AT a turn in the road we look back at the receding perspec-
tives of the "post-war era." New interests, new problems, and
new dangers lie ahead; a new generation is urging toward
action, impatient with the present and critical of the past. For
most of them the "post-war era" is now a synonym of disillu-
sionment; its high promise of a better, safer world has not
been made good. Instead, they find growing impoverishment
in the midst of plenty, and peace that is like the hush before
the hurricane. The institutions in which were enshrined the
hopes of those who escaped the years of slaughter have failed
to hold back the hand of governments that flout both Pact
and Covenant. As the committee rooms at Geneva grow
quieter, the armament furnaces flare higher in the Ruhr, the
Midlands, Central France, and Pennsylvania. Danger appar-
ently lurks ahead. Under such circumstances why pause to
look back? Why study the path we have gone when we have
no reason to retrace it?

Such will be the first reaction--and not only the first--
to the suggestion that before setting out on the new stretch
of the road that leads we know not where, we pause a moment
to get our bearings and take stock of our experiences. But
for those who are neither too impatient to learn from past
mistakes nor too prejudiced to profit from a study of past suc-
cesses, this book is written, not as a history of the era we are
so rapidly leaving behind, but as a commentary on that his-
tory, having in mind the peculiar problems of the United
States in a world that is taking new forms, moved by new
and challenging forces.

The pages which follow were given their final form during

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