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During the past fourteen years, since the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and especially since the end of the war (with its disillusioning peace blending into the so-called cold war), the United States has had thrust upon it the problems of the overwhelming difficulties of world leadership. Leadership in the true sense of the word cannot be totalitarian or authoritarian. It must be intellectual, moral and spiritual. This our leading statesmen have sometimes recognized, though not, I am inclined to think, often enough. In any event, it is in these spheres that our peoples have been perhaps the least prepared for our mission. Even in the natural sciences, one of the principal creative sources of American leadership has been individual scientists—such as Einstein, Fermi and Teller—bom and trained in Europe, who found asylum in the United States from Nazi or Fascist tyranny. In so far as the creative mind and its place in the national life are concerned, our main weakness has not been, however, in the natural sciences. During the first half of the twentieth century in the United States these have become distinguished in their own right. When it comes to the practical application of science we have led the world. In no other country have the results of new scientific knowledge been utilized technologically to produce as high a standard of living, measured in material quantity, as in the United States.

In April 1929 the trustees of the University of Chicago, in the midst of an unprecedented boom on the stock exchange, chose Robert Maynard Hutchins, the thirty-year-old dean of the Yale Law School, to be the fifth president. During the twenty-two years that followed, Hutchins made an impression upon the organization and the life of the young university of a kind such as his sponsors for the office and the newspaper public, which enjoyed the spectacle of a youthful rising star, hardly expected. He made this impression as a student, a thinker and a teacher. He made it not, as the times prompted him to do, by trying to keep the University abreast of the morning newspaper, which is dead the next day, but by trying to raise it toward the philosophical heights of Aristotle and the poetic heights of Homer, whose ideas and words are as fresh now as more than two millenniums ago.

Little more than four decades separated the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 from the first World War of 1914–1918. In terms of material welfare, upon which the economists helped to fix attention, these were the most successful decades in history. In 1650 there were apparently something like half a billion inhabitants of this planet. During the forty-five years from 1870 to 1914 nearly half a billion were added. Population increased by almost as large a number in a generation and a half as it had increased during untold generations separating Adam from Newton. In the wealthier countries of Western Europe (Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Germany and France) and in North America, the real income per person gainfully employed has been estimated to have improved seventy-five percent or more, while the hours of work were substantially reduced. In the United States the per capita output of the manufacturing industries grew nearly four times over. Professor Tawney has explained that, "during the greater part of history, the normal condition of the world has been one of scarcity. … But, as a result of the modernization of production and transport, first in Great Britain, then on the continent of Europe and in North America, then in parts of the Far East, mere scarcity ceased, after the middle of the nineteenth century, to be, except in the last, the haunting terror which till recently it had been."

All aspects of the life of an age are interrelated, even when the interrelations express themselves in cross purposes and intellectual dissolution. Whether or not they embody forms and ideas worthy to be dignified by the name of architecture, the buildings of any period are an expression of it. They reflect, in varying degrees, its economic and social development, the enactments of its legislative bodies, the acts of its administrative officials, the decisions of its law courts, the character and course of its wars. They also express, again in varying degrees, its methods of education, its religious life, its natural science, its thought and its art. They are, to some extent, the expression of past traditions and works of the mind which have retained a hold on the life of the period or have been revived by its thinkers and artists, as classical antiquity has been revived again and again in Western European history since the eleventh century.

Sixteen years ago, in happier times, Europe seemed about to become again what she had been to our American parents of the Victorian Age—a rich expanse of industrious and (according to the standards then prevalent) comfortable daily life, ornamented everywhere by monuments emanating from generations of culture, blessed by opportunities for quiet leisure, for travel at what was once considered a rapid pace, and for serious discussions of philosophy and art, such as provided Henry James and Henry Adams with the indispensable nourishment they missed at home. Sixteen years ago, for several weeks on end, I shared to my advantage a table in a modest Basque inn on the French side of the Pyrenees with a distinguished economic historian. In addition to our wives, we had as our companion an elderly professor from a lycée in Bayonne, named Georges Herèlle. We were told that the old gentleman was the greatest authority in France, if not in the world, on the Basque language. He was also the French translator of two writers then prominent, the Spaniard, Blasco Ibáñez, who rose to fame in the United States with Rudolph Valentino riding simultaneously all his "four horsemen," and the Italian poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, whose name was known round the world in those prehistoric times before any one had heard of "Mussolini," let alone of "Hitler."

Economic historians are faced with the task of reconsidering modern European history as a whole. No age is more in need of reinterpretation than the hundred years or so which began in England with the outbreak of the Civil War and in France with the accession of the infant Louis xiv. Tawney, his associates, and pupils have revealed the main features of English agrarian, industrial, commercial, and financial development in early modern times. With the copious data provided in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Clapham, his associates, and pupils have built recent English economic history into a solid edifice on massive and precise statistical foundations. But Continental and British economic history have still to be brought into appropriate relationship to each other. And even in modern English economic history, an unfilled gap of more than a century remains. The materials that have been thrown into it are inadequate from about 1640 down to 1740, the year in which the war of the Austrian Succession broke out. The task of arranging such materials as are available into a durable pattern has not been seriously faced. So our knowledge of the place of these hundred years in the rise of industrialism both in Great Britain and on the Continent is vague.

For Thought and art and even for politics in the United States, the publication of this Peguy book is one of the important events of the past three decades. It is nearly thirty years since Charles Péguy fell, leading his men, in the first battle of the Marne. Yet, so fatas I am aware, no attempt has been made before to translate into English any substantial portion of the extensive work he managed to write and to print, through his own little publishing house in Paris, during a short life of forty-one years. A powerful poet, a moving and profoundly original prose writer, an intellectual and moral force of the highest rank, Péguy's place is already secure as one of less thana score of the world's leading men of letters of the last half century. The only other writers of his generation in France who have as sure a place as he in the history of French literature are threeartists of a very different kind: Proust, Gide, and Valéry.