Portrait of England Howard Wyce

Equivocal Conservatism Max Eastman

New Facts on Katyn Vasily Yershov

"Freedom is Slavery~~ Ludwig von Mises

Why Yalta Matters An Editorial

What do ~g call vourself?-_.-.:----

-_-:.-_._~

---

In this age of labels, a man is often pressed for an answer to the question as to what he

calls himself. For ourselt'es, we can ansu:er no lnore exactly than we did in our first issue..

The Freeman will he at once radical~ libera1, conservative~ and reactionary. It will beradical because it ,vill go to the root of questions. It will be liberal because it willstand for the Inaxinlunl of individual libel'ty, for tolerance of all honest diversity ofopinion~ and for faith in the efficacy of solving our internal problems by discussionand reason rather than suppression and force. It will be conservative because it believesin conserving the ~reat constructive achievenlents of the past..And it will he reactionaryif that means reacting against ignorant and reckless efforts to destroy precisely what ismost precious in our great economic,! politi cal, and cultural heritage in the nalTIC ofalleged "progress.'!'!

That teas our "label" on October 2, 1950. It remains so today.

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Contents VOL. 3, NO. 12 MARCH 9, 1953 Our Contributors

ElitorialsThe Fortnight..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 401\Vhy Yalta Matters.................................. 403Italy's Taxes and Ours......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 404The Butter Glut... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 405Jefferson vs. Stevenson 406How to Underdevelop................................ 406

ArticlesGermany's Dilemma FREDA UTLEY 407"Freedom is Slavery" LUDWIG VON MISES 410Portrait of England HOWARD WYCE 412Holland's Heroic Achievement MARTIN EBON 415The American Disease PETER KAVANAGH 417New Facts on Katyn VASILY YERSHOV 419

BooksEquivocal Conservatism MAX EASTMAN 423An Upside Down World , EDWARD HUNTER 424Shorter and Better BEN RAY REDMAN 425Our Foreign Policy ALBERT C. WEDEMEYER 426Honest-to...God Nephew WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN 426Noble in Both Senses RICHARD MC LAUGHLIN 427A.E.F. in Siberia HOFFMAN NICKERSON 428Walpole Himself ALIX DU POY 429News About Matthew Arnold BEN RAY REDMAN 430

PoemsSpring Music in Winter............ EMMA GRAY TRIGG 418Neighborhood Witch SJANNA SOLUM 420

From Our Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 400

Arts and Entertainments ALEXANDER MARSHACK 421

This is What They Said. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 416

Worth Hearing Again 418

THE FREEMAN is published fortnightly. Publication Office~TOrange, Conn. Editorial andGeneral Offices, 240 Madison Avenue, New York 16, N. .r. Copyrighted in the UnitedStates 1953, by the Freeman Magazine, Inc. Henry Hazlitt, President; Lawrence Fertig,Vice President; Claude Robinson, Secretary; Kurt Lassen, Treasurer.

Entered as second class matter at the Post Office at Orange, Conn. Rates: Twenty-fivecents the copy; five dollars a year in the United States, nine dollars for two years;six dollars a year elsewhere.

The editors can not be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts unless return postage or,hetter, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed.

Articles signed with a name, pseudonym, Of initials do not necessarily represent theopinion of the editors. either as to substance or style.

j~l1 Printed in U.S.A., by Wilson H. Lee Co., Orange, Connecticut.

PREDA UTLEY is the author of a number ofsearching books about contemporary problems.Of these, The Dream We Lost, describing herlife in Soviet Russia and her conclusions aboutthe Soviet system, first won her fame and ac­claim in this country, and The China Story,examining our policy in the Far East, was abest seller in 1951.

LUDWIG VON MISES, world famous economist, isthe author of Human Action (1949) and otherbooks. He conducts the Freernan seminar onessential problems of the social sciences, whichwas held in New York in 1951 and in San Fran­cisco during the summer of 1952.

HOWARD WYCE, a contributor to the fornler Brit­ish literary monthly Horizon, is now a free­lance writer living in London. He is currentlyworking on a novel.

MARTIN EBON is the author of World Com'YJ'l,un­ism Today, a scholarly study of the policies andramifications of the International Communistmovement. In 1952 he won the Freedoms Foun­dation award for his signed editorials in theSaturday Evening Post.

COLONEL VASILY YERSHOV, a former member ofthe Soviet Army, fled from his country in 1948and "chose freedom" in America. He comes tous with the recommendation of David Dallin, aleading expert on Soviet affairs.

PETER KAVANAGH is an Irish traveler and writer,located at present in New York City.

ALEXANDER MARSHACK, correspondent, author,and photographer, got his background knowledgefor his article "Cinerama-A Third Dimension"as a former director in radio and television.

In Forthcoming Issues"Government by the Insane," an analysis of theCommunist mentality as observed in the FarEast by Edward Hunter, inventor of the nowpopular term brain-washing, and author of thestartling book Brain-Washing in China,. a sec­ond installment of Howard Wyce's "Portrait ofEngland," dealing with the present temper andcondition of British arts, letters, and the drama;a discussion by P. A. Hayek of the current re­vival of the political philosophy of Lord Acton.

11:...-.-.._F_R_O_M_O_U_R_RE_A_D_E_RS llA Service RenderedYou have rendered a service greater than any magazineI have ever had the privilege of reading. Sincerely, thegood it is doing Americans and America can not beestimated; I wish all teachers could read your articlesin the Freeman.Jacksonville, Ill. SARA JOHN ENGLISH

For integrity and restraintAs a teacher I have, for some time, been disturbed bythe failure of educational leaders and writers to applythe test of intellectual competence and intellectual in­tegrity to the question of academic freedom. If we areto have genuine freedom of thought, the academicperson must himself safeguard it through his ownintegrity and restraint. When he steps outside his field,he must be content to be a mere amateur in the roughand tumble of every day opinions. Your gallant fightin the Freeman for true academic freedom leads me toask you to inject this note into such discussion.Richrnond, Va. RACHEL CARY

College Election PollsYour reader Mr. Geoffrey Curtis expresses interestin the results of election polls taken at colleges. Well,according to results announced on Election Day by theUniversity of Maryland student newspaper, the studentbody was 56.40/0 for Eisenhower, the faculty 650/0 forStevenson. In our Economics Department, the resultwas 9 to 3 for Stevenson (counting the Department'ssecretary among the Stevenson supporters).College Park, Md. LELAND B. YEAGER,

University of Maryland

Reprints of RascoeMy February 9 Freeman has just arrived and I hastento inquire the cost of reprints of "Is Your Child anIsolate?" by Burton Rascoe. You've no idea howgreatly needed is this information. There are manyschoolteachers who thoroughly understand the signif­icance of the One World teaching but who lack backingin any effort to resist. This is superb material!Baltimore, Md. HELEN W. JENKINS

[Reprints of this article are now available. See thead on the inside back cover for prices.]

A Word of EncouragementPerhaps you will not find unwelcome a word of gratu­itous encouragement for the new Freeman. I don'tknow how numerous we are, but I think many of ushave longed for a journal of opinion that would upholdthe late William Orton's kind of liberal tradition, thatwould have intellectual respectability, quiet authority,and some of the grace that was present in Nock's oldFreeman. I take it this is more or less your presentaim and I wish you the best of luck in achieving it.

Sandy Hook, Conn. MORTIMER SMITH

Faith of the FreemanIt was good to see "The Faith of the Freeman" printedand to know that the change in the editorial board im­plies no departure from that basic and straightspokendocument. It is hard to see how any thoughtful and

400 THE FREEMAN

fully informed American could dissent from it. I sug­gest that you reprint it in the first January issue ofeach year.

I found the editorial pages of the February twenty­third nunlber all very wise-especiallY "Let's DefendCapitalism." I like the way you state your position andyour views clearly, without equivocation. It is cheeringto those who agree with you, and makes it easier forthose who disagree with you to know exactly whatthey are disagreeing about!

On the whole, I thought this issue the best the Free­man has put out in a long while, although it mightperhaps have sparkled a little more in places. WisdoDlcan be pretty lively reading sometimes - witnessEcclesiastes. I congratulate you, and promise you agreat year if you keep it up.Houston, Texas PAUL ELDREDGE

Burnham's ProponementI was distressed to read in Mr. Burnham's otherwiseexcellent article, "Critique of Containment," that heconsiders the Ukraine's culture separate from that ofRussia.

From Kiev, Russian culture nascented; was carriednorth to Novgorod, for safety from the Mongol horde,and thence to Moscow. The cultures are intrinsicallyinterwoven, and the disparagement of this truisDlevolved from Austrian and later German wartime ex­pediencies, viz., to split their enemy's ranks. To proponeseparate cultures without granting close interrelation­ships is akin to propounding the separation of theUnited States along the Mason-Dixon Line because ofthe variance in culture between New England andVirginia.Bloomington, Ind. NICOLAS MIHAILOFF-SHELLY

An Aim We EndorseYou are what we need in every economics and politicalscience class in the country. You have to grow andprosper because you're the real America, even thoughyour light is hidden under a bushel of Harpers, AtlanticMonthlys, and Saturday Reviews that our "intelligent"friends would not be without. Our aim-to supplantthese on every coffee table with the Freeman/Trona, Calif. EIL"EEN M. AND THOMAS J. STREI

No More Important IssueThe l!~reeman has been unique in its courage in exposingevery facet of Communist infiltration and attelnpts toconfuse our thinking. There is no more important issue,a t least while our sons are still in Korea.Brooklyn, N. Y. M. KIMM

World OrganizationsI read L. Albert Hahn's criticism of supranational or­ganizations with extreme interest. His approach to thesubject seems to me far more judicious and realisticthan I have found in some of your articles dealing withthis and related topics. There is no use to rule out anddenounce in toto the very idea of any sort of integra­tion transcending rigid national boundaries, as someopponents of so-called internationalism do. It is impor­tant instead to ascertain to what extent world, or evensectional, unity can exist, and how to overcome theobstacles working against it. In his able discussion Mr.Hahn has brought forward a number of enlighteningand acute facts. The discussion should be continuedfrom there, and I hope it will be in forthcoming issuesof the Freeman.Philadelphia, Pa. MARCIA BRADFORD

THE

reemanMONDAY, MARCH 9, 1953

The FortnightThe Eisenhower Administration is said to be con­sidering a major contribution in money and muni­tions to help the French against the Communistforces in Indo-China. Before this country rushes into assume yet another of the world's burdens, itwould seem advisable to suggest a wider distribu­tion of the burdens it has already taken on. InKorea, for example, our forces, apart from theSouth Koreans themselves, have been doing somenine tenths of the fighting and dying. Now it isarguable that, because of our comparative wealth,we should assume the lion's share of the financialcost of South Korea's defense. But there is not theslightest reason for extending this financial argu­ment to troop numbers and to blood-letting. Surely,if the Unilted Nations is not a mere fiction, theseought to be proportioned to the relative populationsof the nations involved on our side. A proportionalformula, once adopted in Korea, could then con­ceivably be considered also for the war in Indo­China. But since the beginning of ,the Korean war,the participation formula has been incredibly one­sided: we have supplied the overwhelming bulk ofthe manpower and the casualties, and our U. N.allies, in return for very modest "token" contribu­tions, have been granted a veto power over sltrategyand policy decisions.

There is a striking contrast between the apparentconsequences of removing price controls in 1946and rernoving them today. When price controls wereabandoned in 1946, prices shot up. Or rather theyappeared to shoot up. For many important goodshad not been generally obtainable then at the legalprice ceilings, but only in the black market.Immediately after controls were dropped in 1946,however, the official price indexes showed a sub­stantial rise. This gave birth to the hardy myththat it was the removal of price controls thatcaused the subsequent inflation. Actually the in­flation was caused by what always causes inflation-a continued increase in the supply of money andbank credilt. That supply was increased, in fact,from $176,000,000,000 at the end of 1945 to some$200,000,000,000 today.

Now, although price controls are today being re­moved with almost breath-taking speed, we hear

very little talk of the "inflationary" effect of remov­ing them. Some prices, indeed, have gone up im­mediately after the removal of controls, but othershave been falling. And practically all the hysteriaof the controllists has been directed toward thefalling prices. The hysteria is chiefly about beef.Some of the very people who were most eager tohave the government force down beef prices twoyears ago are most panicky about the decline now.A House Agriculture subcommittee wants the Ag­riculture Department to 'buy "surplus" beef fordonation to a school lunch program. It also wantsto step up mililtary procurement of beef, to putstrict controls on beef imports, and to make emer­gency lo"ans to avert forced sales of cattle.

A sense of proportion might be restored if allsuch people were reminded that only last Decemberbeef and veal were selling 193 per cent higher thanin the period from 1935 to 1939, while the averagerise of all items in the cost of living since then wasonly 91 per cent. They might be further remindedthat the Agriculture Department has just reporteda record 93,600,000 head of cattle on the nation'sfarms and ranches as of January 1. This is 7 percent higher than a year earlier. A falling price isthe free market's way of readjusting such situa­tions. Only harm can come from efforts to preventthat readjustment.

On February 11 the new Secretary of Agriculture,Ezra Taft Benson, speaking in St. Paul, said moresensible and courageous things about agriculturethan all his predecessors for the last two decades.He frankly favored a shift from dependence on"Government bounty" to a "free market" economy."Price supports," he declared, "which tend to pre­vent production shifts toward a balanced supply interms of demand and which encourage uneconomicproduction and result in continuing heavy surplusesand subsidies should be avoided. . . . Inefficiencyshould not be subsidized in agriculture or any othersegment of our economy." In spite of the fact thathe promised to carry out the present law, whichprovides for compulsory price supports at 90 percent of "parity" through 1953 and 1954 (and oughtto be expensive and inflationary enough to satisfyanybody), these few words of wisdom seem to havecost Secretary Benson dearly. Democratic Senatorsare already demanding his dismissal.

MARCH 9, 1958 401

The real reason why the removal of price controlstoday is not accompanied by widespread fear ofinflation is that President Eisenhower has made itplain that he means to halt inflation. And he hasshown that he means to halt it by hal1ting its causes-deficit spending and the creation of more moneyand bank credit. This accounts for the apparentparadox that at a, time when price and wage ceilingsare being rapidly lifted, more fear' is expressed ofdeflation than of inflation. In the next few weeks,in fact, the opposition to the Eisenhower disinfla­tion policy is likely to mount in proportion to theeffectiveness of that policy. Then the test will comeof whether the people of this country really want tohalt inflation, and understand the necessity of doingit enough to be willing to pay the price.

One of the main issues in the last election wasthe Taft-Hartley Act. The Democratic candidateargued that it was anti-labor and ought to berepealed. The Republicans argued that it was pro­labor and needed only to be "amended." The Re­publicans won the argument at the polls. But theyalready act as if they had lost it. Even Senator Taftis now proposing a set of amendments designed toplease the enemies of the act rather than itsfriends. The C. I. O. leaders are attacking the laweven more boldly than during the election. Pre­viously, they pretended to be for "repeal" of theact; now they are unmasking Itheir real purpose,which is to restore the fantastically one-sidedWagner Act. The proposed Taft amendments wouldmeet them half-way in this effort.

The real direction in which the Taft-Hartley law'needs to be changed is indicated by DemocraticCongressman Wingate Lucas of Texas, who has in­troduced an amendment asking for curbs on in­dustry-wide bargaining. It is preposterous thatemployers should continue to be legally compelled,as they are now, to bargain with industry-wideunions, and that the country should be legally putat the mercy of such unions. Did we learn ab­solutely nothing from last year's steel strike?

George F. Kennan, declared persona non grata bythe Soviet authorities after serving a brief term asAmbassador in Moscow, prides himself on a repu­tation as a scholarly expert on Russian affairs. Butone passage in a speech which he delivered at ameeting of the Pennsylvania Bar Association re­veals a gap between what Kennan must know aboutthe international Communist conspiracy against thiscountry and the logical conclusions to be drawnfrom this situation. For Kennan warned against"doing anything at the government level that pur­ports to affect directly the governmental system inanother country." This, he continued, "is not con­sistent with our international obligations. It is notconsistent with the maintenance of formal diplo­matic relations with another country. It is repletewith possibilities of misunderstanding and bitter­ness." Now under the system of diplomatic relations

402 THE FREEMAN

which prevailed before our totalitarian age thesemaxilns would have been entirely sound. But do theyhave any relevance to a situation in which the SovietUnion and its satellites are devoting a large partof their national energies to espionage and sub­versive intrigues designed to sap and undermine thegovernmental systems of all non-Communist states?The Kremlin has challenged us not to a Marquis ofQueensberry boxing match, but to a barroombrawl, and our tactics must be adjusted accord­ingly, if defeat is to be avoided.

The old saying that Satan finds plenty of mischieffor idle hands seems to apply with special force tosuperfluous bureaucrats. Two recent events in Ger­many are cases in point. The British arrested sevenGermans on charges of being involved in a "Naziplot," which, on examination, seemed to be far belowJustice Holmes's standard of clear and present dan­ger. About the same time a branch of the swollenAmerican High Commissioner's Office known asReactions Analysis Staff turned out an alarmistreport about the growth of "neo-Nazism" in Ger­many, based on a sampling of replies to such iffyquestions as "What would you do if a Nazi partyshould try to assume power in Germany?" Boththese developments, whether designedly or not, arecalculated to stimulate doubt and distrust outside ofGermany and to create further obstacles for a mainobjective of American foreign policy: the speediestpossible creation of a European defense force witha substantial German contingent.

News stories from New Delhi, as well as New Deal­ish viewers-with-alarm at home, have spoken withsadness over the recall of Mr. Chester Bowles fromhis post as U. S. Ambassador to India. We are toldthat Mr. Bowles won the undying affection of theIndian masses, or, at any rate, of the Nehru gov­ernment. Chester Bowles endeared himself to dhoti­clad Indian opinion-makers by borrowing a pair ofstriped pants from the Italian ambassador when hemade his first official call. Other actions, we areinformed, were equally in line ,with this initial stepinto New Delhi diplomatic society. As happens sooften to amateur cosmopolitans, Mr. Bowles hasfallen heavily for the exotic ways of India, theplight of its economy, the gaunt and mysteriousfigure of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He has,consequently, displayed some of the gushiness of adowager on her first gondola trip in Venice. He hasalso acted quite often as if he were India's secondambassador to the United 8tates, rather than ourambassador to India. Last year he relturned to thiscountry, loudly proclaiming that he would stirAmerica into making a billion dollar gift to India.This highly undiplomatic shouting from the rooftops quite naturally led to disappointment. Bowleshas failed to transmit the real feeling of theAmerican people to the Nehru government. Hehas cushioned it against the annoyance whichAmericans have felt over Nehru's mollycoddling ofthe Chinese Communists.

Why Yalta MattersIt is symboliQ of a new mood in this country thatsome of the loudest applause during PresidentEisenhower's State of the Union message followedthis implict repudiation of the YaUa Agreement:

We shall never acquiesce in the enslavement ofany people in order to purchase fancied gain for our­selves. I shall ask the Congress at a later date tojoin in an appropriate resolution making clear thatthis government recognizes no kind of commitmentscontained in secret understandings of the past withforeign governments which permit this kind of en­slavement.

The climate of opinion has indeed changed sinceRaymond Swing waxed ecstatic over Yalta withthe observation that "no more appropriate newscould be conceived to celebrate the birthday ofAbraham Lincoln," and William L. Shirer hailed theBig Three compact as "a landmark in human his­tory." The question may be asked: Why does thisconference, held eight years ago by Stalin, Rooseveltand Churchill on the shores of the Black Sea, mattertoday?

It matters tremendously for two reasons, moraland practical. Yalta was the most cynical and im­moral international transaction to which the UnitedStates was ever a partner. It was a repudiation ofall the ideals for which the war against nazism wassupposedly being fought. America came very closeto losing its soul at Yalta. What was even moreominous than the provisions of the agreement wasthe absence, at the time of its publication, of anyloud or audible outcry of protest. It would seemthat the normal American ability to distinguishbetween right and wrong, freedom and slavery, hadbeen badly blurred.

From the practical standpoint, most of our seriousinternational difficulties at the present time can betraced back to a deal which gave Stalin the keysto Eastern Europe and East Asia in exchange forpaper promises which, as anyone with reasonableknowledge of the Soviet record and Soviet psychol­ogy could have anticipated, were broken almost assoon as the ink on the Yalta document was dry.

The principle of self-determination for all peoples,spelled out in the first three clauses of the AtlanticCharter, was completely scrapped at Yalta, althoughthere were hypocritical professions of respect forAtlantic Charter principles in the pact. The Sovietannexation of eastern Poland, definitely sanctioned,and the Polish annexation of large slices of ethnicGerman territory, foreshadowed in the agreement,were obviously against the will of the vast majorityof the peoples concerned. There was no pretense ofan honest plebiscite. These decisions have createdmillions of destitute, embittered refugees, and havedrawn frontier lines which are a very probablecause of future conflicts.

Both the freedom and the territorial independenceof Poland were offered as sacrifices on the altar ofappeasement. The treatment of Poland, carved -upterritorially and made ripe for a foreign dictator­ship, its fate determined by outsiders without eventhe presence of a Polish spokesman, was similar inmany ways to the treatment of Czechoslovakia atMunich. Substitute Yalta for Munich, Poland forCzechoslovakia, Stalin for Hitler, and Roosevelt andChurchill for Chamberlain and Daladier, and theparallel is striking.

And publicists of the Left showed, and sometimesstill show, the apologetic complacency about Yaltathat some publicists of the Right displayed in re­gard to Munich. There are the same distorted andirrelevant arguments a'bout the Sudeten Germans inCzechoslovakia, about the Ukrainians in Poland.There is the same eagerness to find excuses for theassassin and the same impatience with the protestsof the victim against being murdered.

In both ~ases the venture in appeasement was adismal failure. Hitler was not satiated with theSudeten area of Czechoslovakia and Stalin was notsatiated with his acquisitions in Poland. The man­power and industrial resources of Czechoslovakiabecame an asset for the Nazi war machine. AndPoland, with the Soviet Marshal Rokossovsky incommand of its armed forces, is being organizedagainst the West, so far as terror and propagandacan achieve this end.

T"vo features of the Yalta Agreement representendorsement by the United States of the legitimacyof human slavery-scarcely fit news for the birth­day 0f Abraham Lincoln. There was recognitionthat German labor eould be used as a source of"reparations," which could be invoked as j ustifica­tion for the detention at forced labor of large num­bers of German war prisoners in the Soviet Unionand also in France and Great Britain. And there wasa self-assumed obligation by the United States andGreat Britain to repatriate all Soviet citizens intheir zones of occupation. So long as this wascarried out (it has now, fortunately, long beenstopped) there were tragic scenes of actual andattempted suicide on the part of Soviet citizens whofeared above everything else to return to theirhomeland of concentration camps.

Finally, the secret clauses of the Yalta Agree­ment, which offered Stalin extensive territorial andeconomic concessions in the Far East at the expenseof China and Japan, were immoral, unnecessary, andunwise. They were immoral because they gave awaythe rights and interes1ts of an ally, the Nationalistgovernment of China, without consulting or eveninforming Chiang Kai-shek. They were unnecessary,because Stalin's eagerness to be in at the kill in theFar East was beyond serious doubt or question.

MARCH 9, 1953 403

T1hebest proof of ,their unwisdom is the 'weeklycasualty list from Korea. Both the Communist con­quest of China and the war in Korea are directconsequences of drawing the Soviet armed forcesinto Manchuria and N'orth Korea.

Yalta still has its defenders, including DeanAcheson and the court intellectuals of the Rooseveltera. It gave Stalin nothing he could not have takenanyway is one of their arguments. But the heart ofthe moral issue which emerges in considering theYalta sell-out of our friends in the vain hope ofplacating our enemies is the difference betweenactively co-operating in a predatory act and beingunable, temporarily, to prevent such an act.

It is also suggested that it was a great achieve­ment to get Stalin's signature on so many nice­sounding promises. This would seem to be on a parwith attributing financial acumen to a man whowould accept at face value a number of bad checksfrom a notoriously fraudulent bank. The Yaltapromises were far from being the first that Stalinhad broken.

To repudiate Yalta by joint action of the Pres­ident and the Congress will not undo the evil thatwas wrought there. But it is the kind of moralgesture that is very much worth making. It will bean act of repentance and expiation for the past, anda pledge that the way of appeasement is not theway America will follow in the future.

Italy's Taxes and OursThe reader, after dealing with his own Form 1040or 1040A, may wish to be entertained with cheer­ful tax intelligence from faraway places. We hap­pen to have such information on hand, dealingwith Italy's recently enacted income tax law. LikeFrance and other Latin nations known for wine,women, and song, Italy has a gay tradition of na­tion-wide income tax evasion. The new law tries tocounter this tradition by being not too drastic.

In fact, Italy's income tax law is so un-drasticthat, to the American taxpayer, it reads like pureescape literature. As Ame'rican taxpayers havepaid some two billion dollars for aid to Italy sinceWorld War Two, they have a' very direct interestin Italian finances. Here are the details.

Suppose an Italian made the equivalent of $1,600last year, which is 1,000,,000 lire-how much taxdoes he pay? His tax is 3.17 per cent, while anAmerican in the same tax bracket has to pay 20per cent of his income in taxes. An Italian whomakes the equivalent of $8,000 has to part withonly 6 per cent, or the equivalent of $480. AnAmerican with the same income has to turn $1,960over to the tax collector.

This discrepancy becomes really huge when wecompare larger incomes. An American who makes$80,000 has to pay more than $50,000 in taxes; anItalian with the same income pays only about$13,000. Millionaires do even better in Italy. If

It 0 4 THE FREEMAN

you're lucky enough to make a million in theUnited States, the Collector of Internal Revenueprobably lets you keep only about $114,000. AnItalian who makes the equivalent of a million dol­lars can keep half of it.

"Ve know that it is considered indelicate to at­tach strings to the aid we send abroad. But, at in­come tax time, even the most sensitive have theirboorish moments, and are likely to ask: Can'tcountries that get grants and loans from the U. S.taxpayer impose the same kind of taxes Americansare forced to pay?

The Public Comes FirstThe Eisenhower Administration has revived andendorsed the proposal to elevate the Federal Se­curity Agency to a department of the governmentand thus to promote Mrs. Hobby to membershipin the ca'binet as Secretary of a Department ofWelfare, if that is whrut it will be called. The pro­posal is, of course, not new. It was raised severaltimes during the incumbency of Oscar Ewing, Mrs.Hobby's predecessor. But Congress shied awayfrom doing anything for Mr. Ewing, partly be­cause it disliked his propaganda, but primarily be­cause he behaved as if he was more alert to specialinterests than to the nartional, orpu1blic, interest.,As things stand today no one expects these objec­tions to apply to Mrs. Hobby.

There are obviously many good reasons in ad­ministrative theory and practice for taking thisstep. The functions of the Security Agency arenow part of the permanent activities of the federalgovernment. They are more likely than not to grow.Much may be said for centering responsibility forthe policies and decisions of such a far-flung andexpensive undertaking. Common sense would sug­gest the wisdom, policy-wise and budget-wise, ofweaving these loose threads into the permanentfabric of the government. These considerationsassume added force rut the present time when theadministration in Washington is deeply concernedover wasteful expenditures and is seriously bent oneliminating them.

Long experience in Washington, however, raisesstrong doubts as to how efficacious this sort of so­lution of the central problems of excessive spend­ing and centralization of authority has been inpractice. In the now lengthy era of the expansionof federal power and spending, several of the es­tablished departments of the government, notablyAgriculture and Labor, came to behave like special­interest or pressure-group divisions of the govern­ment. What they increasingly did appeared to havelittle relation to the public interest and welfare.They became the inveterate spokesmen of privateorganizations. They used their great influence toinspire even more extreme demands from theirconstituents. In agriculture this process reachedits climax under Secretary Brannan. Now his suc-

cess@r, Secretary Benson, attempting to redefineand limit the boundaries of public and private in­terest, faces the dilemma created by many years ofmisguided policy.

The case of the Department of Labor is stillworse. In their zeal for reform, administrators oftlhis department condoned mutiny at sea duringthe period of the unionization of seamen and long­shoremen. In their efforts to secure the organiza­tion of the automobile industry, they asserted themorality and legality of the sit-down strike on thescale and in the manner in which this weapon wasbeing employed in the auto and other industries.It is not too much to say that the policy-makersand executives of this department took the lead insubordinating the authority of the local to thefederal government and in disregarding both legis­lative intent and the language of the law wheneverit suited their purpose to do so.

What happened during the tenure of Mr. MauriceTobin a'S Secretary of Labor shows how demoralizeda department can become in which the tradition ofserving private interesrts has become firmly rooted.When that happens public servants begin to showlittle concern for the public interest. At any rate,that is the way Secretary Tobin behaved when hesaid thart he saw no need to be "impartial" in thesteel strike of last year and that he was with thestrikers "heart and soul."

Attitudes of this kind toward standards of pub­lic policy and administration are hard to discardonce they have been long in common use. Privateinterests then begin to think of agencies of govern­ment as their representatives, promoting whateverit is they happen to want at any given time. Evenhigh officials of the government tend to lose sightof the line that divides the public from the privateinterest. If there is anything in the persistent ru­mor that the present Secretary of Labor has askedthe officials of the CIO to choose an assistant­secretary, and has acceded to their demand thatthe person so chosen will share in mlaking the de­partment's major policies, then Mr. Durkin-andthe Administration-are pursuing a dangerous pol­icy which would threaten to obliterate the distinc­tion, already badly blurred, between private andpublic policies and objectives.

During its history the Federal Security Ad­ministration has not been free from similar issuesand difficulties. Like all large and gro'wing agencies,this one too has always wanted to extend its juris­diction and authority, encroach on the prerogativesof the states, and devise new activities it is eagerto undertake. The authorities in Washington haveoften quarreled with State administrators abouthow to handle unemployment compensation. Theadministration of grants-in-aid to States for reliefhas been a fertile source of difference. It culmi­nated in the revolt several years ago by the Stateof Indiana, and a similar imbroglio between Wash­ington and the government of N'ew York State.The 'character of the campaign this federal ageneyhas waged for national compulsory health insur-

anee, or state medicine, is too familiar to requirefurther comment now.

These issues, and many others like them, Mrs.Hobby will be required to cope with whether shebecomes a Secretary of Welfare or remains Ad­ministrator of Social Security. In either case shewill be d~aling with questions of government whichaffect agencies other than her own. She will alsobe dealing with a behavior of public bodies whichneeds badly to be reformed and reversed. No onecabinet member or agency chief can successfullyperform this operation alone. What is Reeded isclear recognition by the present Administration ofthe extent to which the making of public policy hasfallen into private hands, and the determination todo something about it.

The Butter 'GlutIn the struggle against Communism it seems im­portant to know whether or not Russia has theatom bomb. But a great many dairymen in theUnited States are much more deeply concerned withthe fact that a spread for bread is being producedwithout batterfat. N'ot only that, but acceptablesubstitutes for whipped cream, ice cream, cheese­and even milk itself-are being produced, and mar­keted in rising volume, without so much as a glo­bule of real cow's butterfat. These facts also havetheir bearing on the sitruggle against Communism.

At least these are relevant facts if Communismmeans a resort to compulsory state intervention inplace of competition as the regulator of human re­lationships in the market place. Butter producersare less than happy to see vegetable oil margarinedisplacing their product as the number one spreadfor daily bread in the typical American household.And the government has been invited to do some­thing about this competition.

While American consumers were giving thankslast fall for bountiful harvests, their governmentwas busy trying to store up the "surplus." LastNovember 30, when the butter market began to re­flect something less than the official concept of afair price-90 per cent of parity-the governmentbegan buying the so-called surplus. That "surplus"has been running about a million pounds a day. Atsuch a rate, the government might easily be theholder of 100 million pounds of butter by the endof March when the current support plan is scheduledto expire.

To the everlasting credit of many dairymen,they recognize that the compulsory interventionbehind this subsidy operation is hurting ratherthan helping them. But they are in a minority.

The theory behind a subsidy, like the one forbutter, is that it benefits a Hclass" of producers.The fallacy in this theory stems from the fact thatdairymen are individuals, each competing with theothers for a market outlet. 'The subsidy helps keepthe "class" large, but how is that of benefit to the

MARCH 9, 1953 405

individual dairyman? Undoubtedly the subsidy con­ceals from the lessefIicient dairyman the fact thathe has failed. But is it a kindly and beneficial actto entice a man into further production of a com­modity which can',t meet competition by the test ofconsumer choice? No self-respecting cow should beasked to stand upon such an artificially supportedstructure-nor should her owner. It can only be arnatter of time until tax-paying consumers of mar­garine, who outnumber butter producers at leastten to one, will vote to let this false structure fall.

Meanwhile a Communist-hating American pubHcis unwittingly indulging in its own brand of col­lective compulsion which does harm to all tax­paying oitizens. And the greatest injury of all growsout of the public ill-will which inevitably builds upagainst the subsidized "class" or group-in thiscase the hard-working dairymen.

This is not to say or to imply that dairymen as agroup are being more heavily subsidized than areother groups. It is to say that the something-for­nothing philosophy-"to each according to hisneed" by means of state intervention-is detri­mental to the development of the ind.ividual. It en­courages him to spend his efforts in the productionof things which are less wanted, thus denying po­tential production of more useful goods and serv­ices. A peaceful and prosperous society can not de­velop out of adherence to such principles of collec­tive pauperism.

Jefferson vs. StevensonDespite his capacity for uttering suave wisecracks,Adlai Stevenson showed less than a full grasp ofThomas Jefferson's basic ideas when he affirmed atthe J efferson-Jackson Day dinner that the J effer­sonian philosophy found expression in Franklin D.Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Jefferson believedthat the government which governed least governedbest. This was scarcely the guiding star of the NewDeal and the somewhat more abortive and innoc­uous "Fair Deal." Leafing through Jefferson'sletters, one finds texts that would hardly be suitablefor New Deal sermons. So Jefferson in Monticellowrote to Colonel Charles Yancey: "We are nowtaught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon papercan produce as solid wealth as hard labor in theearth. It is, vain for common sense to urge thatnothing can produce but nothing." Which would bebad news for any planner. And a letter to SamuelKerchevel contains small comfort for the lavishspenders of public funds: "We must make ourelection between economy and liberty, or profusionand servitude.... Private fortunes are destroyedby public as well as by private extravagance...And the fore horse of this frightful team is publicdebt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretch­edness and oppression." It is a pity that Jeffersonis not available as· a speaker at modern JeffersonDay dinners.

406 THE ~'REEMAN

How to UnderdevelopAt the end of its last session the United NationsGeneral Assembly did a silly thing. It gave an en­couraging nod to governments that nationalize"their natural wealth and resources," but didn'tsay that private owners must be> properly treatedand reimbursed. U. S. delegate Dr. Isador Lubinquite rightly told the Assembly that its .resolution"will be interpreted by private investors as a dan­ger signal-a warning to private investors, every­where in the world, that they had better think twicebefore they place their capital in underdevelopedcountries."

We think the countries that backed the U.N.resolution, many of them in the "underdeveloped"category, just haven't caught up with the changedattitude of the United States. They don't seem torealize that Americans want to replace their gov­ernment's foreign aid with private capital whereverpossible. Even ex-Secretary of Commerce CharlesSawyer said during the fade-out of the DemocraticAdministration that "additional aid borrowings,other than military aid, can well come from privateinvestment and the already established and oper­ating lending agencies."

Even the Truman Point Four program was sup­posed to be made up of both government and privateinvestment abroad. The new Administration willcertainly trim down non-military aid where privatecapital is available. Since 1943, American privateinvestment abroad has about doubled; it came tonearly $12 billion by the end of 1950. If it isn'tscared away, private capital would doubtless in­crease its contribution to economic development inother countries.

The National Foreign Trade Council was quickto point out that the U.N'. resolution has two "ob-'jectionable features." First, the Council said, wasits endorsement of "the right of governments totake over private property for public purposes,without prior provision for just, prompt, and effec­tive compensation." Second, the Council objected tothe suggestion that governments "establish or con­duct enterprises designed to promote economicdevelopment or to carryon economic activities of aprivate enterprise character."

The New York Stock Exchange believes the reso­lution will ,have "unfortunate and long-lasting ef­fects on the free flow abroad of capital from thiscountry." The Exchange said: "Invesltors are told,in effect, that their investments will be subject tonationalization without compensation."

We like the clear-cut stand of the American dele­gation on the U.N.'s short-sighted resolution; afresh breeze seems to be blowing through the cor­ridors of the State Department. That's all to thegood, because the world must realize that Americansdo not approve of piracy by government that mas­querades behind nationalization without propercompensation.

Germany's Dilemma

By FREDA UTLEY

A noted correspondent, just back from Germany, setsforth some of the problems confronting Ithe BonnParliament when ratification \of the treaties with~he Western Allies comes up before ~t [this month.

THE PROBLEM facing the Bonn Parliament is onewhich even Solomon would have found hard to

solve. If it ratifies the "Contractual Agreement"and the European Defense Community" treaty,signed in Bonn and Paris at the end of May, it willbe accepting the severance of Germany into twoparts. If it refuses to ratify them" it will not havebrought German unity any nearer, but will havedenied to the West Germans the limited sovereignty,freedom, and security offered them by America,Britain, and France. Moreover, failure to ratifywill appear to signify Western Germany's refusalto join our side and play her part in the defenseof Europe. For few Americans are aware of thecontents of the treaties and of the real reasons whythere is such strong opposition to their ratification.

The fact is that it is precisely because the Ger­mans are better informed about Communism thanwe are that they are doubtful of the value of thetreaties either to ,them or to the rest of the westernworld. The Germans have been through too muchnot to be realists. Both their experiences underNazi rule and their intimate knowledge of SovietRussia and of the East German "People's Repub­lic" have taught them that no people under the heelof a totalitarian tyranny can decide its own destiny.lIenee the skepticism with which they regard theassurances given them last year by McCloy, andmore recently by Dulles, that the "power of attrac­tion" of a free, prosperous, and strong "EuropeanAtlantic Community" will lead to the reunificationof Germany in "peace and freedom." This seems tothem to be either foolish wishful thinking or acruel deception. In the words of the generally re­spected, moderately conservative, and widely readFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "To believe allat once that the Russians would be so impressed bythe appearance of a European army that theywould evacuate the Soviet zone and more, and handover the whole of Germany to the Western powersis wildly optimistic."

Far from believing that the addition of sometwelve German divisions to the NATO forces willso frighten the Kremlin that it will beat a hastyretreat from eastern Europe, the Germans fearthat ,by signing up with the West they will "petrify"the division of Germany into two parts. It is, there­fore, by no means only the Socialists who feel, likethe late Dr. Schumacher, that the treaties "havebeen signed on the backs of some twenty millionhelpless Germans under Communist dictatorship,

who are starving for freedom and now see it van­ish while terror is certain to increase." Since Schu­macher's death last year his prophecy has beenamply fulfilled, as witnessed by the mass exodus ofGermans from the East zone to Berlin.

It can not be denied that the treaties binding theFederal Republic to the West offer little or no hopeof German reunification. By reserving to the West­ern occupying powers all rights "over the problemsof unification and the peace settlement" they ex­pressly forbid the West German government to ne­gotiate with Moscow for the liberation of EastGermany. At the same time they insure that WestGermany's future army is to be so tightly con­trolled by EDC that it can never be used to liberateEast Germany. Since there is obviously no chanceof Germany's being reunited on terms which wouldbe acceptable to the Kremlin and also to Washing­ton, London, and Paris, and since NATO is pledgedto a purely defensive policy, the treaties rule outGerman reunification.

Concern for Security

Another factor which has to be taken into con­sideration is the mistrust engendered by the pro­Soviet policies of the Western Powers during thefirst years of the occupation. "How can we be sure,"I was often asked during my recent sojourn inGermany, "that Britain and France, given the op­portunity, would not take advantage of this clausein the 'Peace Contract' to Inake another bargainwith Moscow at our expense?" In view of thestrength of the Communists in France and Britain'ssacrifice of other considerations to her desire totrade with the enemy-as exemplified in her Chinatrade-these fears are not groundless.

By our own actions we have made the Germanssomewhat skeptical of our democratic professionsand the ultimate aims of our policy. Having parti­tioned Germany in alliance with Soviet Russia, andoccupied her in order to demilitarize her, we nowsay that we will not disoccupy her until she rearms.

In the view of most Germans an end to the oc­cupation is worth a very high price. But, they ask,is the occupation really to end, or is it in fact to becontinued under a new name? The treaties not onlyperpetuate Allied control over Germany's foreignpolicy. They also severely curtail her internal sov­ereignty. And an "emergency clause" permits us tosuspend the German Constitution adopted. in 1949

MARCH 9, 1953 407

should we ever consIder there exists "a threat tothe basic democratic order."

Moreover, even if West Germany, once she hasraised twelve divisions for European defense, cancount lipon becoming free and equal to the otherWestern powers, has she the right, as Dr. Pfleiderer,a Free Demo'cratic Party deputy, expressed it onJune 6, 1952, "to buy the freedom of fifty millionWest Germans at the cost of the slavery of twentymillion East Germans"?

Such sentiments are not universal in Germanytoday. Most Germans in the Federal Republic would,no doubt, agree with the popular weekly, Der Spie­gel, which said: "If the treaties offered us security,we could talk about them."

Having supped their fill of nationalism underHitler, and reaped the terrible consequences, themajority of Germans today are, I think, less "na­tionalistic" than their conquerors. Seeing no pres­ent possibiUty of reuniting Germany, they would,in all proba'bility, be prepared to make a virtue ofnecessity, if the sacrifice of their "brothers in theEast" ensured their own security and freedom. Butas the treaties stand they not only fail to give theFederal Republic freedom and equality in the com­munity of Western nations; they also fail to pro­vide any hope of real security for the West Ger­mans or the rest of Europe.

If War Comes

Having themselves fought the Russians, the Ger­mans can not imagine that an army of twenty orthirty divisions of mixed nationality could stem theonslaught of two hundred Russian divisions. Mostof them agree with Carlo Schmid, the deputy leaderof the Socialist Party, who said to me in Bonn: "Ifwar comes with the Russians, then all that is beingprepared to defend Europe against them is worth­less."

The people who defeated France so easilY,butfailed to conquer Russia, have no confidence in aEuropean army, of whatever size, in which Francewould play the leading role. Germany would defendFrance if permitted to do so. But, as the wife of·one of the most famous anti-Nazis now in officeremarked in conversation with me last December,as she looked across the tea table at her 23-year-oldson: "How can I, or any German mother, feel any­thing but fear if my son has to serve in an armyin which French divisions are depended upon forsupport?"

All this is not to say that the Germans would re­fuse to serve in a European army. They would, Ithink, have little hesitation in following Dr. Ade­nauer's lead if we permitted them to mobilize theirfull strength for the defense of the West and forthe eventual Hberation of Eastern Germany. But.they see no sense in pretending that there can everbea real European Defense Community so long asFrench governments continue to dream of a Ger­man army stronger than Russia's but weaker thanFrance's. They know that the Communist menace

408 THE FREEMAN

can be avoided only by the mobilization of the fullstrength of the western world, and by a positivepolicy in place of "containment." Thus, so long aswe fail to set German energies free, there will beGermans who consider that their only hope is tocome to terms with Moscow. The truly surprisingfact is that there are still so few Germans preparedto follow the lead of a minority of former Nazisand Communists who want Germany to throw inher lot with Russia. But there remains a generaldesire to find out if there is any substance to Stalin'soffer of March 10, 1952, to permit Germany to re­unite, be freed of occupation forces, and have herown army for her own defense, provided she be­comes a "neutral" in the East-West conflict.

Russian Temptation

The temptation of the Russian offer, if it shouldbe repeated, should not be underestimated.I,Althoughmost Germans realize that Stalin may only be play­ing acat-and-mouse game, they will be inclined toexamine every possibility of reuniting Germanyand winning some sort of independence, so long aswe refuse to treat them as full-fledged allies.

There is little doubt that the great majority ofGermans now want to become "good Europeans."Were we to offer "our Germans" freedom andequality in NATO and the prospect of being ableto mobilize their full strength for their own de­fense and that of Western Europe, and for theeventual liberation of East Germany, they wouldhave little or no hesitation in joining up with theWest. To a considerable extent we are still failingto recognize fully just what adherence to the Euro­pean Defense Community requires of West Ger­many. They must accept the division of theircountry; in the event of war with Russia what re­mains to them will, situated as it is in the veryfront line of the battle, surely be overrun and devas­tated; furthermore, the cost, added to that of occu­pation, constitutes more than a burden. In a word,the treaties, which Dr. Adenauer is trying so hardto get ratified, do not, in the general German view,eompensate for the sacrifices and risks which theyentail.

According to such newspapers as the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, the Bonn agreement "is basedon the powers of the victors." According to the So­cialist press it is "precise in defense of the rightsand interests of the victors of 1945, but vaguewhere German rights and interests come into ques­tion."

The Bonn treaty gives the Federal Republic moreof the shadow than the substance of sovereignty.It consists mainly of a multitude of provisions per­petuating the special privileges and rights of West­ern allied nationals; continuing our interference inthe organization of the German economy; and in­suring "the continued· validity" of past allied legis­lation.

The "Contractual Agreement" starts off by say­ing in Article One that the United States, Britain,

and France are "determined to retain only thosespecial rights of which the retention is necessary,in the common interest of the Signatory States."The following hundred pages of text make it abun­dantly clear that the term "common interest" coversso much territory as to discount the claim that weare restoring sovereignty, freedom, and equality tothe Federal Republic. The proviso "except as pro­vided· in the. present convention" appears on almostevery page. Our "common interest" is held to j us­tify our continuing interference in the organiza­tion of the German economy, either for the benefitof her British and Continental trade rivals, or tofurther the aims of the New Dealers in the U. S.High Commissioner's office, who long to force Ger­many to abandon free private enterprise. Thetreaty even contains a section relating to the re­tention of our hunting and fishing privileges, al­though we have graciously agreed that we shallhenceforth observe German game laws.

To take an instance of that "common interest"the treaty insists that the German coal, iron, andsteel industry, which have already suffered soseverely from dismantlement, are to be furtherhandicapped in competition with Britain's socializedindustries by being split up into small uneconomicunits insuring maximum production· costs. The factthat these measures are being insisted upon underthe good-sounding name of "decartelization" doesnot change their effect. Moreover, .West Germanyhas already voluntarily handicapped herself, for thesake of a Franco-German accord, by ratifying theSchuman plan, the immediate result of which is toincrease German coal prices at home in order tohelp France's new iron and steel plants, constructedwith American subsidies.

Problem of Refugees

In addition to having to provide for the millionsof destitute people expropriated and expelled fromtheir homes in the East as a result of the Yaltaand Potsdam agreements, the Federal Republic isobligated to provide for the ever-increasing streamof refugees from all countries behind the Iron Cur­tain who escape into Germany. Thus the Germansare required to pay for Stalin's crimes as well asfor Hitler's. The burden which this places on theable-bodied working population is enormous.Twenty-one per cent of the population of the Fed­eral Republic exists on relief payments, or pensions,including four million wounded veterans or widowsof the fallen. Many of the expellees and refugeesexist on a dole of $18 a month, or even less. This isa substantial drain on the national budget.

Western Allied nationals are to be exempt fromsuch German tax burdens as the "Equalization ofBurdens" law. Thus, foreign firms such as the Fordautomobile company and the big U. S. oil distribu­tors are to be given an unfair advantage over theirGerman competitors.

Nor are the heavy burdens constituted by theWestern occupation forces to be substantially re-

duced. The occupiers will continue to enjoy the useof the homes and apartments, hotels, swimmingpools, theaters and restaurants requisitioned sevenyears ago. It should her~ be noted that occu:p.ationcosts have all along far exceeded the amounts whichthe Federal Republic has received in dollar aid.Even if one adds to the total of 1.4 billion of ECAand MSA appropriations, the earlier GARIYO re­lief of 1.5 billion, accounted as a debt, the total ofdollar aid comes to only 3 billion, as against a 10billion total for occupation costs. Today West Ger­many is no longer receiving any MSA aid but ispaying occupation costs at the rate of 142.8 milliondollars a month, or 1.7 billion a year. And some re­n1aining counterpart funds are being used to con­struct spacious dwellings for State Department of­ficials, instead of to supply housing for the millionsof people living in cellars, camps, and old air-raidshelters. True, in a year's time, only part of Ger...many's "defense contribution" will be used tomaintain the Western occupation forces in theluxury to which they have become accustomed. Butadditional taxation will also have to be imposed topay for German rearmament.

Gravest Objection

The gravest of all the German objections to thetreaties they are being urged to ratify is their de­nial of the validity of the 1949 German Constitu­tion. The Karlsruhe Constitutional Court, estab­lished as a replica of the U. S. Supreme Court, cannot maintain its function as the defender of thelaws and of freedom if it ag'rees that the Westernallies have the right to suspend the Constitutionwhenever they decide to. This is the reason whyeven some of Dr. Adenauer's most loyal supportershave felt compelled to oppose him on the Treatyissue.

I have omitted from this article consideration ofsuch issues as that of the "war criminals," manyof whom are believed in Germany to have com­mitted no other crime than to have taken measuresagainst Communist partisans comparable to thosewe have been compelled to adopt in Korea. Norhave I touched upon other provisions of the "PeaceContract" which the Germans consider unjust, suchas our confiscation of German private propertyabroad. The main fact is that whatever our feelingstoward the Germans, and however much justifica­tion there may, or may not, have been for ouroriginal occupation policies, we have now got toface the fact that Europe can not be defended with­out them. And it is obviously impossible to enlistthe valor and military genius and patriotism ofthe Germans against the Communist menace so longas we continue to treat them like prisoners on pa­role required to pay for Hitler's crimes for the restof their lives. No one can deny that Dr. Adenauer'sGovernment is anxious to co-operate with us to thefullest possible extent. We should not make it'im­possible for him to retain power by refusing torecognize Germany's dilemma.

MARCH 9, 1953 409

"Freedom is Slavery"

By LUDWIG VON MISESI n this down-to-earth picture of the basic factsabout goods and the consumer, Dr. von Mises showshow 'lvords often get turned into their opposites.

ONE OF THE MOST remarkable features of ourage is the propensity toward changing the

meaning of political terms. A semantic revolutionconverts the sense traditionally attached to wordsinto its opposite. George Orwell has ingeniouslydescribed this tendency in his Nineteen Eighty­Four. The second of the three slogans of Oceania'sParty 'says: Freedom is Slavery. In the opinion ofthe "progressive" intellectuals, Orwell's dictum isthe talk of a hysteric; nobody, they shout, has everventured to 'utter such a nonsensical proposition.

Unfortunately the facts belie their denial. Thereprevails in the writings of many contemporaryauthors the disposition to represent every extensionof governmental power and every restriction of theindividual's discretion as a measure of liberation,as a step forward on the road to liberty. Carriedto its ultimate logical conclusion, this mode of rea­soning leads to the inference that Socialism, thecomplete abolition of the individual's faculty toplan his own life and conduct, 'brings perfect free­dom. It was this reasoning that suggested to So­cialists and Communists the idea of arrogating tothemselves the appellation liberal.

Professor Robert L. Hale of Columbia Universityhas just published a voluminous book, Freedomthrough Law, Public Control of Private GoverningPower.* It is a passionate plea in favor of govern­ment control of business and a review of the legis­lation and the rulings of the courts concerning thesubject. As a compilation of legal material such abook may have some merit. But the author aims atmore. His ambition is to justify the policy of inter­ventionism from the point of view of the philosophyof law as well as from that of the American consti­tutional and legal system.

We may pass over the fact that the author en­tirely fails in this endeavor. For even if he hadfully succeeded in proving his point, he would nothave advanced any tenable argument in supp0rt ofthe policies he advocates. The question whether theUnited States should preserve the private enter­prise system or should adopt what is nowadayseuphemistically called direct controls is not a prob­lem of general philosophy or of jurisprudence. It isa problem of economic policy. It has to be decidedaccording to the effects to be expected from, oralready 'brought about by, the policies concerned.Only economic considerations can clarify such issues.

*Columbia University Press, New York, 1952; $7.50.

410 THE FREEMAN

The case against interventionism is not based onthe interpretation of the Constitution. (Incidentally,most of the recent interventionist measures arecertainly unconstitutional.) The economists do notraise the question whether or not interventionismis legal or illegal, good or bad, desirable or unde­sirable. They demonstrate that the various measuresof government interference with market phenomenado not produce the results aimed at 'by the govern­ments resorting to them. These measures rathercreate a state of affairs which-from the very pointof view of the government itself and all the advo­cates of interventionism-is more undesirable thanthe previous state of affairs which they were de­signed to alter. If the government, faced with thisinevitable outcome, does not want to repeal its de­crees and to return to economic freedom, but goeson with its interventionist policy, it must add tothe first decrees more and more decrees until it hasregimented every aspect of the citizens' lives, theiractivities in production as well as the mode of theirconsumption. Then any kind of freedom-economicor political-disappears, and totalitarianism of thetype of the Hitler Zwangswirtschaft emerges. In­terventionism is not an economic system that canlast. It can not be preserved permanently. It musteither be abolished or it must lead step by step toall-around planning by the government, to full so­cialism, a system in which nobody is free.

State an Apparatus of Coercion

A state or a government is an apparatus of co­ercion and compulsion. Within the territory that itcontrols, it prevents all agencies, except those thatit expressly authorizes to do so, from resorting toviolent action. A government has the power to en­force its commands by beating people into submis­sion or by threatening them with such action. Aninstitution that lacks this power is never called agovernment.

The reasoning that leads Professor Hale toequate every business deal between private citizenswith governmental coercion and to call all suchtransactions the exercise of private governingpower runs this way:

Every person has a certain amount of bargainingpower on which he depends for his livelihood. Bar­gaining power is power to exert pressure on thosewith whom one carries on transactions-in other

words to coerce them. Each person exerts somedegree of coercion over other people's liberty, whileat the same time his own liberty is subject to somedegree of control by others.

The government says to the citizen: Pay taxes ormy armed constables will imprison you. The bakersays to the prospective customer: If you want meto serve you and to :bake bread for you, then youmust reward me by doing something for me. In theopinion of Professor Hale there is no difference be­tween the two modes of acting. Both are coercion,both are government of men over men, both are in­fringements of other people's liberty. The bakercoerces the dentist by selling him bread and thedentist coerces the 'baker by filling the cavities ofhis teeth. Wherever you look in this worst of allthinkable worlds you discover restrictions of lib­erties. But fortunately paternal government stepsin to salvage liberty. It saves Hberty precisely bycurtailing it. For, says Professor Hale,

. . . it is a fallacy to assume that every attemptby the state to control and to revise the economicresults of bargaining involves a net curtailment ofindividual liberty. It mayor may not do so. If theliberty of those whom it restrains is less vital thanthe liberty which those persons would themselvesrestrain, then state intervention may spell a netgain in individual liberty ... It becomes necessaryat times for the political state to curtail the freedomof powerful groups to dominate.

Private Governing Power

Some years ago Mrs. X used to prepare the soupfor the family meals in her own kitchen~ Later shebegan to buy canned soup manufactured by one ofthe country's canneries. A clear-headed observerwill argue that the lady for some reason considersthis mode of supplying her family with soup aspreferable to the previous method. Not so ProfessorHale. In his eyes coercion is present. The cannery,in manufacturing soup and selling it to Mrs. X,exercises governing power. As the cannery is aprivate firm, not a government owned and operatedfactory 'as in Russia, there is something highly im­moral and reprehensible in the matter. For it isprivate governing power. And as everybody agrees.that all governing power belongs by right to thegovernment, it is obvious to Professor Hale thatthe government must curtail this power of the can­nery "to dominate" Mrs. X by manufacturing soupfor her.

The way in which Professor Hale describes theoperation of the market economy is, to say theleast, amazing. Thus he declares:

. . . the customer can deny his money to the retailer,and by threatening to deny it can coerce the retailerto furnish him with the goods.

NoW,millions of people in this way "threaten" thejewelers of Fifth Avenue; they "threaten to denytheir money to them." Yet those "threatened" donot furnish them with bracelets and necklaces. Butif a hold-up man turns up and threatens the jewelerin his own manner, by brandishing a gun, the ourt-

come is different. It seems therefore that whatProfessor Hale calls threats and coercion compre­hends two entirely different things having entirelydifferent features and consequences. His failure todistinguish these two things from one anotherwould be deplorable in a non-technical book. In apresumably juridical book it is simply catastrophic.

It would not 'be necessary to pay much attentionto Professor Hale's volume if his mode of arguingwere peculiar to him alone. But these views are infact fashionable nowadays. For instance, in theYale Review of Spring, 1952, Professor Sutherlandof the Harvard La'w School ina similar way sug­gested restriction of "private government." We en­counter here a new slogan designed to replace theworn-out labels of the Ne'w and Fair Deals. Let ushope that this new catchword will not fool anybody.

Fast AnswersIn an appearance on February 18 before the Senatecommittee investigating the Voice of America,Howard Fast refused to say whether he is a mem­ber of the Communist Party. The answer, he as­serted, might tend to incriminate him. He also re­fused to say whether he would fight in Korea ifdrafted. If anyone is in doubt what the answerwould be, it may be inferred from a letter he sentrecently to the French Communislt paper, L'Hu­m.anite, discussing the Rosenberg case. The follow­ing excerpts reveal 'his attitude to his country andto the truth, and his fidelity to the Communistparty line in representing America as ruled by aHitlerite terror.

"Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have been sentencedto death as hostages for the working class and as athreat to !those who want to end American im­perialist aggression in Korea. . . . The idea of le­galized murder and execution of hostages is an oldone in the United 'States.... Irving Saypol, who isa J ewand one of the most fanatic and hatefulanti-Communists, was chosen as pros~cutor, whileanother anti..iCommunist, Judg'e Irving K'aufman,was chosen ,to pronounce the death sentence. Thusit can be claimed that . . . Jews have sent otherJews to their death. The old technique of the"Jewish tribunal" which Hitler used has been usedagain in America. . • .

"What was the purpose of the trial? ... Firstto stir up the mounting flames of anti-Semitism,which is a general element of the propaganda ofthe leaders of both American parties.... Anotherobjective was to demonstrate that the sentence ofdeath could be pronounced against those who be­lieve in 'a peaceful co-existence of the U. S. S. R.and the United States.... No other case has doneso much to spread terror among the Americanminorities. When the case broke, a cloud of fearsuch as I had never seen before seemed to coverthe Jewish masses. Hundreds of American inte'l­lectuals thoug'iht they could only s'ave their. ownlives by eonde'mning the Rosenbergs."

MARCH 9, 1953 411

Portrait of England 1. The Hungry Night

By HOWARD WYCE

awhat)s it all in aid of, that's what I 'f{JJant toknow?" growls the 'man-in-the-pub in BritcUn today.In this timely and u'ntdersttmding :survey Mr., W ycetries to supply some of the 'answers. A secondarticle will deal with literature and the arts.

I T'S RATHER dark in England today, and we walkcarefully, uneasily aware that the path beneath

our feet is unfamiliar. All the same, we go on; per­haps we are making a fuss about nothing, perhapsthe path will, after all, lead us where we want to go.

We are not children, so we're not afraid of thedarkness itself. There have been far -blacker nightsthan this, and on such thunderous nights we man­aged to step out unhesitatingly, knowing our wayblindfold. But now-something seems to have gonewrong with our sense of direction.

Not that we are really' alarmed about things­not yet, anyway. The English have always had thegift of making a full meal on crumbs of comfort,with ;good-humored grumbling for a condiment,and we still manage to smack our lips with some­thing like the old relish over such crumbs. But Idon't think we have ever before cast so many en­vious or indignant glances at the next man's ta'ble,nor looked ,back so wistfully to feasts of the past.

In the hungry night, daylight is what we allseek; and S'O far there are few gleams of it to beseen. In every facet of our living-in politics, inliterature and the arts, in social organization, evenin entertainment-men peer and grope and try tohope they're going the right way. Nothing is quiteplain or definite any more, nothing wholly good orwholly bad.

You can see this stiff-upper-lipped confusion evenin so unambiguously welcome an occasion as nextsummer's Coronation. I remember the coronation ofKing George VI very well. I was a schoolboy at thetime, a self-consciously calm adolescent of the typestill common among our middle-class youth (thoughnowadays sixteen-year-old lads are judicious andlip-pursing over such things as jazz and Jean-PaulSartre, where we had the Hitler excitements andStephen Spender's liberalism-cum-Communism).The Coronation streets were gay with bunting; wewere presented solemnly with medals and decoratedmugs; people bought periscopes to see over theheads of crowds; the press was full of noble por­traits of royalty and excited descriptions of thepreparations. A friend and I, still busily concealingour emotions behind the traditional gentlemanlydeadpan, strolled up to the West End on the nightof the celebrations, skirted with astonished glancesthe people dancing in the street outside Ciro's, andwound up in a vast wedge of people outside Buck­ingham Palace. And there, tiny and glittering on

412 THE FREEMAN

the floodlit balcony, appeared the King and Queen.Everyone rushed forward cheering, right up to therailings where red-coated sentries stood motion­less; and we, losing at last our deadly calm, rushedwith them, cheered with them, and went away onlylong after the waving couple high above us hadvanished indoors, embarrassed· and grinning andexalted. It was a wonderfully happy time, thatCoronation, day and night, for all Britain. If wesaw storms blowing up, we never for a momentthought they might sink the ship.

The Coronation

Today, our national ship leaking but not sunk,temporarily at shelter in a harbor that isn't verysatisfactory but will do for the moment, we arepreparing to put out the flags again for QueenElizabeth's Coronation. We are going through thesame motions as we did before. The press iscrowded once again with the royal photographs.Even the stately Times bears tasteful pen draw­ings of Sir Hugh Casson's designs for street deco­rations-fairy-like structures of bells and flowersand waving standards on tall poles, Bond Streetmade operatic with huge crowns and herald trum­pets suspended fifteen feet up along its wholelength, Regent Street a bower of pink roses, andso on. Special committees are approving or reject­ing traders' designs for Coronation souvenirs,Coronation pottery, Coronation stamps~ And yet ...

When the time comes, no doubt we shall enjoy asober gaiety-the sort of restrained, surprisedpleasure that came upon us when first we steppedthrough the gates of Battersea Park, in Festivalyear, and found a man-made Xanadu. But for themoment sobriety predominates. Peers of the realmadvertise worriedly for hired robes. A viscountess,wanting to sell her coronet and robe (presumablyto some newly-rich viscountess who 'can afford togo to the ceremonies) adds the practical note:"Train converted to tea-gown also available." TheGovernment, in a memorandum to local authorities,urges them to keep their celebration spending to"reasonable limits," and to use, for bunting anddecorations, "non-traditional" materials like rayon,which will "save imported raw material." In Scot­land they're still arguing, with restrained rancor,about calling the Queen "Elizabeth II." The Scot­tish nationalists refuse to recognize the first Eliza-

beth as a queen of Scotland, and want to call thepresent one "Eliza1beth I."

We can't, in fact, let ourselves go with free­handed and unworried enjoyment, even on such anoccasion as the coronation of a young and beautifulQueen. There's always something to spoil things,even if the spoiling is unimportant.

It is, of course, more important in political andsocial matters. A little while ago, for instance, theChancellor of the Exchequer announced that Britainhad now a surplus in her gold and sterling reserves.But just in case this should make us too happy, wewere informed in the same breath that naturallythis was only a temporary surplus; that some ofit was due to a drainage on the European PaymentsUnion because of our import restrictions, and wemust soon feel the draft again when the otherEuropean countries stop buying our exports; thata lot more of the reserves would be eaten up in anycase at the end of the year, when loan payments tothe United States and Canada fall due; and so on.No hope, you see, can ever nowadays be left un­qualified by some foreboding or other.

Political Darkness

Politically, the darkness grows daily murkierand more baffling. The Labor Party seems de­termined to cut its own throat. Mr. Attlee and therespectable conservative gentlemen who supporthim have declared war on the fiery Bevan and hisvocalists. The Bevanites used to have a monopolyon mountains manufactured out of molehills (evenMr. Churchill nowadays pursues a defense policynot terribly different from the one Mr. Bevan wasdemanding a year or two ago). Now Attlee andMorrison, with the outraged righteousness ofworms who have turned at last, have managed tomake a minor disagreement into a gulf. It seemsunlikely now that Labor will displace the Tories atthe next general election. The voters are no longersure of what they're supposed to be voting for-aparty that wants more socialism as soon as eventsmake that possible (Bevan's policy), or one thatwants to wait until events make it possible beforegoing on to more socialism (Attlee's policy).

So the Tories are firm and united in power? Notat all! They, too, have their split. There was somealarm and gloom among the ordinary Tory voterswhen Richard A. Butler was given the Treasury,and it has deepened considerably since he took over.Most rank-and-file Conservatives want the more orless complete freeing of business from controls.Butler's group are sticking firmly to the same sortof basic planning that earned the Labor Govern­ment so much hate in the City. There are more andmore demands from the Government's own back­benchers for the removal of restrictions and thesimultaneous cutting down of expenditure. Thereare more and more disapproving frowns and head­shakes from a Treasury bench primly bent on pur­suing its policy of cautious restriction. For us, themen in the street, there is nothing left but to shrug

and try not to seQ the latest atom-bomb headlines.As for foreign affairs, the outlook there is pitch­

dark. We are all, whatever our opinions, prettysure that the road we are on is a wrong turningand probably ends in a sharp landslide. But wecan't very well turn back, in case we find thatsomeone is waiting for us round the first bend witha loaded stick. We hate the idea of rearming Ger­many. London, like many another British city, stillhas ugly wounds left from the Luftwaffe's bomb­ing, and every bus conductor and navvy, passingthose grimy waste lots, feels convinced that thebombs we hand the Germans will come home intime to make more holes. While the newspapersshowed remarkable and quite uncharacteristic re­straint over the painful 'business of giving theKrupps back their millions, almost every man orwoman I heard mentioning it at all did so withbitterness and sick disgust. Most people, on theother hand, clearly understand the military neces­sity to the Allies of having a wall against Russiaeast of the Rhine, and would hesitate to leave Ger­many undefended altogether.

The same resigned bafflement appears on Englishfaces when someone says "Korea" or "Malaya"(Americans seem often to forget that we werefighting a single-handed war in Malaya long beforethe Korean massacre hegan-a failure, no doubt, ofour public relations people). There is among us notrace at all of defeatism on these issues. Britishsoldiers will continue to stump grumpily throughbandits' jungles or tackle hostile tribesmen untilthey're told not to. They will continue to grunt"That's handy, that is !"when a shell falls amongstthem, or call mournfully "Share that among you"as they lob a grenade. And their relatives at homewill continue to accept the necessity of the tem­porary and sometimes permanent loss of their menwith the same dourness as that with which theyface our atrocious weather. But the little man inthe saloon bar who shakes his head over his beerand says, "What's it all in aid of, that's what Iwant to know? Where's it going to stop?" receives,always, a sympathetic growl and nod from his fel­low-philosophers.

T,he Crime Wave

In affairs at home there is also much stumblingand cursing and flashing of lights. What our presscalls "the cr,ime wave" makes the most menacingshadow. It's doubtful whether the "wave" title isjustified: there always have been robberies andmurders and hittings on the head (though not, inthis country, too many shootings), and presumablythere always will be. But certainly there seem moreof them lately than we have been used to. An eve­ning newspaper reported the other day (thoughwith a lack of detail that makes the report a littlesuspect) that a local political party found difficultyin canvassing because householders were afraid ofopening their doors to anyone after dark, in casethey were knocked down and robbed.

MARCH 9, 1953 413

My father, a kindly, slow-moving man with anaive faith in his daily newspaper (a paper, as ithappens, eminently undeserving of such faith), hasbecome so convinced by the headlines that we areall potential victims for thugs that he opened thedoor to me the other day "on the chain." Havingrecognized the inoffensive shape of his loving son,he took the chain off, shooed me in, and hastilylocked the door again. I noticed, with growing as­tonishment, something big and brassy gleaming inhis left hand, which he held bashfully behind hisback. It turned out to be an antique brass pestle,heavy and unwieldy; and he told me, with a boyishpleasure in the game, that he always seized this upfrom its decorative brass mortar in the hall andheld it ready to strike as he opened the door!

"Come on, You Coppers"

This, of course, is sheer play-acting on myfather's part, though he and my mother take itseriously enough. Crossing the road is still farmore dangerous, in modern Britain, than openingyour front door to a stranger. But it remains truethat in three years violent crimes (including rapeand sexual assault) have increased in number bymore than a third. And, what seems even more im­portant, the offenders' average age is getting lessall the time. There was an appalling case the otherday in which a sixteen-year-old boy shot one po­liceman dead and wounded another. He did it shout­ing, "Come on, you coppers ! You gave my brothertwelve years, ,now come and get me!" (a melodra­matic piece of nonsense that seems directly de­rived from cheap ,films).

In the face of this problem of young criminals,all, sorts of suggestions, both wildly silly and so­berly applicable, are being thrust forward. Thewildest is also the most widespread, that corporalpunishment, which was inflicted for armed robberyand robbery with violence until 1948, when it wasabolished, should be reintroduced. At least six timesthis year in the House of Commons, 'and twice inthe House of Lords, Government spokesmen havepointed out that these particular crimes have ac­tually been reduced in number since the use ofwhipping was abolished, and that it seems prettyfoolish, therefore, to claim that the lash was a moreeffective deterrent than imprisonment. News edi­tors, eager to give their readers the narcotic ofvicarious brutality, manage consistently to ignorethese facts and figures. The newspaper with thebiggest circulation of the sensational Sundaypapers ran an article the other day calling for thewhip's return, and decorated the paragraphs withlittle drawings of crossed whips and birches.. Re­grettably, most judges' have added their dry legaltones to the clamor.

In the middle of all the pother, the unarmedBritish bobby plods staidly round his beat, earninguniversal respect and not much else. Wages andconditions in 0ur police' forces are still wretchedlyinadequate, and a lot of' intelligent .comment is now

414 THE FREE'MAN

being directed to this, with demands for improiVe.;.,ments that will attract fresh men into our badhrunderstaffed force.

Beneath the trivial or serious instances of law­lessness that daily leap at us from our newspaperS'?,a moral lies that not many of us seem yet to have~

learnt. Thirteen years ago, war whistled down upomour heads, and blasted family life out of its home.,Our crime problems of today began with the firstbomb on Britain. That bomb brought a flood ofregulations and orders that washed away the ordi­nary citizen's rough-and-ready knowledge of thelaw and left him floundering. You had only to let adraft twitch your black-out curtain to be commit­ting an offense. You needed only to accept the giftof a friend's clothing coupon to be liable for prose­cution. It became impossible, in short, to respectthe law completely; there was just too much of itto cope with. It was in those unhappy years thatthe figure of the racketeer, the black-marketcrook, the smuggler, the spiv,' became romantic, afocus for a grudging admiration, the daredevilrapscallion who gaily defied all those tedious rulesthat made our respectable lives a misery. And itwas in that crook-glamorizing period that ourmotherless and fatherless children grew up in theirhaphazard evacuation homes.

The Habit of Petty Offenses

Thirteen years later the British, who used to bethe most law-abiding people in the world, have de­veloped the habit of committing petty offenses­buying the odd half-pound of black-market butter;falsifying their income-tax returns (our contribu­tion to Western defense imposes on us a more penalload of tax per head than any other nation has tosuffer) ; paying a stranger at a street-corner fornylons they can guess were stolen.

Only the other day the headmistress of one ofour best, and certainly one of our most expensive,girls' schools told an old pupil that for the firsttime in all the years she had been at' the schoolshe had had to give the girls a lecture on elemen­tary honesty. She added hopelessly that· it was ofcourse the parents who ought to have had the lec­ture, but they were un-get-at-able.

If this is the effect of postwar materialism onour wealthiest and most respected families, the ef­fect of poorer and more desperate parents' moralslovenliness on their young can be understood. The"crime wave" would not have happened, I'm quitesure, if there had been no war in 1939; nor wouldit be happening today if, having had a war, we hadstill managed to retain our faith in moral values.But we haven't. Any working-class district todaybristles with television masts; few co'ntain' a housewith a Bible in it.

There is our sickness laid bare; and the courseof the sickness is clearly charted in our literatureand arts.

This is the first of two articles by Mr~ Wyce.

Holland's Heroic Achievement

By MARTIN EBON

In this behind-the-news story Mr. Ebon shows howthe \Dutch, )because of ,their p:olicy o/encouragingprivate industry, find the,mselve,8 in fa strongposition to cope with the recent disastrous floods.

ONCE AGAIN Holland is teaching the world a les­son in self-reliance. Once again the tradi­

tional Dutch characteristic of calm tenacity is be­ing pitted against enormous odds. Dike againstflood, construction against destruction-those arethe symbols of Holland's remarkahle will to sur-,vive.

Here is a nation that has suffered well over athousand deaths, that has sustained more than a.quarter billion dollars worth of damage, that isfaced with the loss of over 300,000 acres of farm-,land-and that says, in the matter-of-fact mannerof August G. Maris, Netherlands D-irector Generalof Waterways: "The next full harvest' can be ex­pected in 1955."

They are already thinking in terms of 1955, andbeyond. They are already preparing the gypsumthat will neutralize the salt which violent floodshave spread over the rich brown Dutch earth~

They are busy repairing dikes, draining the soil,and making plans to prevent a repetition of thedisastrous flood of 1953.

This, in detail, is the damage the Netherlandssuffered as a result of the flood that hit the nationduring the first days of February: 1,395 dead;,nearly 70,000 people made homeless; close to sixper cent of the country's cultivated land flooded;144,000 head of livestock and horses lost to themerciless sea.

The February disaster hit the Netherlandsbarely one week after the nation announced that itwould be able to do without $15 million in dollaraid under the United States Mutual Security Pro­gram. "This action," Secretary of State John Fos­ter Dulles had said, "which is in the best Dutchtradition of self-reliance, deserves the admirationof the American people."

'The same approach which enabled the Nether­lands to go without this' dollar aid is now beingused in repairing the flood damage, putting thecountry back in order, and going about the nation'sbusiness. To study this approach, we have to goback to the spring of 1951. It was then that theDutch decided they didn't like the looks of theircountry's economy.

Just about two years ago, the Netherlands foundUse1-! suffering from a global economic disease:prices were high; wages were' rising; inflationwas mounting. But the Hollanders, in response tothese, conditions, did not follow the line of least re­sistance. They did not tighten controIs on wages

and prices. They did not establish new governmentagencies, clamoring for the taxpayer's money andeager to found control empires of their own.

No, the Dutch did the exact opposite. They de­cided to relax controls and free prices. The resultswere apparent within one year. While, during thefirst half of 1951, the Netherlands imported nearlythirty per cent more than it, sold abroad, by early1952 its exports exceeded imports. From March,1951 to March, 1952, the Netherlands reserves ofgold and foreign exchange rose from 1.3 billion to2.2 billion guilders. Although controls were re­duced and prices largely permitted to find theirown level, the cost of living index hardly movedduring the twelve-month period.

The Turning Point

How did this happen? Well, the government, forone thing, decided to get out of much of the in­dustry and building field. After the war, ambitiousplans for plant development and building were ad­vanced by various cabinets. This increased infla­tionary pressures. When the turning point came inearly 1951, the Dutch government stimulated pri­vate business to do its best, while cutting its ownexpenditures in these fields by one-fourth.

The deflationary policies initiated in early 1951caused a reduction in the buying of domesticallyproduced goods. This might have led to unemploy­ment. And, as the Netherlands has a relativelysmall land area, its non-farm labor force is con­stantly growing. The employment crisis reachedits peak in January, 1952. The number of unem­ployed at that time rose to 175,000. Would the gov­ernment seek to reduce this figure by inflationarymeasures? Would the carefully planned come-backboomerang? But natural economic laws caused theunemployment pendulum to drop back. By last N0­

vember it was down to less than 130,000.Although not all the figures for 1952 are in by

this time, we know for certain that Dutch recoverycontinued along the same lines. Exports during theyear had almost completely covered imports. Byyear's end, the Nethetlands had accumulated a $525million surplus in its international paym~nts bal­ance. 'Its total foreign exchange and gold reservegamounted to more. than 3.3 billion guilders. Com­paring even the improved early 1952 figures withthose available at the beginning of 1953, we see animpressive further strengthening of the Dutch

MARCH 9, 1963 415

economic position. The picture is yet more definitein view of the irremediable loss the Netherlandshad suffered as a result of the war. As describedrecently by Emma Doran in the Journal of Com­merce, these included "wartime devastation, loss ofthe greater part of her colonial empire, her limitednatural resources and her large imbalance in tradewith the United States."

Repair and Rebuild

Just before the flood hit the Netherlands, theadministration at The Hague was beginning to re­lax restrictions on house building and public worksprojects. But, on February 11, Premier WillemDrees was compelled to declare that because of re­construction expenditures brought about by theflood, the government must temporarily reduce itsindustrial investment program and cancel projectedtax cuts. The task at hand now is to repair and torebuild. But the pattern is familiar; it is: to facea crisis, to deal with it, and go on to somethingelse.

Can the Netherlands overcome the terrific set­back which it has suffered as a result of the flood?Right now the Dutch act as if such a question didnot exist at all. They are dealing with first thingsfirst. They have definite armament commitmentsunder the European Army Program. There hasbeen no suggestion from The Hague that this pro­gram will be slowed down. The Dutch, rebuildingtheir flood-devastated countryside, can fall back onwartime experiences. During World War Two, theflooding of Walcheren Island opened 38,000 acresto the onrushing sea. The moment the armisticewas signed on May 8, 1945, Dutch engineers begantheir work of rebuilding. At that time, cautiousexperts said it might take up to nine years beforecrops would grow again on the salty soil.

The new Walcheren Island dikes were actuallyready by January 1, 1946. And at the end of 1948,nearly all the Walcheren land was again producingcrops. The flood of February, 1953, represents agreater and more difficult job. Nature has beeneven more devastating than man in wartime. Thejob is enormous, and it will draw energy, man­power, and resources away from the splendidly re­habilitated Dutch economy.

When all is said and done, the Dutch are notmiracle men. They represent, in the world of ram­bunctious talk and destructive hostilities, a ratherold-fashioned picture of common sense and hardwork. Premier Drees, ten days after the flood dis­asters, reassured the world: "Our national life isgoing· on, our harbors are open, our transport isworking, our industry is ready to fulfill orders."The Dutch, once again, were on the job.

Americans mobilized relief for the flood-strickenNetherlands literally within hours of the disasternews from Holland. Those 'Wish~ng to do so maysend their donations directly to : Holland FloodRelief, Box 300, New York 5, New York.

416 THE FREEMAN

II THIS IS WHAT THEY SAID IIHuge, Inverted Pyramids

If we do not halt this steady process of buildingcommissions and regulatory bodies and speciallegislation like huge inverted pyramids on everyone of the simple Constitutional proyisions, weshall soon be spending many billions of dollarsmore.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, Radio Speech,March 2, 1930

Slightly Misquoted

Arthur Krock (Times) says in effect: Sen. Taftdidn't mean what he thought he wrote he meant"'Then he wrote that it was "incredible" that Ikeappointed Mr. Durkin Labor Secretary as it wouldhave been if Ike had appointed Mr. Acheson orSenators McCarran, Jenner, or McCarthy.

DEXTER TEED, (The Press in the Nation),New York Post, Jan. 15, 1953

Stalin's Concessions

I don't agree that Stalin at Yalta was ruthless.Stalin gave away a great many things; indeed oneof the most moving things about the Y'alta Con­ference was that, at the height of Russian . . .n1ilitary power, a height that has never beenequalled in the history of the world, Stalin wentinto a conference dedicating himself and his coun­try to use that power for the establishment of in­ternational peace.

RAYMOND SWING, Town Meeting of the Air,February 15, 1945

Tough on the Nerves

In retrospect it is manifest that we have not gonebackward but are slowly and jerkily inching for­ward. This period was bound to be full of shockto many Americans at the moment far removed inspirit from the deep inner torments seizing man­kind. For what we have been witnessing from afaris the carpentry of a new world, "where a revolu­tion is being completed," as Jan Masaryk said theother day, "which began a hundred years ago inFrance" [Le., in 1848]. It is going to last a longtime yet and for the American people it is boundto be tough on the nerves.

EDGAR SNOW, in Stalin Must Have Peace,1948

Senatorial Poetics,

Consistency, thou fascinating jewel of sophisticatedhumbuggery, loquacity, and confusion, cease, ohcease to lead illustrious and irrepressible wind­bags astray by the blinding and bewildering lightof thy "alluring ray."

HON. MATTHEW M. NEELY, in the Congres­8ional Record, Nov. 14, 1951

The American Disease

An Irish Opinion By PETER KAVANAGH

WITH THE EXCEPTION of a few thousand mysticswho live on the Bowery, all Americans believe

religiously in holding a precise working job up tothe moment they collapse of heart disease. Indeed,the average American looks upon heart disease andother rapid killers as friendly visitors; they re­lease him cleanly and efficiently from the fear ofever finding himself out of a job-or, worse still,being forced to contemplate the life he has led.Whether an American has a million dollars or noth­ing at all, he feels the necessity of working. Workfor him is not a me'ans of living life more intenselybut rather a convenient, if perverse, method of es­caping from it.

If you ask a wealthy American why he continuesto work, he will at first look at you in astonishmentand wonder whether you are trying to imply thathe is on the verge of death or whether you haveplans for grabbing his job. What other possiblereason could you have for asking him? That youmight possibly want to talk to him for. the sake ofrelaxation or stimulation is outside hiscomprehen­sion. He is continuously trying to figure out yourangle. He is 'certain that everyone has an angle.If you 'are able to allay his suspicions and ask himagain why he continues to. work, he will probablytell you that he only intends to work for anotheryear or two to make absolutely certain that he willhave enough money to cover every contingencywhen he retires to his dream. He always has adream and he's always planning to fulfill that dreamin a year or two. But the dream is never fulfilledand, up to the moment of his sudden death, upalmost to the moment he is being pumped full ofem'balming fluid, he is still hanging on to his job.

Work is the essence of life to him, its sole pur­pose. To work until he drops dead is his ideal.l\lfaking money is of secondary importance, becausethe American, contrary to a prevalent notion, ismost generous \vith his money. Money is merely atangible proof that he is on the job~ And he islTIOst delighted with himself when he is workinghardest. He is intrigued with himself because hefeels that he has figured out an angle to beat therap 'which God has imposed on humanity. God de­creed that because of his disobedience man shouldbe compelled to work: the American has succeededin convincing, himself that this was not a penaltyat all. "O.K., O.K.," he 'Seems to say, "God says thatI must work. So what? I like work! God Himselfis only doing his job like the rest of us."

Work being for the American not The GreatCurse but rather a great virtue, it follows that thereis no such thing for him as a menial job. Thevapor surrounding the head of the man who isdown in a hole fixing a sewer is to him a nimbusas angelic as that around the head of a businessexecutive. He is out of bed in his suburban homeat six-thirty in the morning. He has his coffee andorange juice, is driven quickly to the railroad sta­tion by the wife and catches a train for the city.He is in his office at nine. Here his meek and hen­pecked domestic attitude is cast aside with his coat,and he stands there in his shirt sleeves and sus­penders ready to busy himself sedulously with mat­ters of the utmost insignificance until he takes thetrain home at five o'clock in the evening. He bickerswith the wife until bedtime, and so his day endssuccessfully: he has not reflected or contemplatedfor a moment.

Passion for Work

One of the results of this passion for work isthat America has by her own dynamic energy builtherself into a position of power and wealth com­parable to the England of Elizabethan times. Butshe has advanced so far on the material level thatthe law of diminishing returns is beginning to workagainst her. She is compelled to give much of herhard-earned gains away if she is to sustain herpolicy of work for work's sake. There would be con­sternation in America if no one would take her sur­plus wealth! What could the ordinary person dowith his time if 'by working no more than one daya week he could still 'afford the usual luxuries?Luckily, there is little danger of such a situationarising at the moment when Europe and even Asiaare so willing and kind as to accept America's sur­plus wealth. And if both these continents renege,America can always count on Africa.

Other 'wealthy countries in other times solvedthis problem by establishing a leisured class whoadopted the concept of the elegant gentleman.Hav­ing acquired or inherited the excess wealth of thecountry, they espoused the notion that work, espe­cially manual work, was undignified and decidedthat they would live gracefully; hard work was forpeople with strong backs and thick heads. It wasfrom such a situation as this that the Greek, theFlorentine, and the Elizabethan cultures evolved.This may be the answer to America's problem.

MARCH 9, 1953 417

There is no evidence that people were less happythen than they are now. On the contrary, they seemto have been remarkably happy, as they well mightbe in an age that produced so many beautiful andennobling things.

The mass of Americans are naturally somewhatfearful of a cultural renaissance because theirwhole attitude towards living would be jeopardized.They don't 'want to be wakened from their coma, tohave their idol shattered, their drug of hard worktaken from them. Yet in spite of all, there is agenuine demand in America to release the imagi­nation, to stretch out toward something more sath;­fying than the present barren routine. The Com­munists, because they were alert, sensed this needand tried to fill it by organizing a pseudo-intellec­tual coterie of superficial thinkers-but brazen andefficient propagandists. Most conservative Ameri­cans were too busy working on the job to pay muchattention to this.

It is difficult at the moment to visualize a sectionof the American public in sufficient repose to per­mit of a literary flowering. Such a movement willhardly originate with the politicians, because poli­ticians have always suffered from congenital un­awareness, an occupational disorder also of thepress. There is still less hope in the universities,because in America professors spend most of theirenergies worrying over the problem of tenure.Gamblers and racketeers have much to recommendthem as the patrons of a vital American culture,but their activities are so restrained by penal lawsthat it is unlikely they will emerge as the AmericanMedici.

The unfortunate truth seems to be that Ameri­cans will go right on allowing their souls to be driedout, and only perhaps from a great catastrophecould there emerge the agonized cry of the heartwhich is the sign of active and intense growth.

Spring Music In Winter

So early, so eagerFor blossom the pear tree;So surly and meagerIts ration of spring!And a bronze-breasted robinNow clings to the bare tree,And sings of some carefreeIntemperate thing.

The heart is too fearful,The mind far too waryTo trust oblique April­The bird may be wrong.But sing, heedless robin,And bare branches, hurryTo bloom white and airy,Believe· in the song!

EMMA GRAY TRIGG

418 THE FREEMAN

I1__W_O_R_T_H_H_E_A_RI_N_G_AG_A_I_N__1IAdvice to :England

"The Vital interests should render Great Britainthe earnest and unyielding opponent of the Russianprojects of annexation and aggrandizement....Having come thus far on the way to universal em­pire, is it probable that this gigantic and swollenpower will pause in its career? ... With the Al-banian coast she is in the very center of theAdri~tic It would appear that the naturalfrontier of Russia runs from Danzig or perhapsStettin 'to Trieste. And as sure as conquest followsconquest, and annexation follows annexation, sosurely would the conquest of Turkey by Russia beonly the prelude for the annexation of Hungary,Prussia, Galicia, and the ultimate realization ofthe Slavonic Empire. The arrest of the Russianscheme of annexation is a matter of the highestmoment. In this .instance the interests of .democracy and of England go hand in hand."

KARL MARX, New York Tribune, April 12,1853.

A Long View

The American struggles against the natural ob­stacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the

'Russian are men. The former combats the wilder­ness and savage life; the latter, civilization with allits weapons and arts. The conquests of the one aregained by the ploughshare; those of the other bythe s'word. The American relies upon personal in­terest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scopeto the unguided actions and common sense of thecitizens. Their starting point is different, their endsare not the s'ame; yet each of them seems markedby Heaven to sway half the globe.

COUNT DE TOCQUEVILLE, De11tOCracy in A mer­ica, 1833

One Man's Happiness

It is not necessary to my happiness that I shouldsit in Parliament; but it is necessary to my happi­nes's that I should possess, in Parliament or out ofParliament, the consciousness of having done whatis right.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 1833

It Happened Before

In Rome there was more awful cruelty. . . . Therewards of the informers were no less hateful thantheir crimes; for some, gaining priesthoods andconsulships as spoils, others, obtaining positionsas imperial agents and secret influence at court,robbed and ruined without limit, inspiring univer­sal hatred and terror. Slaves were corrupted againsttheir maSiters, freedmen against their patrons; andthose who had no enemy were crushed by theirfriends.

TACITUS, Histories, I, II

New Facts on Katyn

By VASILY YERSHOV

From a former Soviet rColonel comes this rvivi4,spectacular story of the killer Borisov, whoboasted of the hundreds fof Polish officers hehad shot tat Katyn and rdescribe,d the details.

WHEN I MADE Borisov's acquaintance, he wasSMERSH commander in the division in which

I was serving as lieutenant colonel. SMERSH is aname invented during the war for the NKVD sec­tions in the army. The term NKVD was so un­popular that the government thought it advisableto replace it by a more patriotic term, and the newname SMERSH (Smer,t Shpionam, meaning Deathtofue Spies) seemed to be more in line with the mil­itary situation. Actually, its main job was to spyon the officers and soldiers. Borisov was SMERSHcommander in our division. It was his duty to seethat the orders of SMERSH and of the militarytribunals, and especially death sentences, werecarried out.

Captain Borisov came from a good middle-classfamily. His father was a schoolteacher, his eldersister a physician in a Moscow polyclinic. Borisovhimself also went to college. He was studying foran engineering degree at the Institute of Electri­cal Engineers. When he was in his fourth term,the Party ordered him to give up his engineeringstudies and go into a different field of study, toprepare himself, in short, for work in State Se­curity organs.

During the first months his new studies,which had to be kept a strict secret, did not appealto him very much, but, gradually, he said, he feltthe increasing need of devoting himself entirelyto this new life and work. He enjoyed the feelingof superiority resulting from his special position."It is impossible to explain the happiness you feelwhen the highest authorities openly tell you thatyou, the Borisovs, are that particular organ in thestate apparatus which is in charge of controllingeveryone and all. The true revolutionaries are nortthose who make a revolution," Borisov used to say,"but those who protect the revolution!"

Having lived for several years in this atmos­phere, Borisov understood the situation better thanthe others. He believed that in order to devote him­self entirely to his job, he had no right to marryand raise a family. For him nothing existed but hisparticular "job." I once witnessed a public execu­tion attended by several hundred persons (in thebeginning of the war it was customary to carryout the executions of deserters and other criminalsin thepre'sence of the entire staff). Borisov, whowas the executioner, hardly waited until the prose­cutor had finished his short speech before shootingthe "criminal" with savage avidity in the back of

the head. The "criminal" fell dead to the ground,but, obviously, Borisov had not yet had all thesatisfaction he wanted-he bent down and put an­other three bullets into the victim.

Once I saw him setting two dogs on a nakedman. They were tearing him to pieces, while Bori­sov kept repeating: "Confess, scoundrel, confess."The longer the torture lasted, the more excited hegrew in preventing the victim from defendinghimself against the attacking dogs.

It is an honor, he used to say, to shoot scoundrelssentenced to death by a court or on order of thehighest authorities. Therefore, he often would notpermit his colleagues to carry out the executionsbut used himself to shoot several persons, one afterthe other. To yield the victim to another hangmanwas, in his view, a failure to perform an honorablemission entrusted to him by the authorities.

Yet perhaps for Borisov, too, killing had itslimitations....

Vodka Ration

I made Borisov's acquaintance and met him regu­larly because I was quartermaster of my division,and that meant that I was also in charge of thevodka supply. It was impossible to buy vodka inthe army: it was issued only on order, and it wasmy job to 'write out these orders. Borisov cameoften to get his vodka ration, and he was some­times entitled to very considerable rations. Accord­ing to Soviet rules, a commander and each of hismen are entitled to 200 gr. (7.2 ounces) of vodkabefore an execution and 400 gr. (14.4 ounces) afterthe execution. These rules had been laid down asthe result of a careful and thorough study. Theexecutioner was given vodka before the executionso that he should not lose his nerve and refuse todo his job at the last moment, but not so much asto impair his marksmanship. After the execution,however, he needed a good rest and therefore re­ceived a double ration.

Borisov always came himself to fetch his vodkafrom the storehouse; he did not entrust this job toanyone. When getting his ration from the store­keeper, he always begged for an additional glassof vodka. There were many executions, especiallyduring the initial period of the war, and Borisovwas poisoning himself with vodka to such an ex­tent that eventually he could not do without it evenfor an hour. Once, late at night, he came to beg me

MARCH 9, 1953 419

for vodka, without any reason and without beingentitled to any ration. He looked miserable andunhappy like a child begging his mother for a pieceof candy. "Do me a favor, chief," he said, "andgive me some vodka. I can't go to sleep without it,and if you don't give it to me, I'm going to die onthe spot." I must confess I was somewhat embar­rassed.

"I must tell you, chief," he went on, "that Iwould have been dead long ago if it weren't forvodka. I always keep a bottle next to my bed andbefore going to sleep I have a drink. Two hourslater, I wake up like a raving madman. In mydreams I see the most horrible things. I see allthose I've shot. They make faces at me and jeer atme. Some of them have holes in their heads, withfresh blood dripping from the holes, as though Ihad just shot them. They throw lassos at me andstrangle me. They dance before my eyes. When Ican't ,stand it anymore, I wake up and feel asthough I were going crazy. I am so exhausted bythese nightmares that I can hardly reach for thebottle. When I've had a drink, I feel better and goback to sleep. But an hour or two later" the wholething starts all over again. I haven't a drop ofvodka left, and I'm afraid of going to bed. That'swhy I came here to ask you to help me."

Spring, 1940

In the fall of 1944, our division was stationedin the region of Malkino-Gurno in Poland. Borisovcame, as usual, to get his vodka ration. That par­ticular day he had executed four Red Army soldierssentenced to death by the Military Tribunal. Hesat down idly, and -began reminiscing about thewonderful time he had had-which "was probablygone forever"-in the spring of 1940.

"You know, chief," he told me, "you are feedingme drops, but if you just figure it out you will seethat even sticking strictly to the rations I and my12-man platoon emptied hundreds of bottles inApril, 1940, and it was not even a full month. Weshot over 400 Polish pany (gentlemen) in Katyn.We had a major there, he was really the right guy.He gave us as much vodka as we wanted. He wasnot stingy like you."

And that is how I first learned about the Polishofficers at Katyn, and what happened to them. The"major" Borisov referred to was Vetoshnikov,chief of the vas,t "Special Camp No.1" near Smo­lensk where the Polish officers captured by the Red

. Army in September, 1939, when the Soviet govern­ment occupied and annexed eastern Poland, wereheld. There were "thousands of them," Borisov toldme. In April Vetoshnikov ordered him and his pla­toon to execute a large number of them. O,therNKVD groups were assigned also to take part inthe full operation of killing off the Poles.

The executions took place only during the night,starting at- a:bout ten o'clock. "We worked in teamsof three," Borisov described it. "In order that theshots should not be heard, we led the men in groups

420 THE FREEMAN

of ten into a deep dugout where we shot them.When the first ten -were finished, ten others werebrought in and another shooting team took over.After that other soldiers came in to carry awaythe dead and to put them into a common grave.Then we went home, got drunk like hell and wentto bed. At that time, I was still in good health, Icould shoot ten men all by myself and was neverplagued by bad dreams."

"You must understand," Borisov went on, "thatI have been very useful to our government. Wehave not only liquidated the Polish bandits inKatyn but, assisted by my platoon, I also liquidatedduring the war 465 deserters, spies and enemies ofthe people. To such a man you measure vodka witha teaspoon."

A Further Confirmation

Later I had another opportunity to hear Sovietofficers talk about the Katyn executions. It wasshortly after Marshal Rokossovsky had destroyedseveral Polish villages. Among these officers wasthe SMERSH chief of the fifteenth mechani,zeddivision, Lieutenant Colonel Iliasov. One of theofficers expressed the view that it might be difficultto trust the Poles in a future war because theymight turn against us. But Iliasov reassured us.He said: "In general, one should not trus1t anyone.But, as far as the Poles are concerned, we have'calmed' them. If necessary, we shall organize an­other Katyn and prevent them from doing anyharm."

We were dumbfounded when we· heard him say"organize another Katyn." Each of us thought thatIliasov was trying to put us to the test and to pro­voke us. But we were mistaken. In spite of oursilence, Iliasov went on to tell us a number of de­tails ahout the killings at Katyn which coincidedwith what Captain Borisov had told me.

Re confirmed that the officers were shot in a deepdugout. He somehow even knew that the dugoutstill existed in the Katyn forest....

Neighborhood WitchThe children made themselves at homeWith little piles of leaves and loamUpon her well-swept steps-yet sheWithheld her broom and let them be.They were too young to shoulder blame,Too young to mock her, call her nameIn taunting tones. She let them be,Reserving her. asperityTo use against the older others,Their rude, impertinent, school-age brothers,vVho were themselves too young to knowHow porcupine a soul can grow,Frustrated, lonely, and adeptAt keeping everything well-swept.

SJANNA SOLUM

Arts and EntertainmentsCinerama-A Third Dimension

It is perhaps odd in this early day of the atom thatthe largest single' human enterprise, moneywise,in America is neither science, nor manufacturing,nor farming, nor commerce, but the giants of en­tertainment and communication. The modern "massmedia," as they are called-radio, television, Holly­wood, the mass magazines, the newspapers, the bookpublishers, the record and recording companies. Towhich one may add, their cousins and occasionalbedfellows-the telephone, the wireless" the tele­gram. It is odd, too, that these giants of our dayare purveyors of no solid product, but of a thingas insubstantial as the word, the idea, ART.

The mind follows easily the drama and meaningin the detonation of the A bomb, in the speed ofthe jet, ibut the mind. grows slowly, and imper­ceptibly, into the use and habit of its art. It comesusually as a toy,and grows only by steps into so­ciety. We can remember, many of us, when radiowas an amalteur'.s "bug" and hobby, when themovie was the sideshow nickelodeon at the pennyarcade, when the victrola was a parlor game forcourting couples, when television was, with green­headed monsters, the stock in trade of the fantasyfiction writer, when the photograph was a quickfading and long-time-in-the-taking souvenir forthe family album. Today these have grown intoRCA-Victor, NBC and CBS, MGM and 20th Cen­tury-Fox, Kodak, Life magazine, and a thousandothers.

This byway of introducing another child of thearts, hardly fully born, yet already tumbling in un­believable millions of dollars and squalling pitifullyto be recognized as an adult-especially in the of­fices of stockbrokers and at meetings of boards ofdirectors. It is called by many names, Cinerama,"3 D" or three dimension, Cinemascope, tri-opticon,stereo techniques, Natural Vision, and a dozenothers. Cinerama and "3 D" are the basic two, andare different processes both to the eye and to themant!lfacturer.

The rush to tri-dimensional motion pictures be­gan in late 1952 with the success at the ibox office(purely as a novelty) of Cinerama, a sort of three­dimensional travelogue. Cinerama is not three­dimensional on the screen, but three-dimensionalin the theater as it surrounds the eye and ear ofthe spectartor. For it is a psychological rather thana visual effect seeming to surround one by sightand sound.

The Cinerama principle is this. In the ordinarymovie the screen is almost square, and like a photo­graph you hold in your hand it is flat and framed

tight by its rigid shape and borders. The sound andmusic blare forth over the heads of the audiencefrom behind the screen at the front of the theater.In Cinerama, however, both sound and sight aretorn loose. Loudspeakers are placed in front, Ibe­hind, and at the sides of the theater. And theimage is no longer small and easily seen at a glance,but large and wide, spilling over at the sides, andpushing higher and lower than the old screen. Look­ing at the screen of Cinerama you have not, as inthe standard film, the impression of looking througha .window upon an action. Rather you have thesense of sitting in the open, unencumbered by walls.It is a little like being in the open nose of a plane,in the prow of a ship, on the cow-catcher of a train,or in the first row center of a theater. And it isthese obvious and gross effects that the first showof Cinerama dramatizes. The sound aids this illu­sion of depth, sounds emanating from in frontstriking us from the forward speaker, sounds com­ing from right or left coming to right or left ear,and sounds from the rear coming at us from therear.

Trouble and Virtue

The trouble and virtue in all this is that itsthree-dimensional effect is created acoustically andmechanically 'by Iiterally surrounding the eye andear. Trouble because the unfortunate person in theback of the theater may hear only the less impor­tant noises from that rear loudspeaker blaring inhis ear, while someone with a seat midtheater leftwill hear prim'arily the string section of the or­chestra, the 'brass sounding too distant at the right.This is an approximation to reality a little too closefor either enjoyment or art. 'Theaters and sound in­stallations mus,t be specially engineered for it.

In "3-D" the third dimension is created not inthe theater but visually in the planes of the imageon the screen, as it is in the old-fashioned stereo­scope, where a tree seems to stand out froIn amountain in the 'background, and a valley seems tobe actually an empty space 'between foreground andthe horizon. The effect of a good "3-D" system is asstartling as that of Cinerama, which uses a flatimage on a curved screen. To date "3-D" has hadnone but inferior show-shop pieces created for it,with the cumbersome problem of picaresque glasses,polaroid or colored, to be worn by the audience notyet solved.

Philosophically Cinerama poses a fascinating andprofound problem for the arts, one that has not

MARCH 9, 1953 421

yet been discussed or approached, yet one that isof more importance than the simple psychologicaleffect of depth. Just as the early film, intriguedwith the fact that it could show motion, sold noth­ing hut motion for years, so we can expect, first,and for years, from Cinerama, pictures of the wideair and heavens, of the gigantic scope of moun­tains and the plunging valleys (with, of course,the rising sport and heroics of mountain climbing),of the crisscrossing tides and traffic in the depthsof the sea, of the angular 'and pictorial complexityof city streets, of the great encompassing horizon-almost as though these were new facts of learn­ing, new dimensions of reality.

What the "drama" of speeding trains and run­ning horses were to the old film, instituting thegenre of the Western and the detective story chase,the great out-of-doors will be to the new medium,producing glorified cineramatic adventure storiesof the world's spaces and places. And since Cine­rama is panoramic, it will have a heavy and earlytendency toward a sentimentalization of nature.

Language of the Film

But the art of the film is not in the obvious, inpretty pictures or wide sight. It is in the newmethods it creates for a realistic, and symbolic,interpretation of the human drama. It was becauseof the time and effort of the old artists of the film(Griffiths, Eisenstein, etc.) that a movie methodof telling 'a tale was developed, shattering old thea­trical and stage styles of acting and writing, ofemphasizing a detail, of presenting the inner lifeof a character, of telling us about reality or aboutsimultaneous actions going on and building toaclimax. This "language of the film" was technical,but its insights were profoundly philosophical, andaffected the novel, the poetry, even the stage ofour time. These were the close-up, the montageand tricks of the cutting room (with flashbacksand the interlacing of complex actions), and thefree moving camera and pan. An isolated clenchedfist, in close-up, became as vivid a clarification andstep 'in the narrative as a grandiose gesture on thestage had ibeen. Here it was the director as artist,saying as much as the actor.

Cinerama offers a new, deep, and 'broadeningpower to our visualization. With the wide screen,for instance, it is possible now to play a highlydramatic scene centered, say, in the room of a ho­tel, and have at the right the casual, slow proces­sion of persons. in the hall, and at the left a sectionof the more complex life of a city street, all on thescreen at once. In a detective story, the police canroll· up !by c'ar at the left, while the main sceneplays itself out in the center, and then barge infrom the hall at the right. What was done on theold screen :by montage and cutting from room, tostreet, to room, to hall, in separate shots, is nowsimultaneous. The same drama, but a wider con­cept, a wider presentation of its reality.

To the serious dramatist this "peripheral" vision

422 THE FREEMAN

becomes, though at first a difficulty, a new tech­nique and a new language. Where the old tightscreen allowed you to frame and to focus and tocompose with economy, now the camera will stageand choose and cast and interweave its peripheraledges. "Simultaneity" becomes as much a tech­nique as montage, and becomes at once a consciousand theoretical concept, to be used and overused bythe novelist, the poet, as well as by the Cineramafilmwriter.

So a mechanical technique gives rise to newaesthetic concepts, and the public by indirectiontakes a new vision of life.

Postscript: To add a touch of fantasy: The be­wildering list of technical innovations facing themodern, if we dare call him, devotee of the arts,makes his world seem a satire torn from Gulliyer'sTravels, silly and cruel, with all of Swift's incred­ible details of a fantastic and dotty society. Thepublic, for instance, has today two kinds of radio,AM and FM; five kinds of reaording-wire, tape,and three different speeds for the disks; some tensystems for home amplification; four kinds ofmovie, black-white, technicolor, cinerama, "3 D";two kinds of television, the black-white showingand the three color systems now being worked on,one of which will be introduced. And more. Andthere are madcaps and hobbyists and publicity menhollering an exclusivity in each.

The latest to come is a system whereby a fullmovie, sound and dialogue and image, is recordedon a tape recorder, on a single strip of opaque cel­lophane tape magnetized on one .side to retain anelectromagnetic impression. This piece of coldblank cellophane is unscrambled and plays back thefull movie-images, dialogue, and music. BingCrosby is preparing one of his TV shows in thisway.

To follow this development to some ultimate. Itis entirely conceivable that one day the nation willbe brought to ruin by an espionage agent who hasa wire-thread recording of the country's top secret,whatever that is, sewn in as the stitching of hissix-plus jacket. And this magnetized thread re­cording will be a full, three dimensional, cinera­matic, technicolor, sound and dialogue picturetreatment of the subject. An imaginative tale inwhich all the complex arts of a society will be sewninto a garment by that old and simple craft of thetailor, and by a simple needle. And pity the F,BIlooking for such work of art. For, in whateversense, art it is.

And if the spy, as he should, has a fitting senseof the irony, he will end the thread thunderouslywith music, with the spirited national anthem ofhis country.

This "disappearance of the art object" is theopposite end, I suppose, of that first process whena work of art was created by hand to be seen, atonce, by the eye; or danced by the tribe to be felt,at once, in the body; or told, or sung, to be heardby the listening ear. ALEXANDER MARSHACK

Equivocal Conservatismc~

By MAX EASTMAN

Although he has published eight books, it is hardnot to think of Peter Viereck as a young boy-aprecociously brilliant one. This latest book (Shameand Glory of the Intellectuals, Beacon Press, $4.00)carries on the impression. I never saw a book thatcontain@d so many wise remarks and passages offine tasteful eloquence mingled with so much badtaste and disappointing foolishness. By bad taste Imean such cracks as these: "The danger to studentsof being branded for life by a Socialist is less thanthat of being blanded for life by a socialite." "Is ita patriotic triumph if the dawn's early glare revealsour flag progressing from ,being a door mat to beinga fig leaf?" By foolishness I mean such as this: "Hewho says 'goodbye now,' instead of 'goodbye,' isalso likely to be he who, when declining a cigarette,uses the verb 'use': 'No thanks, I don't use them':and there you have the personality that wished Tafthad got the nomination in 1948 or 1952." What Vie­reck needs is an editor, or a trusted critical friend,or a little distrust of himself. He seems to be carriedaway by his own brilliance. What with erudition,wit, logic, jokes, jocules, metaphors, similes, synec­doches, and all those literary and intellectual thingsstreaking through his brain like cars on the NewJersey turnpike, he just can't hang on to himself.They say he is a fast and furious talker, and thisbook, with all its wide learning and brainy sparkle,suggests loquacity rather than meditation. You gettired after a while and want to go away and read theencyclopedia or the dictionary, or something at leastsystematic.

The "glory of the intellectuals" is their comingthrough with truth and lucid judgment in the con­flict with Hitler's totalitarianism. Their "shame" istheir failure to show, by and large, a grain of senseor a half-inch of consecutive and inwardly honestreasoning about Stalin's. It is on these two pointsthat Viereck's penetration and grasp are so sure andhis thesis so simple, that he rises to passages of rea­soned eloquence that are both moving and convincing."The boy can write!" you find yourself saying. Andto prove it you turn to page 54, and read 'again hiscontrasting descriptions of Stalin's politburo-"thesober pedants of massacre"-and Hitler's more flam..boyant Nazi leaders:

Look at any recent picture of the dowdy politbu'ro!Suppose you did not know ahead the long list ofgenocidal crimes ... attached to each one's name,the deportation of whole cities, the starvation of entireprovinces. You would innocently imagine some retiredhick constable in his anecdotage was boring you with

his home-talent Rogue's Gallery: two rows of swag­gering, small town "fixers".... Each looks like athird assistant bookkeeper in the act of rising Nap­oleonically to second assistant bookkeeper....

Photographed at their political celebrations, theNazis are less respectable, yet more "elegant." . . .Wee Goebbels, looking like" an evil-minded CharlesAddams infant that had been slightly nibbled at byrats and then discarded as poisonous. Ley andSt~eicher: trying to smile benevolently, that benignsmIle of cadgers of free drinks and pinchers of veryyoung girls. Hess, Rosenberg, and Schirach: tryingto look wholesome and reputable in their neat unifornlsbut only looking like boy scouts suddenly caughtabusing themselves . . .

Viereck can not only write, but when he knowswhat he is talking about, he can expound and eluci..date, too. And where his subject is the Americanfellow-traveling highbrow, the new BabbitFY of theliterary avant garde, Bill Buckley's God and Manat Yale, free speech and the Communist conspiracy,he does know, down to the ground and a good waybelow that, what he is talking about. He must be ablaze of light to some of those befogged young stu­dents, the constitutional dopes and voluntary dupesof the Communist lie-factory, who wander into hiscourses at Mt. Holyoke. I wish every teacher in theUnited States could read what he says about theshame and glory of the intellectuals-could read this,for instance:

Civil liberties do not protect all actions. Certainacts, for example murder, are barred. Menlbershipin the Conlmunist party is morally an act comparableto murder. Mass murder in fact. Morally every Com­munist or Nazi party member is up to his elbows inthe blood of his party's victims (Belchen, Dachau,Katyn, Korea). . . .

Unfortunately, Viereck's book does not stick to thesesubjects which he understands so well. It has a dis..position to slide off and go galloping all over thecontemporary scene of opinion, making remarks thatare at times acutely penetrating, at others gliblysuperficial. His little subtreatise on Dewey's pragma..tism, for instance, can only be dismissed in perfectlycomplete candor as bosh. The sole memorable thinghere is his calm admission that he has not had timeto study the pragmatists.

"Is their smuggling in of values done by legiti..mate philosophical logic? or is it a contradiction?... neither I nor 99 per cent of my readers aretrained to answer [such] questions." What a con­fession! It wouldn't take two studious days with abook of, or about, John Dewey to find the answer:Dewey's philosophy starts with values, it ends withvalues; in both origin. and essence it is aN effort to

MARCH 9, 1953 423

defend the sovereignty of values inf ace of the skepticism begot bycrude factual science.

Another matter Viereck is nottrained to talk about in my opinion,though it is the concluding subjectof this book, is the return fromrevolutionary experiments to whathe calls "conservatism." On that life­saving journey he is a false, becausea half-hearted guide. He will neverbring us to the goal. And here, too,the reason is frankly confessed:' hisis a literary and non-scientific mind.Not only is he "far more interestedin art than politics," and addictedto "playing economics by ear, withdeliberate amateurishness," but hemakes of these predilections a veri­table program of salvation.

The proper start for an Americanconservatism ... is in the world ofliterature, arts and sciences, intellec~

tual history, the universities thehumanities.... If instead it tries tosta~~ by being directly and activelypolItical and economic, it will ...fail and transform nothing at all.Our civilization . . . its essentialsits truth and its beauty ... are trans~mitted more through the humanitiesthan through that up-to-date journal­ism of the academic world, thecourses in current politics, econom~

ics, and other uselessly "useful"techniques.

Having thus dismissed the weight­ier half of the causal nexus in whichour problems arise, it is not sur­prising to find that Viereck's solu­tion of these problems is a ratherlight and airy one. The main idea is-aside from being good, which is avalid but hardly a new conservatism-that we should be spiritual. Weshould be so spiritual that we arenot tempted either by the plausi­bilities of socialist statism or by theanarchy of the free market economy.

Socialist statism and ruthless pri­vate rivalry are two sets of hollowverbalisms, irrelevant to the realityof our spiritually-based mixed econ­omy.... The spiritual basis forthe still unfinished American experi­ment is ... that enthusiastic, un­coerced, and non-statist cooperationbetween individualists which [Vachel]Lindsay called "civic ecstasy" . . ."Civic ecstasy can be so splendid, sounutterably afire, continuing and in­creasing. with such apocalyptic zeal,that the whole visible fabric of theworld can be changed."

That· is Viereck's general answer

424 THE FREEMAN

to his own question: Which kindof conservatism? It leads himto regard "plutocracy," and espe­cially "efforts to glamorize plutoc­racy as anti-statism," as on the wholea greater danger than statism. (Atleast it led him to declare that hewould vote for Truman rather thanTaft.) It leads him to describe Taft·as a "Robespierre endimanche."Which means "dressed up in hisSunday clothes," and is probably asinept an epithet as prejudiced poli­tics and slipshod poetics could devise.How very remote is the danger ofplutocracy in this country is indi­cated by Viereck himself when hedismisses as an outdated 'bogy "thatold, toothless, moth-eaten lion ofWall Street." Nevertheless thatmoth-eaten lion-elsewhere describedby him as a "leper-outcast"-is thestage property which enables Vier­eck, while seeming to steer adroitlybetween two dangers, actually totake his stand, or rather his drift'with the forces that lead towardstate control of our economic lives.That this means control of our lit­erary and humanistic and spirituallives, and most particularly ourHcivic ecstasies," is growing steadilymore clear to those interested inknowing the causes of things.

It is certainly no joyous sport fora poet to study economics (credeexperto !), and I don't ask Viereckto drown his songs completely in thisuntuneful pursuit. But if he is go­ing to fling out the banner of a newconservatism, and start a march ofminds on upV Day" (his publisher'sname for the publication date of thisbook) back to the great and forgot­ten wisdoms of the past, he has gotto face up to the economic portionof these wisdoms a lot better thanhe has here.

Whether he calls himself conserva­tive or not is a semantic, not to sayan advertising, question. But whetherhe recognizes the dependence of allour freedoms on the free marketeconomy is of the essence. To callthe recognition .of this wisdom a"nostalgia for laissez faire," to talkof "the economic necessity of a non­economic credo," to assert that"though democratic socialism is acontradiction it is not one thatnecessarily leads to ruin," is anequivocation on the essential issue.

An UpsideDown WorldOut of Red China, by Liu Shaw­

Tong. Translated by Jack Chiaand Henry Walter. New York andBoston: Duell, Sloan and Pearce­Little, Brown & Co. $4.00

A great deal has been published inChinese at Hong Kong and Taipeigiving eye-witness and personal-ex­perience accounts of CommunistChina. But the pro-Red and anti-anti­Communist climate built up in theliterary world of English-speakingcountries has deprived them up tonow of this important source ma­terial. For that reason the appear­ance in English of Out of Red Chinais an important Free World victory.The victory was won in an uphillfight against almost insurmountableodds of prejudice, guilt complex, ex­pense, and conspiracy. Even truthfulreports written by American ob­servers have to fight ,hard to get anunbiased hearing and a fair presen­tation in the book shops.

As a Chinese, Liu has made thepolitical phantasmagoria of life inRed China a bit more believable thanthey were. The tales he tells havebeen discounted generally by ourpeople because they sounded unreal,hysterical, impossible to have hap­pened. Red China's secret weaponagainst us has been its fantasticallyinvolved procedures and twisted lin­go, which can be grasped only by anintensive reading and study forwhich most Americans think theyare too busy to spare the time.

Liu's book gives you an intimate"feel" of what the Communists meanby such peculiar phrases as "life ex­perience," "getting emotional troub­le," "dragging one's old-society tail,""merit meetings," and "judgmentmeetings," and a host of other formsof "newspeak." In every case, theconnotation is what would seemleast probable to us. It is, indeed, aninsane world into which Liu escortsus.

Class distinctions, absolutely in­flexible in that world, put the "long­term member" and the. "long-termcomrade superior"-except in timeof purge-on an altogether higherlevel than the masses. And the mass­es aren't all the plain people. Theyare the non-Communist Party mem­bers, and" hence must eat at the "big

oven" and not the "middle oven,"least of all at the "small oven." Andbesides inferior food, they must besatisfied with inferior clothing,housing, and amusement privileges.Even the word amusement has itsnew sense; to be properly so calledand thus per:mitted it :must consti­

tute political indoctrination.

Our sense of morality and romanceis, of course, turned upside down.There is the glamor tale of the Com­munist girl who shot the young manshe loved because she knew she mustnot marry outside the party, and hewasn't a member. There is the heroicson who refused to intervene in thecompletely unfair "people's trial" ofhis hardworking father, and watchedhim put to a cruel death ratherthan interfere with the "people's·will."

It would take a social psychiatristto explain ,the substitution of theword lover for the words husbandand wife. They all must be calledlovers now in Red China. The ma­nipulation of words in this mannercan help cripple the family system,so firm in the old China, by deprivingit of an intelligible terminology.IViultiplied infinitely, with everyslyly calculated variation that theRed hierarchy can concoct, such ety­mological changes must loosen thecement in any socia1 system. "Foulwords," for instance, are not dirtywords; they are words that are po­litically "not correct." That suchfantastic tricks can constitute aphase of psychological warfare isitself something beyond normal com­prehension. Two unforgivable faultsin the new China are: "being tooobjective" and "expressing personalopinion."

There is no unemployment underCommunism, we were told, and untilthe facts of forced and slave laborcame out, we thought this mightmean what it would mean in theUnited States or England. But no­quite the opposite. The same topsy­turvy approach is required to under­stand that every Communist wo­man in China is assured a husband.He is gone to on Saturday nights,with the same routine as the Satur­day· night bath of the past genera­tion in America. No wonder ,thatwomen, under this system, lose ataste for the conjugal relation. Thus

frustrated, they are better geared,emotionally, for their frenzied po­litical responsibilities.

These are a few of the realities oflife as lived under China's Commu­nism. The author belonged to thepropaganda corps. He learned thatthe purpose of journalism was "tosupport the Revolution and en­courage fighting morale." DeHber­ate faking was required. White be­came black or black white, accordingto the destination of the edition.Editors got away with these lies be­cause circulation was rigorously re­stricted iby law to assigned targetareas.

Liu's book is well written andgripping, but it presents only partof the picture. As Hu Shih explainsin his introduction, it covers only1949..;50, "usually described as theHoneymoon Period... before thebeginning of the nation-wide Move­ment of Thought Reconstruction, of'brain-washing,' and long before thetruly terroristic '3-anti' and '5-anti'persecutions of 1952."

The book was originally a series ofarticles written after the author'sescape. They were subsequently com­piled in book form in Chinese, andhave now been edited and rearrangedby the translators for English pres­entation. Such work requires timeand expert language facility, andthis, added to the usual costs ofgetting out· a 'book, makes it almostforbidding. The publishers are tobe congratulated as well as the au­thor and the translators.

EDWARD HUNTER

Shorter And BetterThe Shorter Cambridge Medieval

History, by C. W. Previte-Orton.New York: Cambridge UniversityPress. 2 vols. $12.50

Whatever the virtues of "The Cam­bridge Medieval History"-the firstvolume of which appeared in 1911,the eighth and last in 1936-it suf­fered from some of the defects thatmark all efforts at co-operative his­torical writing. Whatever the de­fects of The Shorter Can~bridge

Medieval History, it e~hibits thevirtues that result from single au­thorship, when the author is in fullcommand of the knowledge and tal-

ents required by his undertaking.These two volumes, in which theman who edited the last five volumesof the larger work has skillfully dis­tilled its essence, are characterizedby no inequalities of style, no con­tradictions, no duplications-all ofwhich seem to be unavoidable in aco-operative enterprise. If, in the in­terests of brevity, the late ProfessorPrevite-Orton seems sometimes tohave left out too much, the fair­minded reader will reflect that hecan not have the advantages ofbrevity without its disadvantages.

It is a vast stretch of history thatthese volumes survey: from thefounding of Constantinople, in 330A.D., to the closing decades of thefifteenth century. In the main it isthe story of the Empire of the Westand the Empire of the East, but therise of Islam has its place in thenarrative, and the Crusades extendthe theater of action. In large meas­ure it is the story of the Mediterra­nean world; but the scope of thework is large enough to embrace'chapters on the British Isles andthe countries of northern and east­ern Europe. And, of course, the lightof the latest scholarship shinesbrightly upon it all-a light that hasdispelled the ignorance that oncemade Hume refer to the history ofthe Middle Ages as a battle of kitesand crows, and made Voltaire dis­Iniss the same history as the doingsof wolves and bears. The ByzantineBmpire is done the justice it wasdenied until Finlay began to correctthe myopic errors of the eighteenthcentury. And it is well that thisjustice is done on a popular level,that misconceptions which still per­sist among the unscholarly are atlong last dispelled. For, as Goo~h

has remarked: "To preserve Greekculture during the barbarism of theMiddle Ages and to defend it againstthe assaults of Islam was to deservewell of civilization."

The rise and endurance of Byzan­tium, the triumph of Christianity,the Dark Ages in the West, theevanescent Carolingian Empire, theconflicts of Popes and Emperors,Gregory VII and papal supremacy,the Crusades, feudal monarchies, andthe increasing importance of townswith their novel social patterns, thefall of the Hohenstaufen, the .Hun-

MARCH 9, 1953 425

dred Year,s' War, the Great Schismand the Conciliar Movement, abso­lute monarchies humbling the prideand power of the nobles, the captureof Constantinople, the Wars of theRoses, individualism challenging au­thority and regimentation, the dawnof the Renaissance-these are a fewof the milestones on the long roadthat we travel in Previte-Orton'slearned, geni:al company. As we go,we glance all too quickly at schola's­ticism, literature, and architecture.Our journey ends when "the oceanicstage was about to succeed the Med'i­terrane'an in commerce. The horizonreceded in world politics." And, a'Swe look back, we may well agreewith our guide:

Taken as a whole, the history ofthe Middle Ages after the ruin inthe West of the' ancient civilizationis one of progress, progress in so­ciety, government, order and organi­zation, laws, the development of hu­Ulan faculties, of rational thought,of knowledge and experience, of artand culture. Man throughout hadbeen restlessly creative and aspiring.But that progres's to a better lifehad been perpeitually thwarted anddelayed, not merely by external dis­asters but by the passions and wilfulambitions of men themselves....Innate barbarism broke from its fet­ters time and time again. Potent de­lusions summoned their appropriatenemesis. In our distant retrospect wecan perceive how crooked and peri­lous was the upward road.

There are those who insist thatit is a waste of time for us to re'adany history that is not "us'able." Ifthey me'an by this that we shouldread history only if we can use itas a det'ailed guide to conduct, thenwe should read no history at all; forit can perform no such service. But,in a larger sense, all history, eventhe most distant, most obscure, isusable, for it enlarges and deepensour knowledge of m'ankind, our­selves, and our fellows. Indeed, Car­lyle hardly exaggerated when he de­cl'ared: "History is not only the fit­test study but the only study, andincludes all others." No man canreally know where he is, and why,unless he knows by what road he hascome to where he is, and why. Itwas through the Middle .Ages thatwe c'ame to where we are; and tothe Middle Ages these volumes arean excellent introduction. As weread them we remember that Schop-

426 THE FREEMAN

enhauer said: "The motto of his­tory should be: Eadem, sed aliter."And we can not take leave of themwithout noting how greatly theirvalue is enhanced by the abundantillustrations, many of them rare,that have been chosen with erudi­tion and taste by Dr. S. H. Stein­berg. BEN RAY REDMAN

"General" Opinion

Your War for Peace, by Frank L.Howley, Brigadier General,AUS(inactive). New York: Holt. $2.75

To any American who is seeking fac­tual information concerning politi­cal, economic, and psychological de­velopments as well as military in theWestern European area, this shouldbe a most welcome book. It is amus­ing, interest-sustaining, and provo­cative.The author is a man of wideexperience, possessing a keen analy­tical mind, and having lived abroadmany years is capable of carefulanalyses in the international fieid.One (i)f the most interesting parts ofthe book is the author's candid at­tempt to answer the question-whyon the whole our American foreignI?olicies have not succeeded in West­ern Europe? Whether his analysesare correct in all details or not, thedata he has so skillfully compiled,and the conclusions he has reached,should make an important contribu­tion to the understanding of thepolitical temper of Europe.

One of the remarkable features.. of the book is a firsthand accountof the machinations of Soviet rep­resentatives in Germany after WorldWar Two. The author's personal ex­perience with the chicanery and sub­versive actions of these men in Ber­lin should dispel any notion thatfriendly co-operation and good faithare possible with the Soviet Unionunder its present leadership.

General Howley's book is fasci­natingand informative. It is writtenwith skill and accuracy and with thefull authority of one who has ob­served and participated in the strug­gle he is discussing. It points theway for realism and dynamic actionin our relations 'with foreign nations,both friendly and hostile.

ALBERT C. WEDEMEYER

Honest-to-God Nephew

My Uncle Joseph Stalin, by BuduSvanidze. Translated by WaverleyRoot. New York: Putnam. $3.00

Strange as ilt may seem, there isa living man who has the right tocall Stalin Uncle Joe, or, as the peo­ple in Stalin's native Georgia say,Uncle Sosso. Having quit Uncle Joe'sservice, this man, Budu Svanidze, isnow in a position to write about hisdistinguished relative in humanterms. Svanidze's defection, how­ever, was not inspired either by afamily quarrel or by disgust withthe Soviet regime.

As he explains the situation, itwas an affair of the heart. He fellin love with a Hungarian Catholicwoman who could not come to theSoviet Union. Rather than part withher, he decided to join the ranks ofwhat the Russians call "the non­returners." His distinguished familyconnection and his employment. in aSoviet foreign mission made his es­cape easy. Judging from the book,he still 'regards his uncle with affec­tionate respect-and this probablyincreases his prospects of living toa ripe old age.

Stalin is represented in this bookas a man of simple but not austeretastes, fond of hunting and games(he cheats at croquet, but no one issupposed to notice it), a strict dis­ciplinarian with his two favoritechildren, his son Vassily and hisdaughter Svetlana, and a Quiz Kidwhen it is a question of supplyingthe right answer, whether this is aquotation from Goethe's Faust orthe date of the founding of the FirstInternational. Stalin relaxes bestwhen he has Georgians around him,and Svanidze was admitted to hisuncle's company fairly often, some­times alone, sometimes in the pres­ence of the chief lieutenants.

Stalin, according to his nephew, isa persistent tease and causes someunhappy moments to his guests, whoare not supposed to tease back. Arare exception to this rule was theformer War Minister, Klim Voro­shilov, a close associate of Stalinduring the years of the Russian civilwar. He retorted to one of Stalin'sgibes by telling the anecdote ac­cording to which Stalin, asked tochoose a design for a monument to

the great Russian poet, Pushkin, se­lected a large statue of himself hold­ing a small volume of Pushkin.

The Soviet dictator, according toSvanidze, was fishing in the BlackSea near a Caucasian resort whenthe news of Hitler's invasion ar­rived. He directed the war opera­tions from a deep bombproof shelterin the Kremlin, which had access tosome of the old tunnels of this me­dieval fortress-palace, tunnels de­signed to provide escape routes fortsars who were threatened by rebel­lion or mutiny.

Malenkov, who at present seemsto be the most likely candidate forthe Stalinite succession, is by origina' Bashkir, member of a Mohamme­dan tribe which lives between theVolga and the Urals. And one ofthe Walter Winchell touches in thisbook is the story of a volley-ballgame in which Stalin took part:Malenkov hit Marshal Zhukov, withwhom he had been quarreling, inthe nose with the ball. Zhukov's re­action was an international but un­printable curse; and the two mennever have been good friends since.

The author does not convey theimpression of being an intellectualheavyweight. He takes the Sovietsystem for granted without eithereulogy or criticism, and he obvious­ly regards his uncle with admirationas the successful man of the familywho also helped along at variouspinches in his own career. Despitethe many anecdotal stories of Stalinin slippers, figuratively speaking,one does not get a clear picture ofthe influences that shaped his deci­sions on internal policy. There is stillless about the right hand and the lefthand of his foreign policy, diplo­macy, and fifth column subversion.

Perhaps the most revealing pas­sage in the book is a description ofa talk with Stalin in 1936, when thegreat purge of the Communist Partywas in fun swing. One of the moti­vations of the purge, according tothis account, was a kind of puritani­cal moralism. Stalin stormed againstthe loose living of some of his pros­pective victims, declared that theFrench Revolution collapsed becauseof the degeneration of the morals ofits leaders, and, working himself upinto a frenzy of rage and hatred,cried:

"rn break the backs of all therotten riffraff who want to plungeour coup.try into corruption! I'llhave no mercy on them! None ofthem! N'one of them!"

Stalin on this occasion also ex­pressed regret that Robespierre hadbeen overthrown. He may perhapstake a grim pride in the fact thathe has carried on for a generationthe murderous terror which broughtabout Robespierre's downfall aftera little more than a year.

The author carefully avoids any­thing that might suggest an indict­ment of the Soviet regime; but someof the casual observations in thebook are all the more impressive be­cause they are not stated in thetones of an accuser. One footnoteafter another is an obituary noticeof some character in the story, shotduring the purge. The author speaksof "a great concentration camp onLake Baikal, containing more than150,000 prisoners." And he refers toYezhov, a head of the political po­lice who for a time possessed powerof life and death over the wholeSoviet population, as "half mad, asadist and a victim of persecutionmania," who comm.itted suicide whenhe was belatedly consigned to an in­sane asylum.

WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

Noble In Both SensesA House in Bryanston Square, by

Algernon Cecil. New York: Har­court, Brace & Go. $5.00

It is almost a decade since I wasfirst affected by the exquisite proseof this deeply moving "recherche dutemps perdu" written hy a memberof one of England's famous families.Re-reading it in the recent Americanedition has set me to wonderingagain if there will ever be anothermemoir like it. Algernon Cecil, whois already past seventy, may wellrepresent the last of a breed ofEnglish aristocrats whose RomanCatholic background and humanisticinfluences in politics and the artsmade the age of Victoria so great.Lord Acton's wise counsels onchurch and state are suddenly beingdiscovered fifty years after hisdeath. Here, on a smaller, more in­timate scale, is another heritage

from that world of quality with itssense of providential direction. Ce­cil revives it eloquently for hisreaders while they journey with himthrough his London town house~

which was destroyed by enemy ac­tion during the war.

It might have been anyone ofthose stately Regency houses, setback from their iron railings, whosequiet elegance seemed to rebuke theAmerican soldiers for intruding onthe tranquillity of that tree-shadedLondon Square. World War Two hadbilleted our U. S. Air Force head­quarters in Bryanston Square. Idoubt if our presence, with morningreveilles, army vans, and the gen­eral scramble and loud ;bull sessionsheard from the barracks, wouldhave been any more welcome thanthe Germans or Russians to a manof Cecil's bent. On the other hand,he might actually have been one ofthose tall fine-chiseled, gray-hairedmen in the neighborhood who wouldstop one of us now and then for achat. We can never be altogethercertain. But Mr. Cecil, who has sev­eral scholarly biographies to hiscredit, strikes me as a man whowould prefer to view the passingpanorama from his study window.

From the start Cecil asks not tobe compared to "those eminent men-duces, fiihrers, comrades in mar­shal's clothing or marshals in mufti,great men in occupation of highplaces or imitators in low ones." Hisfearless attack on Britain's foreignpolicy and his indignant criticismof Russia, rejecting her as H pro­fessedly anti-God and lying today atthe mercy of the sadistic mind,"were not very favora1bly receivedwhen his book first appeared over­seas. But readers, Catholic or non­Catholic, will find little quarrel withthese sane political views now. Infact, they may wish that the authorhad devoted as much space to cut­ting bureaucrats down to size as hehas to metaphysical discussions andhighly erudite examinations into themysteries and origins of the Chris­tian faith. Gifted, as so manycul:­tured Englishmen are, with rareagility in spinning words and moodslike the poets, Algernon Cecil makesa delightful guide through the store­house of his memories. The hookshe has read and the "adventures ofideas" provide one of the threads

l\fARCH 9, 1953 427

running through this unique per­sonal .chronicle.

His book is primarily, as he states,the work of two people-one thenarrator and the other his deadwife, whom he oalls "Allegra," andwhose spirit, summoned back as itwere to grace the rooms of theircharming abode, is the embodimentof all the best arguments for aris­tocracy. Seldom has a writer paidsuch an ardent, tremulously beauti­ful tribute to a woman as Cecil doesto "Allegra" in these pages. He seesin her "qualities reminiscent oftimes when women were more con­cerned with distilling the subtle es­sence of grace at home than battlingdirectly with the storm of the world'sunrest."

On another level this is a tale ofthe spiritual ascent of modern man,the homo sapiens, dogged by thequestion of "the ever-lasting yea ornay." Mr. Cecil's loving devotion tohis wife and all that she symbolizesto him draws him to the upperreaches of the house where no"alien voice" can be heard. But not,however, before he has numerousintellectual debates with philoso­phers, mystics, and literary masters,and leaves them behind or shutsthem out of certain rooms. "Theyhave," says Cecil, as he excludes theGerman philosophers, Hegel, Kant,Schopenhauer, from the dining room,"a gross way of dealing with thenectar and ambrosia of humanthought." As for those minds whichhave welcome-mats put out for them,it is not at all surprising that allthree are masters in modern hu­manism: Rabelais presiding overthe pleasures of the table: Montaigneequally at ease with the ladies andthe men in the' Chinese room; andPascal, with the fire of his vision,lighting the way upstairs to the starsand the Kingdom of God.

Cecil manages to find considerablesupport in Pascal for the aristocraticprinciple he upholds. "In that mostexacting demand of, traditionalGhristianity lay the real answer toall the shallow modern talk aboutequality in a manifestly unequal andevidently hierarchical world. Neitherrevolution nor ridicule will alter theways of nature; and the e~tinction

of the aristocrat will only hasten theadvent of the despot and the par-

428 THE FREEMAN

venue Meanwhile, no Communist hasyet been heard to complain of theinequality in the garden. And if, asa popular poem incautiously asserts,we are nearer to God's heart in agarden than anywhere else on earth,God was pretty plainly no Marxist."

To establish some kind of com­munication between the living, thedead, and those about to die, is per­haps what Cecil refers to when hesays: "I believe that I recognizedalmost from the first that the spoiltdesign of national and individual lifeleft still some larger purpose un­troubled and untouched." A bombhad only a few minutes earlier senthis stately house Grashing aroundhim.

There is courage as well as acritical, precise, and Christian in­tellect in this rich, provocative book.It may appea:r more often solemnthan gay, but then, after all, thetheme is a sober one. Despite count­less passages in which Cecil displaysa lively, sometimes pawky wit, aswhen satirizing the muddlers andmeddlers at Whitehall and West­minster, or paraphrasing Voltaire'sCandide, it is as a "lament over timepast" that his noble book will endure.

RICHARD Me LAUGHLIN

A.E.F. in SiberiaThe Siberian Fiasco, by Clarence

A. Manning. New York: LibraryPublishers. $3.75

Professor Manning of the faculty ofSlavonic languages at Columbia isone of that gallant band of Ameri­can university teachers who neversalaamed to Communism or socialismeven in the darkest days of the N'ewDeal. As in his previous writings­of which this reviewer particularlyremembers his articles on the East­ern Orthodox Churches and hisstudy of Ukrainian. nationalism­readers will find in this book thesame conscientious regard for factslucidly and temperately set forth,and the same warm fairness in judg­ing character which enables him toshow how this or that individual sawthe events of the moment.

He begins and ends by showingthe futility of the American Expe­ditionary Force in Siberia duringthe civil war as a vividly instructive

part of the world-wide chaos whichstill continues. On page 3 we read:

The Bataan death march, .the So­viet coneentration camps, the :massmurders in China, were all in em:­bryo in the Siberian chaos . • . theidealism of the early twentieth cen­tury was confronted with the factsof that century in eastern Asia andit preferred to be defeated and nul­lified rather than to make an effortto understand the situation..•.The material ... available for astudy of the country and the par­ticipants ... was not used. Empha­sis was laid upon doctrines andtheories. . . . Americans today arefortunate that they can speak of aSiberian fiasco and not of a Si­berian' disaster.

The author concludes on page 194:It is time now thirty years later

. . . to rethink the problems • • • [of]

... those unfortunate years. Whenthat is done, the fiasco will seem apreview of the present, a foolishbut not a criminal episode in theconfusion of World War I, and itmay offer substantial hope, by teach­ing what to avoid, for the settlementof the present stage of the Asiaticproblem as it affects world peaceand the hope of a better life for allmen.

The main body of Professor Man­ning's narrative opens with an ad­mirable little sketch of the Russianand Chinese empires and of the Rus­sian Revolution. Although both ofthose great states had a nationalnucleus, neither was a nation. Eachwas painted in a single color uponour maps but each contained a greatseries of suppressed peoples, many.of whom possessed a strong nationalconsciousness of their own. In theTsar's empire the dominant GreatRussians were actually in a minoritycompared with the total of the othernationalities. Upon both patchworkempires the Chinese and RussianRevolutions had suddenly imposed achaos of clashing ideas, withoutroots in habit or tradition. TheWestern governments and peoples,absorbed in their exhausting strug­gle against the Kaiser's Germany,saw the whole Russian situation inmore or less unreal terms.

In July, 1918, when Wilsondecided to send a small Expedition­ary Force to Siberia there seems tohave been little co-ordination betweenthe State and War Departments asto what was to be done there. Cer­tain more recent episodes make one

suspect that there may have been noco-ordination at all.

The commander, Major GeneralWilliam S. Graves, a Texan and aWest Pointer of the class of 1889,was chosen, like Pershing, becausehe could be counted on to obey ordersrigidly. His brienng-a short inter­view in a private room in the KansasCity railroad station with the Secre­tary of War, Newton D. Baker, whowas about to catch a train for theEast-was farcically hasty. His onlywritten directive-a typically Wil­sonian sermon, long on ethical prin­ciples .and short on references to thefacts of life in Siberia or elsewhere-was tragically inadequate. Hemust definitely not "intervene" inwhat had been the Tsar's empire,and his chief mission was to guardcertain military stores in the pioushope that they might some day beuseful to "the Russians." WhichRussians was not stated.

From all this there arose a seriesof floundering uncertainties, relievedonly by the high sense of duty bothof the commander and of his com­mand, and at times by gallant epi­sodes of which all Americans can beproud. Even Graves's fine qualities,his humanity and dogged obedienceto orders as he understood them,were nullified by his incomprehen­sion and most of all by the totalfailure of Washington to inform andguide him. He could not see that inthe dissolution of Russian societybrutal leaders must everywherecome to the top, and since he was incontact with the White factions andnot with the Reds he mistakenly be­lieved the former to be more brutalthan the latter. When the State De­partment turned against the Redshe was not told. A climax of mis­understanding arose when he was notnotified that the State Departmentwas sending an American officer in­dependent of his command to act asliaison between Washington and theheadquarters of Semenov, a fero­cious anti-Bolshevik leader withwhom Graves's outfit had had bothmisunderstandings and skirmishes.A chief subordinate of Graves ar­rested that officer and unsuccessfullycharged him with insanity, appar­ently with the support of Graveshimself!

Readers will follow the whole pic­turesque and admirably writtenstory with absorbing interest. Withperhaps more confidence since theNovember elections, they may alsomurmur "Korea" and "How long, ohLord, how long?"

HOFFMAN NICKERSON

Walpole HimselfHugh Walpole: A Biography, by

Rupert Hart-Davis. New York:Macmillan Company. $5.00

In his novel, Cakes and Ale, Somer­set Maugham gave us in one ElroyKear the adroitly limned portrait ofa successful novelist with a passionfor the podium-a bouncy, preten­tious fellow of meager talents,a lit­erary and social snob determined tobuild himself into a grand old manof letters. Even had there been anydoubt as to whom Maugham had inmind, Hugh Walpole's reaction wouldhave given the show away. He wrig­gled and protested and finally wroteMaugham a tearful, why-did-you-do­this-to-me letter. But even beforeMaugham could deny his culpability,vValpole had forgiven him. Maughamwas also a successful writer, andWalpole not only worshipped suc­cess but there was always the possi­bility that the success of the otherfellow might be manipulated so thatit would augment and enrich one'sown.

In an indifrect and somewhat fe­line way, Rupert Hart-Davis bearsout the Maugham diagnosis. For onething, he had only to let the diariesand journals speak for themselves,for in them Walpole let himself gowith an abandon rarely encounteredexcept in a psychiatrist's office.

Hugh Walpole was one of the mostpopular and prolific writers of fic­tion of our time. He wrote his firstnovel at the age of thirteen and hisfirst published book, The WoodenHorse, brought him success at theage of twenty-five. He wrote morethan fifty novels, and at one timehad five awaiting publication. Hehad a system. He enlisted the inter­est and support of other literarylights by means of a not very subtleappeal to their vanity. He bombard­ed them with letters, praising theirwork and incidentally mentioninghis own aspirations. When a critic

panned one of his books (he wasconvinced that adverse criticism wasbased on personaT dislike), he wouldinvite him to lunch and over thecoffee concede that the critic wasprobably right and humbly ask hisadvice. There were two critics, how­ever, with whom he made no head­way-Rebecca West and KatherineMansfield. He was not at his bestwith women who were long on brainsas they were.

Hugh Walpole longed for twothings: fame and love. He enjoyedfame, when it came, with a child­like exuberance. It would have beenperfect had it not been for the verydifferent fame of people like Vir­ginia Woolf. "My only trouble inwriting," he says, "is that, wriggleas I may, I'm definitely old-fash­ioned. Now, I'd like to be modern.I'd rather be a male Hugh Walpoleto a female Virginia Woolf than any­thing else on earth. How nice if theysaid: 'This new novel of Hugh Wal­pole's may be very beautiful, but wecan't be sure because we don't un­derstand a word of it.' ... I'd trulylove that!"

Women as such frightened him.Those who became his friends werethe kind who made no demands onhim and with whom he could begaily and sexlessly affectionate. Hisquest for love involved him in anumber of unhappy and humiliatingsituations before the Right Onecame along. Among the first objectsof his idolatry was A. C. Benson."There is no doubt," he confided tohis diary, "that I have fallen in lovewith Benson. Most purely, let it besaid." There was the rather blood­less attachment between him andHenry James followed by a morewarm friendship with Melchior, thesinger, which petered out when Mel­chior married. In his fortieth yearhe found what he was looking for inthe person of one Harold Cheevers.Cheevers was a London patrolman,a .champion swimmer and crack shot.He became Walpole's chauffeur andconstant companion and was withhim when he died. During the bomb­ing of London in World War Two,Walpole worried about the pictureshe had collected. "I look at my Utri­llos, my Bellinis, and Cezannes," hesays, "with a burning, protectivelove. No matter if I go they mustremain. They are .more important

MARCH 9, 1953 429

than I am, but I would sacrifice thewhole lot for Harold's little finger."No wonder he remarked after read­ing Proust: "He is just my sort. Iunderstand how he feels."

Mr. Hart-Davis has done an ex­cellent job. His affection for hissubject has not blinded him to hisfaults, and he gives a vivid pictureof the English literary world ofwhich Walpole was so much a part.It is infinitely more interesting thananything Walpole himself ever wrote-largely because Walpole was in­finitely more interesting than anycharacter he created. In short, evenif you don't care for Walpole's nov­els you will enjoy this book.

ALIX DU POY

News AboutMatthew ArnoldThe Notebooks of Matthew Arnold,

edited by Howard Foster Lowry,Karl Young and Waldo HilaryDunn. New York: Oxford Univer­sity Press. $10.00

Matthew Arnold's most famouspoem is almost certainly "DoverBeach," and its best-known stanza iscertainly the last one, in which thepoet exclaims, "Ah, love, let us betrue to one another I", cries out thatin this seemingly fair world of oursthere is "really neither joy, nor love,nor light, nor certitude, nor peace,nor help for pain," and concludeswith his somber, enduring image of"a darkling plain swept with con­fused alarms of struggle and flight,where ignorant armies clash bynight."

Here speaks the Arnold known to~very reader who knows him at all­the romantic pessimist, torn betweenfaith and disbelief, hovering betweena vanished world and a world power­less to be born; the Arnold whowished with all his soul that hemight have enjoyed the sweet felic­ity, the sure security, of living in anage when "the sea of faith was atthe full." ·Rather less well known tomost readers is the Arnold who,publishing as he went, worked hisway from a religion that was almostwholly identifiable with morality toa religion that, transcending mereethics, derived its sanctions· fromthe benignant fatherhood of Godand the saving intercession of Jesus.

430 THE FREEMAN

Still less well known is the Arnold ofthe notebooks, partially revealed tothe public gaze· in 1902, but nowfully exposed for the first time-theonce pessimistic poet, the oncewordly dandy, who for the lastthirty-odd years of his life yearnedafter righteousness, con s tan t I ygoaded himself along the course ofmoral action, prayed for humility,piously worshipped in the privacy ofhis study, endeavored steadfastly toserve God well, and sought salvationby attempting to walk in the stepsof Christ. The editors of these note­books, kept annually from 1852 to1888 (and augmented here by two"general notebooks" and annualreading lists), have performed anarduous task of exacting scholarshipthat has been in process for twentyyears. They deserve the heartythanks of all thoughtful readers ofArnold and students of his age.

A hostile critic once remarkedthat Arnold's "self-imposed mission"was "to give good advice to theEnglish people as to their manifestfaults." It may be said that he as­signed the same mission to his note­books as regards himself-with asomewhat loftier mission superim­posed. They were his constant in­structors and monitors in the fieldof right conduct; they were also hisspiritual guides, sources of edifica­tion, and wells of religious inspira­tion from which he could draw withthe assurance that he could neverdrain them dry. Year after year,from the writings of six .languages,he copied out texts-to-live-by; and,year after year, he wrote down againand again those texts that he foundmost reliable and most uplifting. Hedid not always copy accurately; hedid not try to, or care to, for he wasconcerned .not with the letter butthe spirit. It should be mentioned inpassing that, in accordance "withthe wishes of Arnold's family and ofthe publishers, there is no transla­tion of entries. in foreign or classicallanguages." And it should ,be men­tioned also that the texts in Englishform only a fraction of the presentvolume, the rest being in Greek,Latin, German, French, and Italian.

The New Testament is present inabundance, mostly in Greek, occa­sionally in English; and the Bibleas a whole, with Psalms and Prov­erbs prime favorites, furnishes more

quotations than any other singlesource. But De lmitatione Christiruns the Bible a close second. Hereis more than ample proof that Arnoldagreed with John Wesley's opinionof this potent little book: "A seriousmind will never be sated with it,though it were read a thousandtimes over; for these general prin­ciples are the seeds of meditation,and the stores they contain are neverexhausted." Here also is proof,though it tells us nothing new, thatArnold was one of Goethe's mostdevoted pupils. Among other lessons,Goethe is forever reminding himthat, "It is better to do the mosttrivial thing in the world than re­gard a half hour as trivial"; or cry­ing: "Create! The daily task of myhands-high happiness that I com­plete it." Similarly, Joubert tells hinIthat "nothing so much augments dis­couragement as idleness."

But one might quote endlessly thewords of many writers from thisbook of multitudinous quotations. Ishould like to make only two morepoints in this brief review. It isworth noting that in the year 1867,when "Dover Beach" was first pub­lished, Arnold set down in· his note­book, one following another, theseshort lines: "The word which· I speakis not mine but .the Father's whichsent me." "I proceeded forth andcame from God, neither came I ofmyself, but He sent me." HI do noth­ing of myself." "I seek not mineown glory." "The will of God." "Toplease God." "In knowledge of whomstandeth our eternal life." It is truethat recent scholarship has decidedthat "Dover Beach" was probablywritten in 1850, but the point is thatArnold, seventeen years later, waswilling to commit himself simulta­neously .to such profoundly differ­ent public and private utterances.The other point I would make is thatit is interesting to read the notebooks-the bulk of them, that is, for theycontain some miscellaneous material-as the record of one side of a pro­longed spiritual and moral civil warwithin the writer's own breast.There are ·men who -are saints bynature, but Matthew Arnold was notone of them. Indeed, even his effortto teach himself·· humility must havebeen a cruel and indecisive· battle.

BEN RAY REDMAN

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