by four high-pitched beeps easily heard above the noise of a crowd. In stores customers gather around the nearest transistor like metal filings around the poles of a magnet, in buses the pushing stops and the driver turns up the volume, in cafés the murmur of talk subsides altogether. Israel becomes one vast ear straining to catch the nuances of the latest twist in the international situation. The news is over and the volume turned down, then discussion begins again: What did Golda really accomplish on her last trip abroad? How far are the Soviets willing to go? What did Sadat's latest statement mean and at whom was it really aimed? Here everyone is an analyst and everyone a strategist.

In a century called “the century of total war” more than 62,000,000 human beings met death in two World Wars. These figures do not include people killed in conflicts such as those in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East. The striking difference between the First and Second World Wars was the number of estimated deaths among noncombatants: 5 per cent in the First and 48 per cent in the Second.

Early in Gordon Zahn's “War and Its Conventions” (Worldview, July, 1973) the author sets forth the proposal that “the Vietnam conflict be taken as a test case by writers who would persist in the illusion that just war standards and conditions are, or indeed could be, taken into account in the policy decisions reached by military leaders and magistrates.” By the end of this same article Zahn has moved on to the more startling proposal that an international tribunal of “theologians and other specialists in religion and in the presumed influence religion has upon the affairs of man” be convoked to render judgment on the morality of the Vietnam war. Since these two propositions have no necessary direct relationship, and since in the pages separating them Zahn does not connect them, one is left wondering just what Zahn intends to say in this article.