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Art and common sense.--Ingres: a pilgrimage to Montauban.--The magic of mere paint.--Contemporary European painting.--A note on French military painting.--The post-impressionist illusion.--A memorable exhibition.--Whistler.--Sargent.--Spanish art in Spain and elsewhere.--Secular types in Italian mural decoration.--Rodin.--Four leaders in American architecture.--J. Pierpont Morgan as a collector. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Complex as is the immediate situation of social theory, a general view reveals some significant continuities, both spatial and temporal. The attitude of the pluralists, whether in theory or in practice, to the sovereign nation-state has more common ground than at first appears with that of the states themselves toward the nascent organs of international government; and the dilemma underlying both controversies is in fact nothing less than a restatement, in modern ideology, of an issue fundamental to the history of the entire Christian era.That issue, stated in the broadest terms, centers about the relation between de facto and de jure sovereignty; or, more broadly still, between political and ethical, secular and spiritual, authority; and its importance may be suggested by the generalization that security in social relations is attainable, and has in fact been attained, only when the de facto, or political, sovereign—whatsoever form it may take—has been substantially integrated with the immediate source of ethical or moral authority. The pre-modern period of history abounds in statements, both factual and doctrinal, of this issue.

Not long ago, a distinguished political scientist called attention to "the law of the pendulum" in politics. No sooner, he argued, does a broad political tendency establish itself than tendencies of opposite direction set in and gather force until the original tendency is reversed. As applied to relatively short periods of time and to movements which reflect temporary trends, a plausible case can be made out for the law of the pendulum. It seems doubtful, however, whether it can be proved with like plausibility for tendencies which are truly secular. Take as an example the steady trend toward enlarging the size of the independent political unit, or state. Since the feudal age, the tendency has run in the same direction, sometimes more slowly and sometimes more rapidly, but with seldom a check, and never a retreat, from the feudal state to the national state, from the national state to the colonial empire, and in recent years from the colonial empire toward some larger goal of world organization. Barring accidental destruction of modern machine civilization, a recurrence to a world of petty states seems unthinkable.Whether or not the law of the pendulum applies in the world of political events, there can be no doubt of its sway over political thought. No sooner does a doctrine embody itself in an institution than it exposes its nakedness in a pillory and challenges competing dogmas to do their worst. In consequence, the history of political ideas has been a story of oscillations, of attack and repulse and counter-attack.

Mediaeval man lived in a marvellously ordered and disciplined universe. Both reason and faith taught him that God was in His heaven, and if all was not well with the world, it was the fault of man and his revolt, of sin and moral evil, not the fault of God. Through all the ranges of created being, from prima materia to the very infinitude of God Himself, there was a necessary order and hierarchy, for the simple reason that God had so disposed all things. Only man was capable of violating that natural order and its concomitant law. The tradition of philosophy supported this pervasive thesis of revelation, at least without contradiction; and the fact of sin was selfevident: not man's irredeemable corruption and futility, as in the great heresies of Manichaeus, the Albigenses and later of Calvin, but his tragic tendency toward evil and moral disintegration unless sanctified by supernatural aid. This aid would be forthcoming with absolute certainty if man assumed his personal responsibility for the evil in his own life and if he cooperated in an intimate way with the scheme of divine redemption. Time and the secular order therefore could be redeemed, from generation to generation, because God had intervened in time and had interfered with the natural state of man in the climactic events of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. But the redemption of society must depend inevitably on the redemption of the individual human person; St. Paul's "redeem the time for the days are evil" meant "redeem one's self, and the days will be better." Any other philosophy of reform must lead, as we know now, to the subjection of the human person to slavery, whatever the complexion of the particular totalitarian "ism." On the other hand, the Christian hope and desire for moral improvement, and thus for social betterment, was and no doubt continues to be the basis for the ultimate optimism of Western civilization.

Measurement of changes of marriage frequency involves peculiar difficulties. To some extent the trend of crude birth and death rates reflects the trend of more refined indexes. A corresponding statement is not even approximately true of crude marriage rates. The crude rate may be either rising or falling, while the true rate remains constant, and vice versa. Though this fact emphasizes the need for accurate analysis, comparatively few computations of true marriage rates exist. One reason for this is probably that the marriage rate has fluctuated widely in the past from year to year in response to economic changes, without showing any very definite secular trend. So the relation between marriage frequency and reproduction rates has not seemed to be highly significant. However, the position is now changing. On the one hand, marriage is less inevitably followed by reproduction. On the other hand, most marriages are still followed by first births, and first births form an ever-increasing proportion of all births. Hence fluctuation in marriage rates is reflected to an increasing degree in fertility rates.It is now a generally accepted view that the best method of obtaining true marriage rates is to draw up nuptiality tables in accordance with the principle on which life tables are constructed. The true marriage rate is then given by the proportion of women who marry at least once out of a thousand girls alive at 15 years of age (gross nuptiality), or out of a thousand new-born girls (net nuptiality). The present paper presents nuptiality tables for Canada and each of the nine provinces for 1930-2, and for Saskatchewan for 1926 and 1936. It is hoped that similar tables will be calculated for more recent years, when the data become available.